Every company has or has had challenges with AE-SDR alignment. It’s a topic I hear most regularly as a GTM consultant. It hinders the productivity of these teams, potentially leading to missed opportunities and lost revenue. It hurts morale, productivity, and retention.
This is a quick read on realignment for SDR Managers and SDRs, but expect realignment to take time. It takes intentional steps, and if you cover all the bases listed here, you’ll get there.
Start with Trust & Built Trust
Begin from a place of trust. That means having good faith in the other side. See them as wanting a better outcome and willing to work for it once they see genuine engagement. That’s the first step, but it doesn’t preclude the work of building and later maintaining trust.
Building trust requires intention and active listening. Hear the other side and show that you care enough to listen closely and genuinely understand their concerns. Use those active listening skills and empathize. By working together to establish clear goals and expectations, both parties can better understand each other’s roles and responsibilities.
Understand Core Concerns
Build better working relationships by understanding the core concerns driving the misalignment and miscommunication. It’s usually not a tit-for-tat issue. If you have an ongoing problem, each surface and spoken issue manifests deeper unresolved concerns. These can be about past incidents or misaligned goals or expectations.
Qualification is the consistent issue I’ve seen in misalignment. SDRs feel they do their best given the limited time they have with each prospect, while AEs feel they’re getting meetings that should have been avoided or without proper notes, leaving them unprepared.
Your first reaction might be to push strong qualification requirements. This is not wrong, but it’s not a complete solution. First, ensure that your requirements align with what your AEs want to see. Make sure the SDRs understand them and understand the why. But most importantly, you have to take all the steps listed in this article to see real change.
A quick tip — you know about the difference small word choices can make due to denotation and connotation (FYI — A great training topic for junior SDRs). But have you considered how culture can share understandings and sometimes hide differences in understanding?
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer is a great read, especially for those managing teams of many cultural backgrounds. I manage EMEA-wide SDRS, and it’s been a tremendous help.
Review the Data
Believe it or not, not everything people tell you will be true from the perspective of the data. Perceptions are a construct of a reality individuals are living within. We have to work with perceptions. You can show data to help shift perceptions if data clearly indicates the perceptions are off, but don’t expect it to make any dramatic change in people’s feelings. They’ll prefer to consistently live a different experience before changing their view. Instead, review data to get a wider perspective. It can help you understand in greater detail what’s driving underlying issues, such as blockers.
Perhaps SDRs have very low call success rates, so they’re feeling more pressure to convert any possible call to a meeting. Helping them find more/better-targeted success could alleviate the issue more quickly than pushing simple qualification requirements.
Take Steps & Showcase Progress
Taking steps takes time. They can go forward, backward, or in circles, but often it’s still some progress! Be sure to showcase this, even if you still need to get to the end goal. It helps build confidence that you’re working on the problem and have a plan.
After all, you’re working with perceptions, and those are tricky things. Once formed, they can be hard to change and often lag behind a changed reality. But they can change, and efforts in good faith and effective communication can speed up the process.
Training, practice, and review is a great moto to have here. Using this, I moved a team of 9 SDRs from filling out qualification notes for about 48% of meetings to 92% in about two months. It’s not rocket science — it’s follow-through. Show the team what good looks like. Take time together as a group to practice what you’ve talked about. Then, review the notes they book daily or weekly. Speak to individuals 1–1 and showcase good examples during team calls. Positive reinforcement works wonders.
Whale Done!: The Power of Positive Relationships by Ken Blanchard gives excellent tips on using positive reinforcement techniques for training and alignment.
Communicate Proactively & Regularly
Be super responsive, especially if you’re in the early stages of trust building. Communicate back what you heard and then proactively communicate the steps you will take. Then circle back to tell them it’s done and ask for feedback. Repeat, apply, and request. It’s that simple! But not doing this can undermine everything else you’re doing.
Good Luck!
In conclusion, building better working relationships between AEs and SDRs requires trust, understanding, and proactive communication. Your team can improve productivity and drive revenue growth by taking a do-ocracy approach and working together to identify and address core concerns.
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