Lars Nilsson
Founder & CEO, SalesSource · 1 appearance on the record.
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Lars Nilsson pioneered the Account-Based Sales Development methodology during his tenure as VP of Global Inside Sales at Cloudera. Over a sales career spanning Xerox, ArcSight, Riverbed Technology, Cloudera, and Snowflake, he has helped take five companies public and scaled dozens of inside sales and SDR operations.
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4 assertions · 1 opinion · 16 insights · 7 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
Everything Lars Nilsson said on the Official SaaStr Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Nilsson: Hire Two SDRs Before a Head of Sales or Marketing
“And so the second role that I advocate for a very early stage founder after that content person is two SDRs. There is no head of revenue. There's no head of marketing. It's a content person and two SDRs, and those SDRs should be booking meetings for the founde…”
Nilsson: Startups Should Always Hire Sales Reps in Pairs
“As these SDRs start generating meetings and pipeline starts to build, then yes, hire two sales reps. Never hire one, always hire in pairs.”
Nilsson: 90% of Outsourced SDR Agencies Suck
“If you want to reach out to me and ask me after you've vetted a few, I typically know all of them, and I know, I can tell you that 90% of them suck.”
Nilsson: Startups' First Revenue Hire Should Be a Content Specialist
“In my opinion, the very first front revenue facing hire should be someone who can develop, produce content and messaging.”
Nilsson: Hire Raw SDR Candidates Over Those With Prior Experience
“I don't need to see a track record of success in anyone. In fact, I'm not looking. I don't want any bad habits that people, for SDRs that come from other operations, I want to take someone raw, and I want to kind of teach them the way I was taught when I got m…”
Nilsson: Deals Under $25k Should Bypass SDR Qualification Entirely
“In my opinion, if you are selling a product or a service for less than 25,000, that should take, you know, that should take Right? If you're selling something for a thousand or 3000 or 10,000, you got to do that in days, if not one or two weeks. You do not wan…”
Nilsson: Compensate SDRs on Executed First Meetings, Not Pipeline Progression
“The SDR can control the meetings that they set up. They can control the quality of the qualification information. What they cannot do is they cannot control whether or not that meeting that executes becomes an opportunity and goes on to close. That is the job …”
Nilsson: One SDR Can Fill the Pipeline of Three Account Executives
“If you consider that one SDR can fill the pipeline of up to three reps, you can accelerate revenue at a very quick rate.”
Nilsson: Early B2B SaaS Should Target 1,000 to 5,000 Accounts
“You've got to start with a focus, in my opinion. And I think that is anywhere from 1000 to 5000 accounts, ah, to start out.”
Nilsson: Untriaged Inbound Leads Cause SDR Burnout
“When SDRs are used to just manage inbounds You might overtake them and burn them out, because at the end of a long day of going through a bunch of inbound leads from a trade show, not like Saster and they get 99 out of a hundred blanks, and they've left 99 voi…”
Nilsson: SDRs Spend 90% of Their Time in Sales Engagement Tools
“For those of you that don't understand sales engagement technology, it is one of the must-haves if you're gonna build out a sales development organization. It's where they spend 98% of their time, 90% of their time. They are not spending it in marketing automa…”
Nilsson: Early SDR Teams Need One Engagement Tool and Two Data Providers
“If I was an early stage founder and I was just starting to get to revenue after I had the person that's generating content and messaging, I would get sales engagement tool, and I would get two data providers. That is all an SDR needs to get going.”
Nilsson: Snowflake's SDR Enablement Team Reports Directly to Sales Development
“What we've done is we've dedicated an ops training and enablement team. So we have a director that has seven direct reports. They report up to me, the global leader, not into enablement, not into, so we choose all our own technology, we orchestrate it, we cust…”
Nilsson: Snowflake's 223 SDRs Make 10,000 Dials and 25,000 Emails Daily
“We have 223 SDRs at Snowflake. They report to twenty-twenty-one frontline SDR managers who report to four second line directors. At the end of every given day, we have over 10,000 dials. Probably have sent 25,000 emails. This is on a daily basis.”
Nilsson: Snowflake Reduced Its SDR-to-AE Ratio From 1:8 to 1:3.5
“So when I came to Snowflake eight years ago, our coverage was one to eight. Doesn't even work. I don't ever do that. Very quickly, we got it down to one to four. So one SDR was overlaid to four account executives. Still pretty light, in my opinion. Again, we'r…”
Nilsson: 90% of Cloudera's Inbound Leads Fell Outside Its TAM
“We ended up implementing lean data as an inbound lead to account matching, and I was able to show marketing that 90% of their inbound leads fell completely out of our town, and literally 40% of them came from partners.”
Nilsson: SDRs Should Shadow Every Discovery Call They Schedule
“The smart thing also to do is make sure that your SDRs are on the call that they help set up for their AEs. They should be on every call. They'll learn the language. They'll learn what it is the product can do. They'll hear all the use cases and the stories.”
Nilsson: Hire Dedicated SDR Leadership Once Teams Reach Three to Four Reps
“Active frontline leadership of SDRs Is really important after you hire your first two or three. Once you get to three or four SDRs, I would invest in someone who has done the role before.”
Nilsson: Hiring a Single SDR Risks a One-to-Two-Year Operational Setback
“If you hire one SDR and you put them on the front lines, you will not know if they work out for three to six months. And if you're a founder that's never done this before, it might take you even longer. When you figure out that you've made that mistake, now yo…”
Nilsson: SDRs Should Only Outbound to Accounts Approved by Sales
“An SDR, in my opinion, should not be outbounding, cold, to any account that sales people haven't at least blessed.”
Nilsson: Specialize Inbound and Outbound SDR Teams at 5 to 10 Reps
“Yeah, so when you get to a certain size, and I believe it's five to 10 SDRs, I think you need to go away from a hybrid approach and specialize and have an inbound and an outbound team.”
Snowflake Promotes 25 SDRs Quarterly, 80% Becoming Account Executives
“Today at Snowflake, we graduate on average, 25 SDRs every quarter. 80% of them go into AE roles. The other 20% go into roles in marketing, operations. We even have a school for early sales engineers.”
The other half of the tape: Lars Nilsson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 2 episodes on the Official SaaStr Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →
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Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| How to Manage 100+ SDRs Across 4 Continents | Snowflake VP, Global Sales Development Lars | Dec 1, 2022 | 46m |