We were delighted to speak with Ernie Owusu, Senior Director of Sales Development at 6sense, for this week’s Scaling Stories podcast.

Ernie took a team of five sales development reps and built the team to 50 or so. Such was the positivity of the environment Ernie nurtured, there were years where the attrition rate of people they didn’t want to leave was just 2%.

Ernie highly recommends the book Leading Sales Development (by Alea Homison and Jeremey Donovan) for anyone building a team of sales development reps. The book examines data from the likes of Salesforce and Salesloft on the characteristics of their top performers from their sales development programs.

“And essentially what they notice is these four core traits,” explains Ernie. “Curiosity, conscientiousness, business acumen, and grit.”

Ernie goes on to explain what he believes each of these characteristics mean:

• Conscientiousness. “Someone who is constantly trying to find ways to improve themselves day in, day out.”
• Business acumen. “It’s not in the sense of ‘do they understand how an org works or how revenue is generated’...It's more about, specifically with SDRs, can they connect the dots? Can they take a piece of information they’ve seen online about a persona, tie it back to their product and explain in a concise way why they should buy your product?”
• Curiosity. “The SDRs that I’ve hired have [often] done research before they get on the call, like on a thought leader or influencer on specific tactics that can make them effective as SDRs. They’ve read books or they’ve read podcasts on the specific tactics to be effective in the role. They tend to be phenomenal sales development reps.”
• Grit. “Someone working towards a long-term goal and having experienced many plateaus or setbacks, but still being just as passionate and achieving that goal over a period of time.”

It’s one thing to possess these qualities, but how does Ernie codify the talent identification process into a meaningful framework?

Some of the technical tasks for SDR candidates include “mock calls where we're not expecting them to be perfect”, and “writing assignments where we ask them to take one of our customer personas and write them an email on [why] that person should buy our product”.

Ernie goes on to explain the wisdom of this written task in separating the brilliant candidates from the bluffers. “Does this person actually know what our company does and why this person should buy our product?”

It was great to catch up with Ernie – check out the pod, then head over to our Scaling Stories page for more expert insights from the Recruitment Kingdom.