Case Study: Building an Elite SDR Team in the United States
CLIENT: CB INSIGHTS
The Result
How CB Insights partnered with Sales Talent Agency to recruit elite SDR talent in the United States.
The Challenge
CB Insights is a market-leading tech company, with a platform that enables its clients to make quick and confident decisions. Whether its clients are looking for a game-changing new vendor, want to uncover a competitor’s strategy, or want to better understand a new market, CB Insights provides the data and tools to help. Over the past 6 years, CB Insights grew its revenue by 8x, ranked as one of the top 100 midsize companies to work for in NYC in 2022, and signed on thousands of happy clients, including Microsoft and Wells Fargo.
CB Insights was undergoing massive growth as a company due to an increase in demand for its solutions. To capitalize on this opportunity, it needed to scale its sales team by adding more reps to help meet its revenue targets. To ensure that its sales team had proper top of the funnel support, it had to first scale its SDR team in the United States and fill its junior hiring classes for the months of May and June.
But the market for sales talent was fierce, and for this highly sought after role, demand typically outweighs supply by 500%. Because of this, many candidates were in the interview process or final offer stages with other organizations. And, with the shift to remote work, employers could go after top candidates anywhere in the United States, which added another layer of competitiveness to hiring from this talent pool. This meant that CB Insights needed to cast a wide net to ensure it had a large enough candidate funnel to meet its hiring needs.
The Solution
CB Insights engaged Sales Talent Agency (STA) in early 2022 to help fill its junior hiring classes. To start, STA met with the CB Insights team to get a better understanding of their hiring needs, the scope of the project and the challenges they were facing as an organization.
After speaking with CB Insights’ hiring team, STA learned that they urgently needed a steady stream of junior, new grad candidates who were well spoken, understood the state of the market, had strong communication skills, and demonstrated creative problem-solving skills in their past experiences. These candidates also needed to be high energy, resilient, and coachable, with a passion and drive for sales to help them excel in this type of role. However, this candidate profile was in such high demand, making it hard to find and attract qualified talent to open roles.
The solution? To utilize two members of STA’s NEXT division, who are elite at sourcing and quickly presenting top junior candidates. This team expertly uses STA’s DNA framework (drive, nature, acumen) to evaluate junior talent on their potential to be great in a sales capacity. For this project specifically, STA:
- Took a data driven approach, and used tools like LinkedIn Talent Insights and Recruiter to determine how many candidates should be screened from the total addressable market, and to understand what additional value they were looking for so that it could be addressed during initial conversations.
- Quickly targeted and connected with new graduates who were well aligned with CB’s ideal candidate profile and ready to make a move into software sales.
- Screened an average of 15 candidates per week in order to present at least 8 potential hires weekly.
- Provided strategic support to all parties throughout the entirety of the interview process.
- Helped candidates analyze and weigh all job options, thus giving CB’s hiring team more insight and predictability in their pipeline.
- Handled the facilitation of offer acceptances and rejections, making the process quick and seamless for CB’s hiring team.
The Result
Sales Talent Agency’s STA NEXT™ team worked quickly and diligently with CB Insights to fulfill its critical hiring needs and support its growth. Over the course of 4 weeks, 34 candidates were presented to CB’s hiring team, of which 34 interviews were booked within 48 hours of candidate presentation. By early May, 7 offers were extended, of which 86% (6 hires!) were accepted, which successfully filled CB’s hiring classes.
“Sales Talent Agency was an invaluable partner during a time of growth for CB Insights, they helped us meet our hiring goals for our sales development team, with great candidates, in a quick and efficient timeframe.”