Psychological Safety for SDRs

1. We initially connected because you’ve been very vocal online about the importance of authenticity as an SDR. Why does that matter so much to you?

2. How has sales evolved over the past few years, and how does this “authentic rep” play a role in the modern sales environment?

3. Let’s define psychological safety. What does it mean to have it? What happens when you don’t?

4. You’re really active on LinkedIn, and you encourage others to do the same. What has it done for your career?

5. We know what’s in it for the rep – what’s in it for the company? For sales leadership? Why should they care about this?

Top 3 Takeaways

🌐 “…if you think about it, in the early 2000s, virtual selling wasn’t a thing…but in the early 2010s, the last decade, the early last decade, selling became virtual…technology enabled that. But with technology, you lose human touch. And it took the sales community a while to really understand, why are the strategies that initially worked for us maybe five, ten years ago, when we first started doing this, why are those strategies not working for us anymore? And the reason for that is people are tired.”

Prospecting fatigue is very real. Email send rates are at all-time highs, and response rates are at all-time lows. The sea of prospecting emails, phone calls, and LinkedIn messages continues to swell – and as an SDR, you can either sink or swim.

Choosing sink means you continue sending messages off into the void – hoping someone will respond.

Choosing swim means you craft relevant, novel messages with the notion that your prospects would be crazy to not respond.

Jagrit believes that to swim, you have to show your authentic self. Breaking through the noise is hard, but it becomes a lot easier when you shed the “corporate” version of yourself and inject some personality into your messaging.

But in order to do that, you need to have that net of psychological safety.

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🔬 “And there has been a lot of research done on this, right? Your employee engagement levels, your team engagement levels, the output, the creativity, the motivation, when your team faces that safety, it goes off the charts. But if you don’t have it, then it has a negative experience on your team’s morale, your team’s performance, and a lot of other trickling effects.”

Jagrit is intimately familiar with working in an environment without psychological safety and with psychological safety. And he could see the difference in just his own attitude very clearly.

When he felt restricted or like he couldn’t be his authentic self, his mood and motivation were prone to dropping regularly. On the flip side, when he felt like he could be himself without fear of retribution from his manager, his motivation was through the roof.

Sales Health Alliance published a great article on why psychological safety is so important, and the impact safety can have on your sales org as a whole:

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🧪 “You’re at a startup because you can experiment. You can try your hand at different things. If you go to a company with 10,000 employees, you’ll be put in a box. The reason you chose the hard startup life is because you have the room to experiment. You have the room to try out new things and fail and learn, iterate, right? So make sure you use that and make sure that the leadership enables you to do that.”

One of the most rewarding aspects of the SDR role is the ability to experiment – with new messaging, channels, or verticals. That growth mindset and long-term vision are tenets of high-performing SDRs, and can act as a strong catalyst for overall sales growth.

And when managers stymie that growth, they stymie pipeline growth.

Obviously, you need to establish guard rails – you can’t have reps doing whatever they want to try and book meetings. But if the rails are too tight and reps feel like they can’t deviate from the script, they begin to consider things like the impact they have at the organization and the consequences of coloring outside the lines.