How Brex scaled outbound with SDRs: lessons from Ashley Kelly
A whopping 80% of Brex’s revenue comes from outbound sales. Ashley Kelly was the first hire and leader of the Sales Development team at Brex, taking the company from $2M to over $300M in ARR. Here are key insights from her journey and approach:
Effective Outbound Strategy
In the early days of cold outbound, it’s tempting to buy a sequencing tool and blast emails to potential customers – but this is not a good idea. Instead, Brex’s approach was more thoughtful:
Start with your network: Brex began with first-degree LinkedIn connections, leveraged the YC network, and sought warm introductions
Creative outbound programs:
Champagne Campaign: Sending champagne and handwritten notes to very targeted companies in San Francisco where their ICP was located
Billboard strategy: Placing billboards throughout SF and sending targeted emails to companies in the billboard radius – the probability of someone replying after seeing the billboard was much higher because they already knew of Brex
The fundamental philosophy is reaching out to companies who have some engagement with your company – for example, they visited your website or downloaded a whitepaper. Avoid blasting emails into the ether.
SDR Hiring: Finding the Right Talent
The SDR organization is a fantastic pipeline for future leaders and high-performer ICs in the company. However, SDR will always be the most challenging role to hire for. Unlike AEs and Manager roles where you have past performance data and references, there isn’t much for SDRs who are typically fresh out of college.
Key traits to look for:
Coachability
Ability to navigate change and failure
Organization skills (SDR work is very structured)
Hunger and motivation
Ashley’s tips for who makes good SDRs:
College athletes (high on teamwork, time management, coachability)
Students from “work hard, play hard” schools (UCSB, Chico State)
Folks with fraternity/sorority and other extracurricular backgrounds
Students who worked through college (who had to balance school and work)
Ex-recruiters (very transferable skills)
Interview process tips:
Hiring manager phone screen
Panel interviews with specific questions testing for key traits
Can they drive the conversation? That’s a good indicator they can do that in sales
Setting SDRs Up for Success
Junior employees are coming from decades spent in structured educational environments. Help them transition to their first job by creating structure:
Be clear about what a successful day looks like – block off chunks of time in their calendars for calls, account scrubbing, and sequencing
Don’t make it a checklist like “you need to do 70 dials a day” – this will get you exactly that much and no more
Instead, create an SDR-sales equation and explain it: “To get A customers, we need B meetings booked, which means C accounts need to go into a sequence…” Get the reps to buy into this logic
Balance structure and autonomy: in the early days when the org is still learning, provide more autonomy. Tell reps, “Here is what has worked for us, but please feel free to try new things.”
Outbound efforts today show up tomorrow – so it can get emotionally high and low for reps. Make sure to celebrate the small wins every day. Celebrate the inputs and the process.
Performance Metrics
In the early days, use Sales Qualified Opportunities (SQOs)
It’s important to give SDRs enough direction on where to hunt for them to be successful
Work closely with data and sales ops to get account scoring right (Brex used Alexa ranking to gauge website traffic as an extremely useful indicator)
Later stage, moving to a revenue-based quota even for the SDR team can dramatically increase output (3x at Brex) – but this will only be successful when deal cycles are short and the team has insight on what works
Scaling Considerations
As you grow your SDR organization, pay attention to:
Per-rep production as the first indicator (are they consistently hitting quota?)
Account penetration metrics (accounts to stage 1, stage 1 to stage 2)
Ramp time
Optimal SDR:Manager ratio (8:1 at Rippling) – helps with coaching especially in remote work
TAM limitations – more SDRs doesn’t necessarily mean more opportunities if you’re saturating your market
SDR Career Progression
The SDR organization truly is a talent pipeline:
The best SDRs go on to become top-performing AEs
They become future managers and leaders
They can transition to marketing, CS, recruiting, etc.
Hiring from your SDR team results in lower risk than external hires, as you already know their capabilities and cultural fit.