I have walked into rooms where the BDR function was very busy and not very good, and rooms where it was very quiet and quietly excellent. The gap between them is never the reps. It is almost always the operating system underneath them, or the lack of one.
So last week I put the whole thing on paper. Nine principles. Hiring, ramp, coaching, forecasting, enablement, AI, and the operating rhythm that ties it together. Not a framework you have to license and not a maturity model that ends in a sales call. Just the actual document I would hand a new manager on their first Monday.
This week is the tour. The three principles that fix the most in the shortest window. The one meeting almost every org is missing. A stat that will ruin your next headcount conversation in a good way. And a rec that is genuinely just a very good novel.
This Week on the Site
The Manifesto · Free
How I Run a BDR Org. The Operating System.
Nine principles I run every BDR org against. Hire for judgment, not just hustle. Ramp is a gate system, not a calendar. Coaching gets its own hour, separate from inspection. AI is a structural layer, not a productivity hack. Forecast the funnel, not the feeling. The whole POV in one document. Print it, mark it up, disagree with three principles, keep the other six.
Read the full postCompanion Blog · For Managers
Two Drills. One Rep. Actual Behavior Change.
The operating system says coaching gets its own hour. This is what to actually do in it. A five-minute pre-call rehearsal, a three-minute post-call replay, and how a manager defends the eight minutes when the pipeline meeting wants them back. For the reps who are tired of hanging up and knowing they had it.
Read the full postRun This Monday
Three principles to install this week. In this order.
If you only touch three things from the manifesto this quarter, start with these. In this order. Nothing downstream works until they do.
- 01
1. Separate coaching from inspection. Different hour. Different agenda.
If your managers' 1:1s are pipeline reviews with a warm-up question at the start, you do not have coaching. You have inspection with a hat on. Split them. Coaching gets its own hour, its own agenda, and one behavior it is trying to change. Watch what happens to stage 1-to-2 in sixty days.
- 02
2. Ramp is a gate system, not a calendar.
"Ramped at month four" is a scheduling decision, not a performance one. Define three gates at day 30, month 6, and month 10 to 12, with a rubric per gate the rep can see before they walk into it. Pass the gate, move up. Miss the gate, get a specific plan. Nobody rides the timeline just because time passed.
- 03
3. Put an AE/BDR handoff review on the calendar. Weekly. Thirty minutes.
The meeting almost every org is missing. Two BDRs, two AEs, one manager, five handoffs from last week. Grade the discovery depth, the account context, the next step clarity. It is the fastest way to raise the standard on both sides of the line without a training deck, a new tool, or a headcount request.
14 mo
Average BDR tenure. Which means the operating system runs on people who joined less than a year ago, being coached by managers who got promoted six months before that. This is not a talent problem. It is a system problem. And the system is the only thing you can actually build.
The Bridge Group SDR Report · The case for building the OS, not the roster
Unsolicited Recommendations
Book · High Output Management, Andy Grove
Written in 1983, still the most useful management book I have ever read, and quietly the source of about a third of the operating system I published this week. Grove's core move is treating a team like a production line and then figuring out where the leverage actually lives. It sounds cold on the page and reads warm in practice. If your managers only read one book this year, make it this one, not whichever thought-leader hardcover the LinkedIn algorithm is currently pushing.
Amazon
Podcast · The Knowledge Project, Shane Parrish
Long conversations with people who think for a living. Investors, operators, decision scientists, the occasional Navy admiral. What I like about it is that it is not a sales podcast, so nothing on it is trying to sell me a sales podcast. Every third episode I finish with a note in the margin that ends up in a 1:1 the next week. The Annie Duke episodes on decision quality versus outcome quality are the ones I still hand to new managers.
Apple Podcasts
Book · Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt
A widow works nights cleaning an aquarium. A giant Pacific octopus in the tank has opinions about her, and about the rest of us, and is largely correct. It has nothing to do with sales. It has nothing to do with anything productive. It is one of the kindest and quietly funniest novels I have read in a year, and every once in a while a newsletter should just tell you to go read a good book. This one.
Amazon
One Bad Joke
I told my CRO I built an operating system for the BDR org. He asked if it was Mac or Windows.
Told him it was Linux. He nodded like he understood. Meeting adjourned.
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