Enterprise SDR Manager

Overview

You manage a team of Enterprise SDRs at LaunchDarkly, a feature flag/release management platform that sells to developers and DevOps teams. Your reps are doing outbound into mid-market and enterprise accounts—cold calling engineering managers, VPs of Engineering, and CTOs to book discovery calls for AEs. You spend your days coaching call reviews, fixing messaging, running pipeline reviews, and helping junior sellers navigate technical objections from skeptical developer buyers.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series D+ (607 employees, mature startup)

Size: 600+ employees

Growth: Established player in feature management space, targeting enterprise expansion

Market Position: Category leader in feature flags/progressive delivery—competing against homegrown solutions, Split.io, and enterprise platforms like Harness

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources for Enterprise Team:

• 20% Inbound - Some hand-raisers from content/events, but enterprise buyers rarely fill out forms
• 75% Outbound - Your SDRs are mostly cold calling into target accounts, trying to break into engineering orgs
• 5% Partners/Referrals

SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated Enterprise SDRs feed a team of Enterprise AEs. Your SDRs book the meeting, AEs take it from there.

SE Support: AEs have SE support for technical demos, but SDRs need to handle initial technical questions themselves.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Split.io (direct competitor), Optimizely (experimentation angle), Harness (broader DevOps platform), homegrown feature flag solutions

How They Differentiate: LaunchDarkly is the established leader with the most mature platform—broader feature set, better observability, and stronger enterprise support than competitors.

Common Objections:

• "We already built our own feature flag system"
• "Why do we need to pay for this? It's just if/else statements"
• "We're already using [Split/Optimizely/Harness]"

Win Themes: Speed to market, reduced risk of outages, better observability than homegrown solutions, proven at scale

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Coaching/1-on-1s (40%) | Team Ops/Forecasting (25%) | Hiring/Training (20%) | Your Own Pipeline Work (15%)

Key Activities

• Call Reviews: Listen to 3-5 rep calls daily, give specific feedback on how they're positioning LaunchDarkly to technical buyers who are skeptical of "yet another tool"
• 1-on-1s: Weekly coaching sessions with 5-8 reps—half struggling to hit quota, half ramping or plateauing
• Pipeline Reviews: Monday team meetings reviewing week's activity—dials, connects, meetings booked, conversion rates. You're troubleshooting why certain reps are stuck.
• Sequence Optimization: Testing new outbound sequences, refining messaging for different personas (Engineering Manager vs VP Engineering vs CTO), adjusting cadences
• Cross-functional Meetings: Weekly syncs with AE managers on meeting quality, monthly marketing meetings on list quality, quarterly planning with Jackie (Director) on territory strategy
• Hiring: Interviewing candidates, onboarding new SDRs (expect 1-2 hires per quarter)
• Firefighting: Dealing with rep burnout, motivation issues, conflict between SDRs and AEs over meeting quality

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Technical Buyers Are Tough: Your reps are calling engineers who hate sales calls. Connect rates are low, prospects are blunt, and reps get discouraged. You're constantly coaching resilience.
• Meeting Quality Debates: AEs will push back that your reps' meetings aren't qualified. You'll spend a lot of time mediating between SDRs and AEs about what counts as a "good" meeting.
• Rep Turnover: SDRs burn out or promote out after 12-18 months. You're always hiring and ramping someone new.
• Competing for Budget: Enterprise teams compete with Mid-Market/Commercial teams for top SDR talent and resources.
• Your Reps Outgrow You: If you develop them well, your best reps promote to AE or move on. You're rebuilding the team constantly.

What Success Looks Like

• Your team consistently hits 60-80 qualified meetings/month
• Conversion rates improve: more dials → connects → meetings over time
• AEs stop complaining about meeting quality
• 2-3 of your reps promote to AE within 18 months
• You build repeatable onboarding that gets new reps to quota in 60-90 days

Who Your Team Sells To

Primary Buyers (for discovery calls):

• Engineering Managers (team leads managing 5-15 engineers)
• Directors/VPs of Engineering (overseeing multiple teams)
• CTOs (at smaller mid-market companies)
• DevOps/Platform Engineering Leads

What They Care About:

• Reducing deployment risk and avoiding outages
• Shipping features faster without big bang releases
• Better visibility into what code is running where
• Not having to maintain a homegrown feature flag system
• Integration with their existing stack (CI/CD tools, observability platforms)

Requirements

• 2-3 years as an SDR/BDR selling to technical buyers (developers, engineers, DevOps teams)
• 1-2 years managing or leading SDRs (even as a team lead or mentor)
• Experience coaching cold calling and outbound prospecting—this isn't an inbound team
• Comfortable with technical products and talking to engineering buyers
• Ability to diagnose why a rep is struggling (skill issue, motivation, territory, messaging) and fix it
• Data-driven: you look at activity metrics, conversion rates, and can spot patterns
• Reports to Director of Sales Development (Jackie French), likely manages 5-8 Enterprise SDRs
• Comfortable with ambiguity—this is a growing team, processes aren't perfect