Most SDRs get roughly the same number of rejections in a week. The ones who end up at the top of the leaderboard are not the ones who feel rejection less. They are the ones who extract more information from it – just one of the examples we uncovered of what top SDRs do differently.
That message about learning from every call came out of a webinar we hosted recently with Dan Brockwell, founder of Australia’s first sales school Early Work; Juan Morales, a former top SDR at monday.com now working as an AE; Jelle Van den Eede, who manages SDR teams at Notion in Sydney and Singapore; and Ben Hobbs, who hit 175 percent of target as a senior SDR at Firmable before moving into an AE role.
Between them, they covered mindset, personal style, team systems and the AI-powered signals that turn a cold call into a warm one.
Here, I’ve tried to pull out the specific, repeatable actions that surfaced in that conversation.
1: Rejection is signal, not verdict
Dan Brockwell’s position is that rejection is unavoidable, but the lesson inside it is not automatic – you have to go looking for it. His method is a daily rejection log: a word or two after every call about what happened, reviewed at the end of the week to spot patterns. The goal is not comfort with rejection. It is curiosity about it.
He also makes a numbers point that reframes the whole exercise. Only a portion of any prospect list is even open to changing providers at a given moment, so a chunk of no’s are simply not winnable, and chasing 100 percent conversion is the wrong target.
Juan Morales’ take complicates the usual advice that resilience is the main skill. He says rejection itself was never his weak point – organization was. His fix was structural, not emotional: a fixed morning routine of dialing before anything else, repeated daily until the process ran on its own.
2: There is no one ‘right’ selling style
Dan opened with a bold statement: copying a top performer’s script will not get you their results, because what feels natural to them can feel forced to you.
He backs this with a specific example from his time at Uber Eats, where the three top-performing account executives had entirely different personalities. One was calm and almost professorial, one charismatic and jokey, one direct and confrontational. All three hit the same numbers with opposite approaches. His advice is to use a top performer’s script as a starting foundation, then iterate toward language and energy that feel natural, while staying flexible enough to mirror different prospect types.
Framework: the base-style-plus-range model
Dan describes reps having a default communication style, then layering a range around it to match whoever they are speaking to – more formal with formal prospects, more conversational with chatty ones. The components are:
- A base style: the rep’s natural, default way of speaking to a prospect
- A range: the set of adjustments a rep can consciously make around that base
- The trigger: actively listening to the prospect rather than following a script word for word, to decide which adjustment to make
Reps who only have one setting, in his framing, cap their own ceiling regardless of how good that one setting is. That ability to adapt on-the-fly is a perfect example of what top SDRs do differently in their day.
3: How the best SDRs build systems around signals
Jelle frames the environment bluntly: AI has made most outreach look and sound the same, so friction – the visible effort of research and personalization – has become a differentiator rather than an inconvenience. His teams consolidated multiple prospecting tools into one internal system, removing the need to context switch, and built what he calls “warm cold calling” on top of it.
The mechanism runs on a 60/40 rule. Sixty percent of rep time goes to below-the-line contacts – individual users or potential internal champions – purely to gather intelligence on how the company operates, what it’s optimizing for, and what its leadership is talking about. The remaining 40 percent goes to calling above-the-line decision makers, armed with that research. Face-to-face coffee chats and personalized direct mail, including gifts tied to details like a birthday, run alongside this as a differentiator in the Sydney and Singapore markets his team covers.
Ben Hobbs’ take on what top SDRs do differently when it comes to systems building is more individual than team-based. The mechanism is the same though: reduce the guesswork before every call. He structures his day around LinkedIn at both ends – engaging with prospects’ content and sending personalized Loom videos. Then he blocks his calling time into three chunks rather than treating the day as one long stretch. Learn about how intent signals work.
4: What this looks like in practice
The live mock cold call
Dan and Juan ran an unscripted three-minute cold call, with Dan playing a busy prospect and Juan cold-calling as an SDR from monday.com. Dan’s post-call breakdown flagged what worked: Juan referenced a prior in-person meeting for familiarity, opened with researched intent signals – Dan’s company was already using a mix of Notion and HubSpot – and asked for the meeting more than once without adding pressure. The one gap Dan named was that Juan never gave a specific reason why switching platforms would be worth the switching cost for a time-poor buyer, only that other companies in a similar position had seen friction.
Juan’s follow-up sequence
Immediately after any call that lands a tentative booking, Juan sends a follow-up email within minutes, before moving to anything else. If the meeting is a few days out, he follows with a text the day before rather than another email, on the basis that a friendly phone conversation earns a more casual follow-up channel. Learn about building a follow-up cadence that sticks.
The Firmable demo
Ben Hobbs demonstrated building a target account list inside Firmable – filtering to a specific vertical and city – then layering signal tracking on top of it: job postings for sales roles, event attendance, leadership changes, and promotions. He cited booking a meeting with Airwallex directly from a signal on hiring growth. His weekly habit is refreshing two to three accounts out of his working list based on which ones show the most movement that week, rather than working a static list until it’s exhausted.
How to apply this
- Start a rejection log today. Jot one line after every call – what happened, why you think it happened – and review the pattern once a week instead of once a quarter.
- Audit your current script against your own personality, not against whoever wrote it, and rewrite the parts that feel forced until the language sounds like you.
- Build a research window into your call prep, even if it’s only 30 seconds of checking a prospect’s recent activity before you dial.
- Split your calling day into three blocks rather than one continuous stretch, and protect the transitions between them.
- Pick two to three signals to track weekly – hiring activity, leadership changes, or event attendance are a reasonable starting set – and refresh your working list against them.
- Send your follow-up email within minutes of booking a tentative meeting, before you move to the next task.
- Confirm meetings by text the day before, not another email, if the relationship with the prospect is already warm and conversational.
- Set a real daily call target based on connect rate, not habit. Ben Hobbs’ number was 70, not the more commonly cited 50. Work out where your own number should sit.
Conclusion
None of the four operators had a silver bullet that, in itself, represented what top SDRS do differently. What they describe is a compounding set of small systems: treating rejection as information instead of judgment, matching selling style to the individual rather than a script, and using signals to make every dial less cold than the last one. For a GTM team building or refining an outbound motion in the US, ANZ or wider APAC market, that combination – mindset discipline plus signal-driven prospecting – is a more durable edge than any single script or tool.
For more, watch the full webinar here.
Frequently asked questions on what top SDRs do differently
One example is the time allocation Jelle’s SDR teams at Notion use: 60 percent of rep time goes to below-the-line contacts to gather intel on how a company operates, and the remaining 40 percent goes to calling above-the-line decision makers armed with that research.
Ben Hobbs, a top-performing former SDR at Firmable, benchmarks 70 calls a day as the target, higher than the more commonly cited 50. He splits them across three call blocks rather than one continuous session
Dan Brockwell recommends logging a short note after every call about what happened, then reviewing the pattern weekly to identify what’s changeable rather than treating every no as a personal failure
No. Dan Brockwell points to three SDRs at Uber Eats with completely opposite personalities – calm and formal, charismatic and jokey, direct and confrontational – who all hit top-of-org numbers. He says that copying someone else’s script rarely works as well as adapting it.
Intent signals are indicators like job postings, leadership changes, or event attendance that suggest it may be a good time to call a company. Both Jelle and Ben use them to prioritize which accounts to work each week, turning a cold call into one backed by a specific, current reason to talk.
Juan Morales’ approach is to send a confirmation email within minutes of the call ending, then follow up by text the day before the meeting rather than a second email, provided the prior conversation was already warm.
Jelle says he prioritizes attitude over aptitude. Specifically, evidence that someone has taken themselves from zero to competent in any skill, sales-related or not – can count more than prior sales experience itself. Read more about hiring and scaling an SDR team.
