Media/Appearances/YouTube

Nobody wants to talk to an SDR

You Deserve More Business/Benyamin Holley/Feb 21, 2025

Zach has Ben on You Deserve More Business, a few months into Cyft. Ben opens by saying he has never run an MSP and is not claiming to be an expert. The overlap he does claim: an MSP is a service business whose owner often does not want to be in sales. He lived that in a home recording studio. Covid hit before the studio was mature enough to keep going. He went back to school for music production and still could not make money, because he did not know how to ask for it. Motorcycle sales came in that stretch. Instagram ads at $15, back when they were cheap, and hundreds of comments. He has been chasing that high since. Platforms raise the price once they have the users. Sell or Be Sold was the first sales book. Andy Elliott's old car-sales videos landed while he was selling motorcycles. He is not into those guys now. The line he kept: in a sales process, somebody is selling you on why they should not buy, and they are usually winning. The product, as he described it then, is talking to the PSA the way you talk to Siri. A ConnectWise ticket, a new-user install, three hours on site, Active Directory, and the note writes itself. They had pictured it for sales, then noticed most MSPs have one person selling, so the user was the field tech writing notes on Friday, missing billable hours, and leaving something the customer cannot read. Cyft rewrote those notes down to about a ninth-grade reading level. He was skeptical of the pitch that ticket time dropped from six minutes to 60 seconds until he listened to customer calls. After that: incident response down, note quality up, fewer calls about a broken printer, because the customer can see what happened. He had started November 1 and had been there about three months. The company had been around a bit over a year. The product in its then-current form was seven or eight months old, in beta, with customers. A lead investor was in negotiation. First money went to more engineers. He wanted the sales team kept small. You cannot outsell churn. An owner who wants out of sales should stay the salesperson until about $3 million in ARR. Nobody wants to talk to an SDR. They want the founder. Henry Schuck at ZoomInfo was still messaging him on LinkedIn, and Ben does not think it was an assistant. On La Growth Machine he ran campaigns for himself and the three co-founders. James and Jeff sent a connection request with no note, and people wrote back about the product. That had never happened to him. Hiring a college SDR at $60,000 to invent the motion is the wrong rate. Figure-it-out money is a different job. He looks at Thread in the space and wants the chatbot version of the PSA: read the tickets, and if a laptop keeps breaking, open an opportunity to replace it instead of funding the repair. IT Glue and Hudu sit in the docs layer. The point is to augment L1 techs. Younger techs are not going to want to mouse through a documentation site. He would rather be with MSPs serving doctor's offices and accounting firms than back in telecom aggregation for national accounts. He said he was not there to give an anti-capitalist speech. He prefers smaller businesses.

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