CEO @ Retention.com & RB2B | Person-Level Website Visitor Identity | Identify 70-80% of Your Website Traffic
Me: How many dials do your SDRs do every day? 50? 100? Emir Atli: 3,000-4,000. Me: WHAT?!?!? Me: That’s literally 30-40x best practices. Emir: Best practices are for people who want mediocre results. Me: Fair enough. Let’s break it down. How many reps do you have dialing? Emir: We have 5 outbound reps. All hitting 3-4k dials. Me: So 20k/day from a team of 5. That sounds like a SPAM cannon on steroids. Emir: Most founders are afraid of being pushy. We’d rather grow revenue than be polite. Me: Just … Wow. I’ve never heard of anything quite like that. How do you not burn through your TAM in a month? Emir: Most people view their TAM as fixed. I think that’s pure laziness. You can build product for TAM expansion. Most people are just afraid to do it. Me: Tell me more… Emir: We started out SMB SaaS. We expanded to mid-market and enterprise by building features for use cases that were different than SMB. Upmarket was our first TAM expansion. Our second was looking at SaaS and seeing what other verticals had a similar go-to-market motion, that we could service. It turns out that recruiting firms have a CRM and AEs, as do IT companies … and we were able to make some small changes and expand into both of those. Me: That’s incredible. Are you global? Emir: We’re mostly focused on US/UK/Europe/Aus/NZ. Me: What are the SDRs telling these people when they call? Emir: The first thing we’re telling them is that it’s a cold call. The second thing we’re telling them is the most acute pain that we know they all have. It’s like a 10/10 product-market fit in terms of the pain. And everybody has it. Me: What’s that pain? Emir: “Do you struggle with attribution on brand marketing spend?” Me: Oh man. I have that pain. Emir: Of course you do. Everybody is throwing money at all sorts of different things and they have no idea if it’s working. We just call them out on it. Me: How well is this outbound machine working? Emir: We’re generating $74m/yr in pipeline from outbound. Me: I would say that is working. Emir: Of course, and it’s because most Founders would rather sit around and wait for inbound than build a machine that makes 20,000 cold calls per day. Me: Which is why they’re stuck at $2m ARR! ——— The uncomfortable truth? While most SaaS founders are debating whether cold calling is "dead," Emir's team is generating $74M in pipeline … By simply doing MORE of what everyone else is too scared to do at all! Volume beats "best practices" every single time. But most of you reading this STILL won't pick up the phone. I only have one question for you … WHY NOT?!?! P.S. If you want a recording of the entire interview and Emir teaching us about his $74m outbound machine, put “outbound” in the comments and I’ll send it to you. Make sure we're connected.
I call bullshit on 3-4K dials a day
This is fantasy. There is no human on earth that can make 4,000 dials every business day. If these SDRs work 10 hours straight with no lunch, no meetings, no bathroom, no after call follow ups, no breaks at all that's one call every 9 seconds. If they could somehow pull that off it's not enough time for the phone to ring more than once or twice, let alone have a conversation and drive pipeline.
Come on man, this is obviously total BS. Even assuming a 10 hour working day, that's 5 dials per minute - 1 dial every 9 to 12 seconds. Even autodialers need a buffer and it leaves no time for a human voicemail, meaning if you do you're relying on an AI generated voice
I mean this with all due love and respect - this is just how outbound was and has always been done for companies that have scaled and around the series C or D mark etc. aka been there - been a part of this we used to send a google doc and get 1600 law firms as a request whenever we wanted. Taking nothing away - this is how it should be done that being said 3-4K dials is wild even with parallel dialers lol. What’s the connect rate in these? If connect is high then potential burn but if connect is low then keep chugging along and find new ICP .
Can someone help me on the math here? Let’s say you use a power dialer and you’re calling 3 people at the same time per minute. Let’s also say you make 60 calls per hour (meaning you make one call per minute and don’t connect with anyone) that means you’re at 180 calls per hour. Let’s say you call for 7 hours straight at that same level, you’re at 180 calls per rep per hour, 1,280 calls per rep per day and 6,300 calls per day for the team. Where’s the other 14k calls coming from?
Been in SDR roles for 8 years now, and while I respect the hustle, it only works if there’s strategy behind it. Blindly calling 20k people without reading buying signals, intent data, or having clear ICP targeting feels like burning through your list faster than you can build a pipeline. Volume can work, sure. But if it’s not paired with precision, personalization, and timing, it’s just noise.
Let's do the complex math here. 3000 dials per day(conservatively). Assuming an SDR hustles hard for 8 hours non-stop. 3000/8, that's 375 dials per hour. Boils down to 6.25 dials per minute. Let's take 6 for the sake of math. Assuming parallel dialing, six is doable. But skeptical! 🤔 However, assuming a best-in-class connect rate of 10% (for the sake of math), conservatively, at least 30 calls are connected every hour. Spend at least 1 minute to land the pitch. That itself takes 30 minutes. I do appreciate inspiration, especially when it comes to cold calls. But this is a bit too much to believe. Until Hockestack lets me sit along with one of their SDRs. Even open to calling them in for a day to see this happen. 😉
This is why LinkedIn needs a community notes feature. 🙄
This is the right mindset but the wrong execution… Who cares about dials? A vanity metric it’s about how many quality conversations you have. This brute force, 4K+ dials a day will accelerate waste, kill connect rates (“spam”), and burn buyers with delays at “hello?” Instead: pre-filter lists with TitanX and dial on a no BS power dialer (FrontSpin) to actually complete more quality conversations with fewer dials because you’ll never call people who don’t answer. We get reps to 3+ hours of live talk time per day (usually 30-40 quality convos per day per rep)
Commercial Strategy & Marketing Effectiveness
3moSorry...but I'm calling BS on this BS! That's ~6.5 seconds PER CALL per rep. It takes ~5 seconds just to reach a first ring. So they're having a LOT of 1.5-second conversations apparently 🤣🤣🤣 --- It takes a bare minimum of ~20 seconds to do a dial and get enough rings to know if you're going to voicemail. There are about ~25,000 seconds in a workday. So that's a MAX of ~1200 calls a day per person, assuming that: 1. NO ONE ever answers 2. The BDR immediately hangs up without ever leaving a message. --- If they never actually talk to anyone, but leave a VM message, then the timing looks like this: 5 seconds (dialing) + 25 (ringing) + 15 (greeting) + 20 (message) = 65 seconds That then caps the calls per day at ~400 or less...again assuming that NO ONE ever picks up the phone and the BDR never does anything other than leave a VM message. --- So someone is either making up BS stories...or the reps are manning cold-call robo-dialers! Which is strictly illegal in the US, Canada, UK, and the EU and should be reported to the appropriate law enforcement bodies. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls-and-texts