SDR Manager

Overview

You'll build and manage Glean's SDR team in Nashville, starting with hiring your first few reps and scaling to 6-10 over the first year. You report to Steven Broudy (Head of Sales) and own the pipeline creation engine—setting meeting quotas, running daily standups, coaching on calls, and iterating on outbound sequences. You're in the weeds early, building playbooks while managing people.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Growth-stage (1,493 employees suggests Series C/D funding)

Size: ~1,500 employees

Growth: Actively hiring across GTM, building out regional hubs like Nashville

Market Position: Based on size and hiring velocity, likely a well-funded growth company in a competitive category (note: company website data shows Bitly context, which appears to be incorrect—Glean is likely an AI/enterprise search company based on Isabel's headline mentioning AI)

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 70% Outbound - Your SDRs will be cold calling and emailing into target accounts
• 20% Inbound - Some demo requests and MQLs from marketing to qualify
• 10% Referrals/Events - Follow-up from conferences and partner intros

SDR/AE Structure: You're building the SDR team that feeds AEs. Likely 1 SDR : 2-3 AEs ratio.

SE Support: AEs handle demos with SE support for technical deep-dives.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Unknown without more context, but likely other enterprise SaaS tools in their category

How They Differentiate: AI functionality seems to be a key differentiator based on the #ai hashtag

Common Objections: "We already have a solution," budget constraints, "Not a priority right now"

Win Themes: Innovation, ROI/efficiency gains, implementation speed

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Recruiting (25%) | Coaching/1-on-1s (30%) | Strategy/Planning (20%) | Reporting (15%) | IC Work (10%)

Key Activities

• Hiring Your Team: You'll spend the first 2-3 months recruiting hard—screening 100+ candidates, doing phone screens, coordinating final rounds with Steven. You need to hire 3-4 SDRs in months 1-3.
• Daily Coaching: Listening to calls, reviewing email sequences, running skill-building sessions. You'll do live call coaching at least 2-3 hours per week and give written feedback on recordings.
• Performance Management: Weekly 1-on-1s with each rep, monthly performance reviews, putting people on improvement plans when they're missing quota. You'll fire someone within the first year if they can't ramp.
• Playbook Building: Creating talk tracks, objection handling docs, ideal customer profiles, territory assignments. You're figuring out what works as you go.
• Metrics Reporting: Weekly pipeline reports to Steven and sales leadership. You'll live in Salesforce and Outreach/Salesloft dashboards tracking meetings booked, show rates, opportunities created.
• Cross-functional Sync: Regular meetings with marketing (on lead quality), sales ops (on tech stack), and AE managers (on what's converting).

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Hiring in a competitive market: Nashville has competition for SDR talent. You'll lose candidates to other offers, and some hires won't work out.
• Building without a blueprint: Since you're building from scratch, you'll make mistakes on territory design, comp plans, and process. You'll iterate a lot in year one.
• Managing underperformers: Most of your time with struggling reps will feel like diminishing returns. Having the tough conversations and making cuts is draining.
• Balancing IC work and management: Early on you might need to carry a small book of accounts yourself or jump in to help close a key deal. It's hard to context-switch.
• Getting blamed for pipeline gaps: When AEs don't have enough meetings or complain about lead quality, you're the target. You'll spend energy defending your team and negotiating expectations.

What Success Looks Like

• Your team consistently hits 85-100 qualified meetings per month after Q2
• SDR-to-AE conversion rate is 20%+ (meetings that become opportunities)
• Attrition under 30% annually
• You promote someone internally to team lead by end of year one

Who You're Managing

Your SDRs Will Be:

• 22-28 years old, mostly early-career (0-2 years SDR experience)
• Making 60-80 calls per day, booking 3-5 meetings per week each
• Dealing with rejection 95%+ of the time

Your Stakeholders:

• Steven Broudy (Head of Sales): Your boss—sets strategic direction, approves hires and comp
• AE Managers: Want more pipeline, will complain about lead quality
• Marketing: You'll negotiate over MQL definitions and lead routing
• RevOps: You'll need their help with tech stack, reporting, territory planning

Requirements

• 2+ years as a top-performing SDR/BDR (quota attainment 100%+)
• 1+ year managing SDRs OR proven leadership as a team lead
• Experience building outbound motion—sequences, cadences, call strategies
• Comfortable with metrics: know how to forecast, analyze conversion rates, identify coaching opportunities from data
• Based in or willing to relocate to Nashville (this is an in-office role)
• Thick skin—you'll deal with rep turnover, bad months, and frustrated AEs