Problem: What’s the most effective way to get sales leads? In a conversation with Howard Lerman, CEO of Roam, we hypothesized that in-person meetups over dinner might be one of the best ways. What if SDRs are outdated? Could DDRs do the job?
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Solution: DDRs are what I call “Dinner Development Representatives.” Rather than focusing on the traditional SDR (Sales Development Representative) role which focuses on identifying prospects, cold emailing, making calls, setting up meetings, and other tasks to generate sales leads, the DDRs would focus on mutually beneficial experiential sales strategies.
For instance, suppose you wanted to sell a product to CTOs. Instead of cold-emailing 1,000 CTOs with a description of the product, this DDR would invite a select number (perhaps 25) to an exclusive dinner, sporting event, or other activity along with notable C-suite executives from their own companies. The benefits of this model are quite endless: suppose the guests invited have been wanting to get in the room with one another for months. Then (by serving as the connector), the company would have created immense value. Moreover, these DDRs could organize specific events that each prospect would actually love: cooking classes, dance classes, private concerts, you name it. A $5,000 targeted spend on this experiential prospecting would probably significantly outperform a shotgunned $5,000 LinkedIn advertisement approach.
However organizing the perfect events would certainly be an art and not just a skill. In order to be the most successful, individuals would likely need to have experience organizing dozens of these events. Thus, the business would focus primarily on organizing at-scale the best events possible. Because of their repetition and scale, they would also be able to negotiate special pricing, tables, or deals with restaurants that are sought after in each city.
Monetization: While it’s hard to estimate the market size for a business like this, the global sales enablement platform market size was valued at $3.6 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 15.5% from 2022 to 2030 (according to Grand View Research). Much of this growth is expected to come from machine learning & AI along with sales enablement platforms, but I can also imagine a world where this growth comes from entirely new forms of selling like Experiential Prospecting.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)