Hello and welcome 👋 to the second stage of the application process for the role "SDR" at hyrise for our training business unit hyriseTraining.

We really enjoyed our first interview with you and are now looking forward to getting to know you better with a case study. Additionally, you will get a good idea of what you can expect in everyday life at hyrise. 🙌 Let's get started 🕶 (Tip: Please read carefully!)

<aside> 💡 Note: Section 2 (”Your tasks”) has the actual case study.

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1. Relevant background information on hyrise

<aside> ℹ️ Context

The tech industry is booming. Software and internet companies have never shown more growth than they do today. By 2021, funding rounds for the sector have skyrocketed with more than 10 billion having been raised in Germany alone.

Tech products often require explanations. Even more so with hundreds of thousands of software applications out there. Therefore, one profile that almost every company looks for is “sales”. While companies look for both experienced and entry-level roles, one profile is in particularly high demand: “Sales Development Representative.”

As of 2024, there were 4 times more open sales positions in Tech than there were profiles. Why?

1. Sales is not being taught as a career track. Not at university, not in school, not as vocational training.
2. People have false stereotypes of what sales is and is not. What most think of are old images of sleazy car salesmen or insurance brokers that talk helpful old grannies into products they don’t need.

The reality today:

1. In the last 15-20 years, Sales has become a craft that can (and needs to be) learned.
2. Tech sales is much closer to a role of a consultant - it’s about identifying a potential buyer’s needs, finding solutions, and helping them understand how to create value.

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What does this 👆 mean?

Two specific problems when trying to build great sales teams

1. Recruiting and hiring the right sales profiles is extremely difficult - it takes too long and is very expensive.
   • It’s very hard to find sales profiles, not to mention good ones.
   • Barely any (good) inbound applications.
   • Internal recruiters spend a lot of time on active sourcing (candidates) - costly because of the time they spend.
   • If they find candidates, it’s usually too few to choose from. Companies want/need bigger pipelines to select the best candidates.
   • Positions are unfilled for too long: Every minute a position is unfilled, companies lose money. An estimated 1.000€ per day the position goes unfilled.
2. Training new sales hires and existing sales teams is extremely time intensive and costly.
   • Companies are often “forced” to hire career changers as sales juniors as the market is empty.
   • Those profiles have great potential but need a lot of training, management attention, and instruction to become productive and successful.
   • Companies, especially when growing fast, often don’t have the bandwidth (time) and/or resources (people) to properly train any of their sales reps.
   • Motivation and performance drop, worst case the candidate leaves or is asked to leave.
   • The biggest cost of this is the quota that they never reach. It’s estimated an average cost of 200.000€ for every bad-performing seller.
   • Badly trained managers do the biggest damage → it’s why people leave the company

The Solution

<aside> 💡 In reply to the problems we have seen in the marketplace, we provide 2 solutions for growing tech companies. Note that as SDR for hyriseTraining, the 2nd one (!) is the relevant one for this case study.

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1. Talent (hyriseRecruiting)
   • Value proposition in a nutshell: Delivering vetted sales talent in the most efficient way
   • This is designed to solve the company’s sales recruiting problems
2. Training (hyriseTraining)
   • Value proposition in a nutshell: Continuous and highly individualized training to get better performing sales employees
   • This is designed to solve the company’s performance issues in sales

2. Our Ideal Customer Profile for hyriseTraining

<aside> 🤓 We have two target ICPs. To keep things simple, we will focus on our priority one below.

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