Life for SDRs in tech sales can be quite stressful. And between bro-chella and client visits they typically have their hands full. But everyone has time for self care and a lot of us choose to spend that watching GAME OF THRONES. Warning there are some spoilers ahead. This was written before the very last episode of the series.Since Game of Thrones is all the hype these days, we wanted to draw some parallels between the last season of Game of Thrones and life as an SDR. Here are our top 3 Game of Thrones SDR takeaways:
#1 Don’t be Jaime, be like Gendry
Not going to get into the graphic details here but Jaime bids Brienne a farewell rather quickly. While Gendry tries to maintain that relationship moving forward. Here’s the lesson for anyone in sales: once you close a deal with a prospect, don’t just move on and ignore them. Check in on them every so often to maintain the relationship. Sales Hacker is currently (as I type this) doing a webinar titled “Customer Success: Why it's the New Sales Frontier” which is one reason why you want to maintain that relationship. It is much cheaper to retain an existing customer than sign a new one (contrary to what Michael Scott thinks). It also gives you a chance to upsell your product. Another important reason to maintain that relationship is Word of Mouth marketing. A book I read called “The Profit Upgrade” by Richard Parkes Cordock hypothesizes that your customers are your best salespeople/marketers. For companies that don’t have stellar marketing teams or aren’t household names, it can be hard to get your name out there. We typically get a solid number of referrals which tells me that students are having a good experience. Which is one of the main things we strive to accomplish.
#2 Done is better than perfect
Not only a famous quote from the walls of Facebook but also relevant to Game of Thrones. Hear the rumors GOT was considering going for 10 episodes but instead just did 6? (that is why things feel rushed btw). It is a perfect example that sometimes it is fine to just get it done and move onto the next thing. Often in SDR land we feel paralyzed wanting our messaging, as an example, to be perfect and as a result we miss a deadline...when in reality the change to your copy would have resulted in a .05% difference in the metrics. Just get it done. Achieving perfection is impossible. You will go crazy if you fret over making everything perfect.
#3 You can’t please everyone
Now if you’re a real Game of Thrones nerd like me, you probably have found yourself deep in a reddit conspiracy thread. Some of the theories that were thrown out there (more dragons, Bran = the Night King, the Many-Faced God coming into play) would be awesome. But are all of these realistic? No, they aren’t. Which means that people are bound to be let down. You can’t please everyone with storytelling. Just like you can’t please every prospect that has interest in your product. It is very rare for one product to be better in all ways than a competitor’s product. So don’t lose sight of that when you inevitably have some stints of failure in your time as an SDR. Your product isn’t a perfect solution for everyone. Which means you’ll have rough patches. Acknowledging this is half the battle.
-- What are your predictions for the finale? Either way, it’s the end of an era. I know I’ll be looking forward to HBO doing some spin-offs because they could go so many directions with the world that George RR Martin has created. -- We have free online sales training videos on our Teachable. The online sales training videos will help you learn some sales skills as well as give you a preview of what our bootcamp training is like. And if you're asking yourself: "How can I find a boot camp near me?" Our real sales bootcamp that includes live, instructor-led curriculum from former SDRs at Salesforce, Linkedin, and IBM, can be done virtually!
