Sales Development Manager [SDR Manager] at Nooks Communications, Inc.

The role

We’re looking for an experienced Sales Development Manager to lead one of our Mid-Market SDR teams! Reporting into the Head of Sales Development [Under Marketing], you bring 3+ years experience managing a high performing outbound SDR team, in a B2B SaaS org, you shouldn’t be afraid to pick up the phone and have experience building outbound messaging through all prospecting channels - phone, email + linkedin. Working closely with marketing + sales leadership, you’re experienced with hiring, coaching and motivating an outbound focused team to hit and exceed pipe gen targets, in a fast paced startup environment.

Responsibilities

• Hire top talent to the team as we continue to grow
• Onboard and train new reps to the team within a one week onboarding program
• Run effective 1:1’s weekly with reps to provide analysis, coaching, performance management and career growth support
• Work closely with the Head of Sales Development + VP of Marketing to ensure messaging + talk tracks are aligned and effective
• Provide product feedback and ideas to our product/engineering team on an ongoing basis to help contribute to the vision and value of Nooks for our customers
• Work directly with sales leadership to ensure SDR + AE alignment in processes, messaging + strategy
• Build and consistently iterate on outbound sequences and templates within Outreach
• Identify and resolve process bottlenecks, data issues and inconsistencies in process, systems and strategy
• Assist with list building + target account gathering for the team
• Utilize analytics and data to uncover and follow patterns to guide the team

Requirements

• 3+ years of sales development management experience leading an outbound team, ideally in B2B SaaS
• Experience selling to GTM leaders
• Experience and ability to thrive in a rapidly changing early stage, start up environment and enjoys getting their hands dirty – This means leading by example and not being afraid of picking up the phone to show new SDRs how to get the job done
• Proven experience growing high performing SDR teams
• Passion to hire well, coach, and hold team members to high standards
• Strong analytic skills and the ability to leverage data to determine how we should prioritize improvements
• Deep familiarity with systems like Outreach, Hubspot, ZoomInfo, and Sales Nav

What is Nooks?

Nooks is a platform transforming sales reps from manual laborers to scientists. With today’s technology, sales reps shouldn’t need to manually write hundreds of emails, research hundreds of websites/linkedins, and make hundreds of calls. They should instead focus on the parts of their job that actually require people - talking to customers, being creative, and problem-solving. With a combination of AI tools, automation and real-time collaboration, Nooks can do the rest.

About Nooks

• The team: Nooks is ~60 people. Engineering & product are mostly in SF and go to our office 2-3x/week. The go-to-market team is distributed across the U.S + Canada.
  • The founders (Dan, Rohan, and Nikhil) met studying AI at Stanford, have published in top AI journals, Forbes 30u30, worked at Scale AI, Tesla Autopilot, etc.
  • The engineering team has won international math & physics olympiads, has experience at Google, Facebook, Slack, Quora, Scale AI, Bolt, Snap, Flexport, and other fast-growing startups.
  • The sales team have been top-performers at companies like Gong, Amplitude, LeadIQ, and Orum
• Fast growth: We’ve grown $0 → ~$4M ARR in 20 months. We grew 4x in 2023 and expect to 3x by EOY 2024.

The problem

Sales pipeline is critical for growing companies. Many, especially B2B companies, have teams of sales/business development representatives (SDR/BDRs) or full-cycle account executives whose responsibility is to identify, contact, and qualify new potential customers. There are ~750,000 SDR/BDR’s in the US alone (e.g. Airtable, Brex, Databricks and many other tech companies have sizable SDR/BDR teams)

In their day-to-day, SDR/BDRs spend time on 3 main activities:

1. Prospecting & research - identify a list of potential customers using signals like industry, size, fundraising, headcount growth, new hires, job descriptions, etc.
2. Email & LinkedIn messaging - write messages to those contacts to convey the problem and pitch your product. The goal is for them to book a demo
3. Calling - Live phone conversations often have higher conversion than emails because they’re more personal, but there’s a lot more manual work involved

Most of the sales rep’s job can be automated with today’s technology: large language models, web scraping, automation, integrations, etc.

Nooks today

Our customers use Nooks for most of their day (avg ~3hrs/business day). Nooks currently owns end-to-end workflows around sales calls:

• AI dialer - automates the manual parts of the calling process: skipping answering machines, leaving voicemails, taking notes, logging calls, even figuring out what to say on a call
• Analytics - we record, transcribe, and analyze every call. Since these are all outbound calls with little context, these calls follow similar structure - opener, pitch, questions/objections, ask for meeting, etc. So we can answer questions like: “which reps struggle to book the meeting with prospects who showed interest” or “what are the most common objections across each of our key personas”
• Salesfloor - sales reps & managers can work together throughout the day, listen to each others’ calls, give real-time advice, coaching, shadowing, onboarding, training.

Teams that use Nooks often see a 2-3x increase in reps’ productivity within weeks! And we’re working on adding prospecting / research workflows (to-be-announced soon!)