Should We Replace BDRs with Product Advocates?

A Technical Sales Technique That Drove Huge Growth

What if the “BDR problem” I’ve been writing about recently could be solved by hiring a different kind of BDR/SDR with a different charter? I have been so inspired by the way Vercel’s Hank Taylor built out their “BDR/SDR” team by hiring developers and technical people and naming them Product Advocates. He found that teaching technical people persuasion and sales skills is much easier than teaching business people technical depth. And, he found that prospects responded more, faster, and more deeply to people that deeply understood their challenges. Hank shared, “For technical sales, an SDR's absolute ceiling is usually below the floor of knowledge for the technical prospect. It’s a really bad mismatch.”

At Vercel, which sells developer-oriented web tools, Hank hired developers out of developer BootCamp programs, put them through Customer Service Rep onboarding, and then a 30-day customer service tour of duty before teaching them writing, persuasion, and objection handling. These “Product Advocates” were then given a sequence that was more about providing resources and answering questions than starting a sales pitch. The product advocates qualified the prospects as they went along, properly routing them to self-service and product-led-growth channels or to enterprise sales reps. Their primary goal was to engage users quickly (in 10 minutes or less!) and get people properly sorted into the most cost-efficient channel. They were paid more on activity than commission - and even turned out to be less expensive and easier to promote than SDRs! This orientation worked very well for Vercel, which grew from $1M to more than $50M under Hank’s direction.

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Hanks's innovation came from his own hands-on experience - earlier in his career when he was an SDR, he realized that he could get more responses from prospects by positioning himself as “evaluation support” instead of a sales development representative. In his role, he quickly learned that he needed to qualify people based on very technical concepts he didn’t necessarily understand. After rising through the ranks, he built three different SDR teams before Vercel and experimented with better ways to engage technical prospects at each step.

Like Snowflake, which I covered in my “Expert Insights on SDR Success” article, Hank also found that his team became a fantastic grooming pipeline for other roles in the organization. Hank’s first Product Advocates have gone on to become a Sales Engineer, a growth engineer, a customer support manager, a partner engineer, and one of the top salespeople at Vercel.  This is incredibly valuable since hiring great technical staff can be harder and more expensive than hiring even the best salespeople. Hiring junior folks for the Product Advocates team and growing them can provide huge long-term company savings. 

Since I met Hank last year, I haven’t stopped obsessing over how impactful this approach could be to so many other technical companies.

• Prospects want knowledge and help — more technical people can engage in deeper and more relevant conversations.

• Prospects want resources and insights instead of making them feel “sold to”

• BDR/SDRs are often annoying to prospects because they are primarily focused on qualifying and booking a meeting with someone else later. This requires more time and steps for the prospect instead of useful impact now.

• Time to follow-up is a notorious issue and OPPORTUNITY for better results. The time between getting your BDR to follow up, getting a call booked with a sales rep, then maybe meeting a SE or technical person that can answer deep questions could be a week or more. Product advocates answering deep questions and having meaningful conversations within 10 minutes of your interest is game-changing!

  

The Product Advocate Follow-up Process

Hank was kind enough to share some of the step-by-step processes he orchestrated for his Product Advocates:

• New inbound contacts are immediately and automatically sent an email from a real Product Advocate’s name and email. The email contains a bundle of resources that others have found most useful. This human becomes one of the most helpful people ever, so you’re more inclined to respond when they email you a week later to check in and see if you have any questions or need any help.

• A week later, the product advocate sends a follow-up email that is a run-on sentence: “Just wanted to see what you thought of the resources and what projects your team was working on.” This format looks more human and comes from the same real person, triggering much better responses than formal marketing sequences.

• The product advocates are goaled on a 10-minute response time to all inbound emails during business hours.  

I am a Hank fangirl, as you can tell. He’s hosting a class with even more details on how he interviews, trains, pays, and goals product advocates:

• Workshop: Building A Product Advocate Team - March 8, 9a-2p PT

• Learn more and register on growthsprint.dev - use HGL for a 30% discount and 90 days of Slack support and Office Hours support

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