SDR Automation

Intro:

Our board gave me a HUGE revenue number for 2025.

I did the back of the napkin math, and I told them to hit the goal I’d need 25 SDRs.

They said I could hire 6…

So we kicked off an internal project called Project Nova.

Using HockeyStack’s Account Intelligence product, Clay, ZoomInfo, Outreach, and Nooks we went from booking 5 meetings per SDR per week to 15 per week in a quarter.

It took a TON of work, and we made a lot of mistakes.

In this playbook, I will cover our process, signals/workflows we used, and more.

P.S: If you want to learn more about HockeyStack’s Account Intelligence product and have a similar workflow for your company, you can reach out here!

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Playbook:

Doing the Math

We first started with the math.

We worked on a model that started with our pipeline goal to number of opps needed to our SDR capacity.

It looks something like this:

$1M in qualified pipeline at $50K ACV ⇒ 20 opps

At 70% S0 to S1 ⇒ 29 opps

Then we got our Dial to Connect to Meeting numbers and came up with the number of dials/leads we need per SDR per month.

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Tech Stack and Setup

After we had the numbers, we started working on the requirements. For us it was this list:

1. Accurate phone numbers and emails for B2B Software companies in the US, Canada, and UK between 300-10000 employees
2. We need all relevant signals to be tracked and automated (website visits, third-party research, LinkedIn, etc.)
3. We need to do account research at scale to check if they are using a competitor, hiring signals, etc.
4. We need a sequencer and a parallel dialer

We used ZoomInfo and Clay for list building, Nooks for dialing, Outreach for sequencing, and HockeyStack’s Account Intelligence product to track all signals, do account research, and turn them into workflows:

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Automating List Building

We bought bulk credits from ZoomInfo and used Clay to find more accounts/leads.

This is what our Clay workflow looks like:

This is what tables look like:

Lead table gets these accounts and enriches by leads.

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Automating Account Research

After we implemented the “cold” outreach lists, we started working on all the first-party data we collect and other enrichments. Nova was a great project to battle test HockeyStack’s new Account Intelligence Product.

We started with a list of signals that we will use, which includes:

1. Pricing and Contact sales pageviews
2. Interactive demo views
3. LinkedIn ad engagements/comments
4. Template library pageviews
5. SDR email opens
6. Closed lost from the last 180 days (excluding bad fits) who were on our website recently

Then we built different workflows to automate these. Here is what they look like:

Mistakes

Perfecting this process took us 6+ weeks. Every single day we worked on small improvements. Here are top things we learned:

1. Supplementing ZoomInfo data with Clay is one of the most important things we have done. Clay finds more accounts and ZI is a great data source. If you combine both instead of relying on one, you get better results.
2. Feedback loop needs to be instant. We created a spreadsheet and a Slack channel for SDRs to put feedback into. Almost every 30 minutes we got feedback about a bad title or inaccurate data, and we fixed it in minutes. It’s really important to focus on small improvements.
3. You need to start with a small number of titles and industries and expand incrementally. We first started with a broad list of titles and had a ton of bad titles, which made us lose a TON of time.
4. You need to have at least one person internally who understands these workflows otherwise you lose a lot of time with agencies/freelancers.
5. Do not push these changes to your entire SDR team. Start with 1 SDR then expand to others.

Thank you for reading this playbook! If you want more content like this, follow me on LinkedIn.If you want a live demo of HockeyStack’s Account Intelligence product, click here.