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THE INTERVIEW
THURSDAY
STATE
OF SALES
The State of Sales right now….
It could be a lot better. There are influencers saying things are dying without coming up with actual solutions. They're playing on people's fears, and it creates this cascading doubt in leaders. There are pockets of really good motions out there. They've just been drowned out.
THE SETUP
Dave Wilkins is the founder of SDR Leaders Global, the largest SDR leadership community in the world, connecting sales development leaders across EMEA, the USA and APAC. Few people hear from more SDR leaders in a week than Dave does, so we asked him what the field is actually reporting.
THE 60-SECOND VERSION
The phone is still king. Cold email is failing on deliverability and attention.
A third of SDR teams still burn three hours a day on admin. That is the real AI use case.
Measure pipeline contribution, never inputs. Activity inspection is for performance management only.
Burnout starts in the interview, with promotion promises the business can't keep.
3 THINGS YOU'LL STEAL FROM THIS
What his community's data says about cold email versus the phone
The three-hour admin problem AI is finally shrinking
Why SDR burnout starts in the interview, months before the first missed target
01 · The phone is still king, and whoever says otherwise is lying
Dave's community gives him a live feed of what's working across hundreds of SDR teams. Cold email is struggling almost everywhere: deliverability problems, plus the simple fact that people have stopped reading their inboxes.
The big thing that keeps coming through is the phone is still king. Prospects just aren't being called now, because everyone's hiding behind emails. When you actually call somebody with a value proposition that's relevant to them, they will have a conversation with you.
Is outbound still viable? "Yeah. And whoever says it's not is a liar."
DO THIS THIS WEEK
Count the ratio of emails to dials in your team's activity. If email is winning by volume while the phone wins by results, your sequence design is backwards.
02 · AI SDRs went full circle. Here's what survived
Dave watched the industry sprint toward AI SDRs, then quietly walk it back. What survived the hype cycle is far more useful: AI that deletes admin.
At his community meetups he ran a show-of-hands survey. A third of the room said their SDRs still spend over three hours a day on admin: sorting account lists, enrichment, prospecting research.
Now the most effective teams get that done at the click of a button, and the team focuses solely on selling. The more time your team spends selling, the more money you're going to make.
His tooling shortlist reflects it: a dialler for the phone-heavy world we're in, and data waterfalls that enrich a lead across multiple sources for pennies, right as those two-to-three-year single-vendor data contracts come up for renewal.
STEAL THIS
Run Dave's survey on your own team this week. Ask everyone to log admin hours for five days. Anything over an hour a day is your automation roadmap.
03 · Measure pipeline, never calls
Activity metrics have never been higher and returns never lower, so we asked whether SDR leaders are measuring the wrong things. Dave didn't hesitate.
It annoys me when I see "we need X amount of calls, X amount of emails." What's the relevance in that? I care about the end result: pipeline contribution to the business. Leaders who focus on the inputs are the ones who need the most coaching, because they're thinking too binary.
Activity inspection has a place, in his model, only once someone is missing the number, and at that point it's a performance-management conversation, never a team-wide KPI.
TRY THIS THIS WEEK
Rebuild your SDR dashboard with pipeline contribution at the top. Move calls and emails to a diagnostic view leaders only open when the top number slips.
04 · Burnout is a promise made in the interview
SDR churn is at an all-time high, and Dave traces it to a surprising place: the hiring conversation.
Expectations haven't been managed at the interview process. You might say "we've had people promoted in six months," and they hear "that's me." It creates a verbal contract. Then the business evolves, there's no headcount, and they go find a job where somebody else says the same thing.
His five-year forecast reframes the role entirely: the SDR seat stops being entry-level. Think graduate scheme: rotations through marketing, sales and customer success, then into sales development with the whole business understood. "They're not booking rubbish meetings for rubbish meetings' sake. They understand what a truly qualified account is."
THE MOVE
Write down exactly what you say about promotion timelines in interviews. If it sounds like a promise, rewrite it as a criteria list.
THE ONE THING
Stop measuring inputs. Pipeline contribution is the only SDR number that matters.
WHERE TO FIND DAVE
Dave Wilkins is the founder of SDR Leaders Global, the largest SDR leadership community in the world, elevating sales development leaders across EMEA, the USA and APAC through masterclasses, meetups and peer support. Find him on LinkedIn or visit sdr-leader.com.
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