AE and SDR meeting agenda

How to use it

1. Put in the pair, the date, and every meeting the SDR set since you last met.
2. Go through them one at a time and write the actual reason it was taken, rejected or lost. Not a category, the sentence.
3. Agree one change to the bar or the targeting, then pick the accounts you are going after together.
4. Write down what each of you owes the other by when, print the page, and open the next session with it.

 

Why it is built this way

The agenda is built round a feedback loop that is broken in one direction almost everywhere. The SDR is measured on meetings, so the SDR knows exactly how many they set. The AE decides which of those were worth having, but that judgement is normally made silently, in the two seconds it takes to mark an opportunity as unqualified. The SDR sees the outcome and never the reasoning, so the same mistake gets repeated for a quarter. Going through each meeting by name, out loud, with the specific fact that would have disqualified it in advance, is the only part of this session that reliably moves the acceptance rate. Everything else on the page exists to stop that turning into a general complaint about lead quality, which is where these conversations go when they are not structured.

The second half is there because the reciprocal side of the relationship never gets scheduled. An SDR working an AE's accounts needs things only the AE has: the story from the customer who looked exactly like this one, a warm introduction, an email read before it goes out, twenty minutes on the part of the product they cannot yet explain. None of it is urgent, so none of it happens unless it is written down with a date against it. If the AE's column is empty three weeks running, the session has quietly turned back into a status update, and the page is laid out so that is obvious to both people.

 

Questions

How often should an AE and SDR meet?

Weekly, for half an hour, at a fixed time that does not move. The value is in the rhythm rather than the length, because feedback on a meeting is worth most while both people still remember the prospect. Thirty minutes every week beats an hour every fortnight. If one SDR supports several AEs, each pairing still needs its own slot: a group session becomes a broadcast and the specific feedback stops happening.

Is this the same as the manager's one to one?

No, and it should not replace it. The manager's one to one covers performance, development, targets and how the person is actually doing. This is a working session between two people attacking the same accounts from different ends, and nobody is being assessed in it. Teams that merge the two end up with an SDR who cannot be honest about what is not working, because the person they would be honest with also writes their review.

What if the AE keeps rejecting the SDR's meetings?

Then the session is doing its job, and the useful question is whether the rejections are consistent. Write the reason down every week for a month and the pattern is nearly always one of three things: the bar is genuinely not being met, the bar was never written down so the AE is applying a private one, or the AE is rejecting perfectly good meetings because their diary is full. Only the first of those is the SDR's problem to fix, and you cannot tell which it is without the written record.

Who should own the agenda, the AE or the SDR?

The AE fills it in and runs it. That is deliberate. The failure mode of these sessions is the SDR presenting to the AE, and the person holding the page sets the tone. An AE who has had to write down why they turned down four meetings arrives in a very different frame of mind from one who is being reported to.

What about meetings that were held and then went nowhere?

Those are worth more than the rejections, and they are almost always skipped because by the time a deal quietly dies everyone has moved on. A meeting that was accepted, taken and then went nowhere tells you something about the qualification bar that a rejected meeting cannot, since the bar let it through. Give them their own line on the page and they get discussed.

Our SDRs sit under marketing and the AEs barely speak to them. Does this still work?

It works, but the reporting line is the real problem and the agenda will mostly make it visible. In that structure the SDR is usually measured on meetings booked while the AE is measured on pipeline created, so the two are quietly optimising against each other by design. Run the session anyway. Within a month you will have a written record of exactly where the two definitions diverge, which is a far better argument to take upstairs than an opinion.

Should the numbers be in this session at all?

Keep them out. Acceptance rate, activity and pipeline created belong in the team meeting and in the manager's one to one, where they can be acted on. Bring them in here and they take the session over, because a number is much easier to talk about than a specific meeting that went wrong, and the specific meeting is the entire point.

 

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• Know Your Pipeline: Work back from your target to the meetings, calls and demos you and your SDR need.

• See all the free sales tools

 

Meetings booked, but no pipeline behind them?

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