Head of BDR

Overview

You're building incident.io's outbound BDR function from the ground up. You'll hire a team of BDRs across US and UK time zones, develop the prospecting playbook for reaching engineering leaders and DevOps teams, and coach reps on what actually works. The company has 1,500+ customers and product-market fit - your job is to build a repeatable outbound motion to accelerate pipeline beyond what inbound generates.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Likely Series B/C (192 employees, 1,500+ customers indicates strong growth)

Size: 192 employees

Growth: Actively scaling GTM - hiring BDR leadership signals investment in outbound

Market Position: Strong product with proven adoption in incident management category, competing against PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and internal tools

GTM Reality

Current Pipeline Sources:

• Primarily inbound-driven (product-led growth with free trials, engineering community word-of-mouth)
• Outbound is underdeveloped - that's why they're hiring you
• Some partner/integration-driven leads (Slack ecosystem, observability tool partnerships)

Your Mission: Build the outbound engine that generates 30-40% of total pipeline within 12-18 months

SDR/AE Structure: You're creating the structure. Likely 4-6 BDRs in year one (split US/UK), supporting a growing AE team

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: PagerDuty (legacy incumbent), Opsgenie/Atlassian (suite play), FireHydrant, homegrown Slack workflows

How They Differentiate: AI-powered automation, better Slack integration, modern UI/UX vs PagerDuty's dated platform

Common Objections: "We already use PagerDuty," "We built our own thing," "Not ready to switch incident tools," pricing concerns from smaller teams

Win Themes: Faster incident resolution, less manual work, better developer experience, cleaner integration architecture

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Recruiting/Hiring (25%) | Coaching/1:1s (30%) | Playbook Development (20%) | Strategy/Reporting (15%) | Hands-on Prospecting (10%)

Key Activities

• Hiring and Onboarding: Screen 50+ BDR candidates to find 4-6 solid reps. Build onboarding that gets them productive in 60 days. You'll spend a lot of time on this in months 1-6.
• Daily Coaching: Listen to calls, review email sequences, run pipeline reviews. You're fixing messaging that sounds too generic, teaching reps how to talk about incident management without jargon, helping them handle "we already have a solution" objections.
• Playbook Building: Figure out which personas respond (SRE managers, VP Engineering, DevOps leads), what messaging works, which channels convert (cold calls vs LinkedIn vs email). Test AI tools for research and personalization. Document what works.
• Pipeline Reviews with Sales: Weekly meetings where AEs tell you the meetings your team booked were unqualified or mistimed. You adjust targeting and discovery questions accordingly.
• Metrics Reporting: Track meetings booked, show rate, SAO conversion, pipeline created per rep. Defend your headcount budget when someone questions BDR ROI.
• Hands-on Prospecting: You'll probably carry a small quota yourself early on to stay sharp and test new approaches before rolling them to the team.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Cold start problem: You're building from scratch. No playbook to inherit. You'll waste time on approaches that don't work before finding what does.
• Technical product, technical buyers: incident.io sells to engineers who hate sales calls. Your reps need to sound credible talking about on-call rotations, incident workflows, and observability - not like script-reading BDRs.
• Competitive displacement: Most prospects already have something for incident management. You're selling change, not filling a void. Expect "we're fine with what we have" on 60%+ of connects.
• Building team across time zones: Managing BDRs in SF and UK means async coaching and coverage gaps. Someone's always asleep when a hot lead comes in.
• Proving outbound ROI: If inbound already works, sales leadership might deprioritize your budget when things get tight. You'll constantly need to show pipeline $ created vs cost.
• Rep turnover: BDRs burn out or promote to AE. Plan on 30-40% annual turnover - you're always hiring.

What Success Looks Like

• 4-6 BDRs ramped and hitting 15-20 qualified meetings per month per rep within 6 months
• Outbound contributing 30%+ of new pipeline by end of year one
• Playbook documented and repeatable - new reps can ramp in 60 days without you spoon-feeding them
• AEs stop complaining about meeting quality (SAO conversion rate above 50%)
• At least one BDR promotes to AE internally within 18 months (shows you're developing talent)

Who Your Team Will Be Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• VP Engineering / Head of Engineering (budget holder for tooling)
• SRE Managers / DevOps Leads (day-to-day users, influence decisions)
• CTOs at mid-market companies (50-500 employees)

What They Care About:

• Mean time to resolution (MTTR) - incidents getting resolved faster
• Reducing on-call burden on engineers (better workflows = less burnout)
• Consolidating incident management tools (they're tired of Slack + PagerDuty + Statuspage + homegrown scripts)
• Integration with existing observability stack (Datadog, Grafana, etc.)
• Proving ROI to finance (incident downtime costs money)

Requirements

• 4+ years building or leading outbound BDR/SDR teams in B2B SaaS
• Experience selling to technical buyers (engineers, DevOps, IT) - must understand how to message to people who hate being sold to
• Track record of hiring, ramping, and coaching reps to quota attainment
• Hands-on with sales tech stack: Outreach/Salesloft, ZoomInfo/Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Nav, CRM hygiene
• Comfortable with AI tools for prospecting and personalization (this is called out specifically - they want someone who experiments with AI, not just talks about it)
• Data-driven: can build dashboards, analyze conversion funnels, optimize for metrics that matter
• Based in San Francisco (role is onsite, likely hybrid but expect to be in office 3-4 days/week)
• Bonus: Experience in DevOps/incident management space or selling to engineering orgs