Automation is a double edged sword.
Sales automation software tools can have profound impacts on productivity and operational visibility, but if used incorrectly, they can destroy your brand reputation. With tools like outreach, one person can target and send emails to 2,000 people in a day. Every one of those emails has the chance to piss someone off so bad, that they will never talk to you or anyone at your company ever again.
Most SDRs are in a churn-and-burn shop where their employment hinges on people opening, reading, responding, and being interested in their communications: under this pressure, desperation can kick in and they will resort to sending hundreds or thousands of hastily composed touchpoints.
Sequences are annoying.
The job of an SDR in 2021 is to put the right people in the right sequence at the right time, then execute the sequence to best fit the prospects needs. When you need volume, the former part supersedes the latter, and a bunch of uninterested people start getting bothered by your company.
So when a rep goes in and hastily sequences every lead in Florida to hit their monthly quotas, they make a permanent negative impression on everyone they sequenced.
Spam filters never forgive or forget.
Advanced spam filters will notice if your sequence is getting ignored, then mark your company's domain as spam, and block it forever for everyone at that account.
B2B sales emails have to prepare to be treated like a completely unwanted spam email by spam filters.
Ever been selling into an account where you cannot get traction no matter what? Someone probably sent one bad sequence out four years ago.
Managers need to chill.
Sometimes you need to slow down to speed up. Everyone knows when they're getting automatic emails. When some self-proclaimed sales guru learns how to write cold emails, they'll sell the formula, it becomes overused, and then prospects recognize it for what it is. Constant innovation is required to keep your emails top-of-mind and useful, on top of adding real business value.
Managers must keep a pulse on activity, but not enforce it militaristically.
If a rep is struggling, their last instinct should be 'better throw a bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks.' Management actively hawking activity metrics, especially at Director/VP levels, actively encourages this kind of self-destructive behavior. Playing enterprise sales fast and loose just doesn't work like it did in ye olden days of 2018.
Be careful about installing operational guardrails.
Sales ops doesn't need to get involved here to set an upper limit to the number of touchpoints made in a day. Most email providers (Gmail and Outlook) set 2,000 outgoing emails as the maximum number of emails you can send in a day. Good reps don't need to be told how many emails they can or cannot send in a day. Onboarding needs to include weeks of lessons on how to use automation tools. Teach reps how to pay close attention to minor details and the risks of failing to take precautions.
Reward quality of outcome, not quantity.
SDR quotas are so tough to figure out, but the standard 'pay-per-meeting' method has so many customer-affecting downsides. Think of some ways your organization can start paying commission on long or large deals. Give SDRs skin in the game late in the deal cycle, and don't visibly hawk activity unless it's a clear sign of something else going on.
Setting up a Salesforce dashboard with everyone on the team's calls and emails per day is a great way of keeping people motivated to pick up the phones, but the top indicator of performance should be the revenue closed from each SDR's sourced deals. This will incentivize SDRs to be far more strategic when designing sales touchpoints.
