Read time: 5 minutes

Welcome to the Succession newsletter where 2,000+ life science sales reps improve their skills in 5 minutes per week. If you’re getting value from these newsletters, we'd love it if you could forward it along to your sales colleagues. If you’re new here, subscribe below.

Succession Bio works with life science/biotech companies to help drive sales, licensing, and partnership opportunities.

We do this through market research to identify the right companies and people, craft scientifically credible messages, and then perform the outbound sales and marketing tactics on your behalf to facilitate meetings with the right people at the right companies.

Succession

• Specializes in life sciences/biotech (it's all we do!)

• Provides market research, messaging, and outbound sales/marketing services

• Facilitates meetings and opportunities with the right people at the right companies for our clients

• Sales training for teams of 10+ who want to find and close more deals with biotech and pharma

For those of you who have read my previous newsletter pieces for Succession you will be very familiar with my journey from biochemistry graduate to biotech manufacturing and finally landing inside the nitty-gritty world of sales.

Having served my time and earned my stripes as a sales development representative I now find myself at an interesting career point where the job that brought me into the sales world and no doubt taught me many of my most valuable skills as an employee has now become the point of much online contention.

The SDR role can often be degraded to that of a spammer or telemarketer, and when done badly no doubt it is, but in reality it is far more than that. It is the first point of contact for many buyers in your organisation and the main tap which feeds the rest of your sales funnel.

These days the position is in a huge state of flux due to the advent of AI. Some are writing off the role as easily replaceable, while other more astute observers see the truth that the much beloved SDR position, that birthed many a great sales person and forged more than a few great sales leaders, is merely transforming into a newer, more dynamic and respected seat at the GTM table.

Today I will take you through a classic 3 act play regarding the Sales Development Representative as we look at The Death, In Between and Rebirth of the SDR.

The Death

The previous idea of the SDR's place in your GTM org was simple. Build a half decent list, fire up the email sequence or cadence, for your Salesloft aficionados, and jump on the phones.

It was a great system that embraced the grind and allowed for quick wins from what was, truth be told, a low effort input from reps. Get the prospect on the phone, run through a quick BANT as quickly as you could and shove the meeting down the prospect's throat.

In this model the goal was get in the door as an SDR, bank a few solid months of SQLs, hit your target and get out the other door as an Account Executive to finally get on to the big bucks.

But then, enter Artificial Intelligence, dun dun dun (ominous music).

This changed everything in the SDR world. Now anyone with a far smaller budget and a few YouTube tutorials can start replicating the work, or fairer to say, equal the output of an entire SDR team.

Suddenly prospects' inboxes have now become flooded with low quality, generic AI outbound emails and the game is up.

The entire world of outbound sales has changed drastically since the everyday use of AI became commonplace.

The In Between (Right Now)

Currently we sit in a time of great change and even greater confusion for what is to become and even what is the SDR role in today's workplace.

You have a lot of people pushing forward in a lot of different directions and no one really being sure of what top of funnel sales will look like a few years from now.

You still have a few stalwarts of the old guard doubling down on the old system, adding headcount, pumping the phones and still expecting (incorrectly) to see revenue and pipeline increase accordingly.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the tech messiahs who have doubled down even harder to try remove the human from the loop entirely. Sadly to say messiahs, I don't think this is the way either.

With this approach you end up spamming inboxes with total disregard for the nuance and intelligence of your buyer and giving the whole profession a bad name. It seems the only people making money from these AI-SDRs are the people selling them.

Finally you have the hybrid option, where you have curious, driven salespeople augmenting themselves with AI tools to perform high quality outbound work, that resonates with your buyers.

These are the SDRs that are not only surviving but thriving in today's landscape. These reps are jumping into Clay, configuring their LLM of choice to think like them, building signal-based campaigns and seeing themselves as a 1 person marketing team and not just a dialling robot (R.I.P Dialmaster 5000).

KPIs are moving away from volume driven inputs to reward smarter more targeted work, but the interesting thing is that no one really agrees on what the SDR job will look like in 3 or even 2 years. Here's my best guess.

The Rebirth

As I said above it's hard to predict the full effect that AI will have on the SDR but here's Daly's top 4 predictions for what the job might look like in a short few years.

1. Lower headcount, higher compensation.

Previously every market had its own SDR and you had a set amount of SDR roles allocated to feed a specific amount of AE's pipeline. AI is no doubt going to offset the job market and most likely the modern sales team will be made up of fewer highly effective individuals who will ultimately merit higher compensation. The GTM org will now most likely have 1 or 2 highly efficient inbound sales roles that can quickly meet with and qualify the warm leads now being generated through AI outbound initiatives. These hypothetical sales teams of the future will be supplemented by a GTM engineer who feeds the reps with warm leads and manages the stack.

2. The SDR pivot to GTM engineer.

The good thing for many, especially experienced SDRs, is that they are in a great position to pivot to some of the new roles being created by AI, such as the GTM engineer. Reps who choose to upskill now and build technical skills on top of their existing frontline sales knowledge are in a great position to become the next wave of professionals driving this new era of GTM.

3. The skills inversion.

The skills once valued by hiring teams as recent as 2022 such as perseverance and resilience are the skills being replaced by AI tools and systems most rapidly. The most highly sought after skills for sales reps are versatility, technical skills and the ability to write and edit great copy to help supplement these AI tools.

4. The life science premium.

An important thing to remember is that although LLMs are great for saving time and cutting down on boring repeatable tasks, they will also confidently mis-cite a paper, invent a Phase II result, or use the wrong therapeutic area without blinking. In life science that kind of error gets your email deleted in seconds by anyone who actually works in the field. By their very nature life science buyers are skeptical, detail oriented and quick to point out and vilify sloppy work. The human's ability to actually understand the science will be the only real moat left.

So What Now and Final Thoughts

As always I will wrap this up on a practical note.

For SDRs: take this as a gentle sign to get out there, improve your technical skills and familiarise yourself with the tools of modern GTM such as Clay and Claude Code. The chances are your career path will be greatly altered by the AI onset but it could be a great opportunity to catapult yourself into a new and more exciting role.

For sales leaders: take this as a stark warning to move away from the old volume centered approach, modernise your tech stack and start thinking about how to navigate the imbroglio of the GTM world today.

I joined the sales world at the end of one era and I find myself in the middle of the next one. Whatever I think the SDR role will look like in 2029 is most likely wrong but the good news is these times of large change can be a great time to reinvent your career and refine your future path.

At Succession we support life science teams trying to bridge the gap between the old volume based sales and this new AI orientated landscape. If you want to learn more about how we can support your team with high quality, targeted and scientist driven outbound, book a quick call with us.

Apple Podcast | Spotify | YouTube

SalesDNA Podcast Episode 88: Biotech's Talent Gap: How to Hire When Speed Meets Science SalesDNA Podcast

1. Lead Generation: We’ll build target lists, write scientifically relevant messaging, and send messages on your behalf to book qualified sales meetings with biotech and pharma companies.

2. Training for Teams: If you want to upskill your team around prospecting, driving to close, key account management, AI, or any other topic, we can put together a training plan specific to your organization’s needs.

3. Strategy Call: Need more than training? Want help implementing and executing your sales strategy? In a 30-minute call, we will assess your company’s current situation and identify growth opportunities.