Founder — BizDev Labs. Progressive outbound BDR agency (45+ SaaS clients 🚀)

In 2020, I quit my job with $3K in the bank and no plan. 

Two years later, I built a multi-million-dollar BDR agency and earned a spot on Forbes 30U30.

Today I am redefining the role of a BDR. I believe the BDR role is a lifelong career. And my goal is to build the most tenured BDR team on the market.

—-

Outside of work, I was an Olympic-class windsurfer. 

I lived in Israel, Canada, USA, England, Mexico, Hong Kong, Portugal and Aruba.

Roy Itzhaki

Your first BDR should get paid $200K.

And if that sentence triggers you…
you probably haven’t built outbound from scratch.

Your first BDR is not a rep.

They’re not “booking meetings.”

They are the first version of your GTM engine.

There’s a massive difference between:

• 2 → 10 (scaling a working system)
vs
• 0 → 1 (creating the system)

Most founders confuse the two.

A true first BDR hire:

• Turns founder-led sales into a repeatable motion
• Defines ICP through real conversations, not slide decks
• Tests positioning until it actually lands
• Builds sequences that don’t embarrass the brand
• Identifies triggers that convert
• Documents what works and what doesn’t
• Creates the first predictable pipeline

They’re not following a playbook.

They’re writing it.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth:

If you underpay this seat, you don’t save money.
You delay momentum.

A weak 0→1 foundation compounds.
Bad messaging scales.
Wrong ICP scales.
Low-quality pipeline scales.

And then you wonder why 5 SDRs can’t fix what 1 strategic operator could’ve built properly.

You’re not paying $200K for activity.

You’re paying for leverage.

The right first BDR hire builds an asset.
The wrong one creates noise.

Founders who understand this scale faster.
The ones who don’t keep “trying outbound.”

#BDR #Outbound #GTM #SaaS #Sales #Startups

Roy Itzhaki 

Founder @ BizDev Labs | Forbes 30 Under 30

You don’t have a pipeline problem.
You have a “no one wants to call” problem.

In a world of automation, 
AI-written emails, 
and perfectly timed sequences…

Cold calling is becoming rare.

And rare becomes valuable.

Everyone can send 1,000 emails.
Everyone can automate LinkedIn touches.
Everyone can build a 12-step cadence.

Very few are willing to interrupt their day,
ask a direct question,
and handle a real objection live.

That’s why the phone is quietly becoming the edge again.

When something becomes uncomfortable,
most people avoid it.

When most people avoid it,
it becomes opportunity.

The less the market calls,
the more powerful your voice becomes.

If pipeline is slow,
don’t look at LinkedIn and Email.

Look at your call blocks.

#Sales #Outbound #BDR #Pipeline #GTM

Want to know the real difference between 
$120k and $500k Account Executive?

It's not just about:
• Product knowledge
• Negotiation tactics
• Closing techniques

It's what happens AFTER the meeting.

Most sales people:
• Take days to follow up
• Send generic check-ins
• Forget key details
• Hope for the best

Here's how top performers do it:

"Hey [name] - 
I hope you had a great weekend!
I was just looking over our call notes and noticed you mentioned reviewing the proposal Friday.
I know there's a lot to process.
Is there anything I can help with?"

And they send this on a Monday.
Right on schedule. 

Simple. Personal. Attentive.
Shows you're listening.
Shows you care.
Shows you're organized.

Because great follow-up isn't about:
• Fancy words
• Aggressive tactics
• Complex strategies

It's about:
• Being present
• Staying organized
• Showing you care
• Guiding the journey

P.S. Your prospects can feel when they're being prioritized. I can't tell you how many compliments we get about this 🎯

The best BDRs should stay BDRs.

Read that again.

Every company says they want consistent pipeline.

But the moment a BDR gets really good…
you promote them out of the role.

Or you lose them.

Think about the timeline.

Month 1–3:
They’re learning the product.
Learning the ICP.
Learning how to not sound robotic.

Month 4–9:
They start figuring it out.
Messaging improves.
Confidence builds.
Meetings go up.

Month 10–14:
Now they’re dangerous.
They understand objections.
They know which triggers convert.
They are able to maximize efficiency.

And that’s exactly when they leave.

AE.
Management.
Another company.

So you restart.

New hire.
New ramp.
New mistakes.
Lost momentum.

You don’t have a pipeline problem.
You have a tenure problem.

We decided to fix that.

Instead of building “future AEs,”
we built career BDRs.

• Pay them like closers
• Give them specialization tracks
• Give them strategy ownership
• Remove the “junior” label
• Treat outbound like a craft

Our average BDR tenure? 3–4 years.

---

The best BDRs shouldn’t be promoted out.
They should be leveled up inside.

#BDR #Outbound #Sales #SaaS #Pipeline

CEO: We need to hire a BDR.

ME: For what exactly?

CEO: Pipeline. We need more meetings.

ME: Do you already have an outbound motion that works?

CEO: We have sequences. Lists. A script.

ME: I’ll rephrase.

ME: Do you know who to target, why now, what to say, which channel, in what order, and how to adjust when it stops working?

CEO: …Not fully.

ME: Then you don’t need a BDR.

CEO: What do you mean?

ME: Most companies THINK they just need BDRs.

ME: But they don't.

ME: A BDRs isn't supposed to figure out the outbound motion
They're just supposed to perform inside of it.

CEO: Tell me more.

ME: That’s the gap you're missing.

ME: Discovery and execution are two different jobs.

ME: You’re asking one person to:
• Discover ICP nuance
• Test messaging
• Find triggers that convert
• Decide channel order
• Fix deliverability
• Handle objections they’ve never heard before

ME: While also being judged on meetings booked.

CEO: But we need activity now.

ME: Activity without a solved motion is just paid guessing.

ME: Especially when the BDR is junior, inexperienced,
or hasn’t done this across multiple companies.

ME: They’re learning and being evaluated at the same time.

ME: That’s not scalable.
And it’s not fair.

CEO: So what do we actually need?

ME: If outbound isn’t already solved…

ME: You don’t need a BDR.

ME: You need:
• Process before people
• Strategy before volume
• A team that’s already done this before
• Clear rules for targeting, messaging, and sequencing
• Feedback loops that compound

ME: Once that exists?

ME: A BDR becomes leverage.

ME: Before that?

ME: They’re just an experiment with a quota.

#BDR #Outbound #Sales #SaaS #GTM

P.S. If your BDR has to invent outbound before they can run it…
you hired too early.

You call BDR entry level?

Cool.

If it’s truly entry level…

Why do so few ever become elite?

Think about it.

If it’s “junior,” then why can’t most people do it well for more than 6 months?

Why do performance numbers collapse the moment pressure increases?

Why does rejection break people?

Because it’s not entry level.

It’s emotional control at scale.

You’re asking someone to:

Call executives who don’t want to talk.
Get rejected 20–50 times a day.
Stay sharp.
Stay confident.
Write messages that convert in 3 lines.
Manage multiple channels at once.
And not let yesterday’s losses affect today’s calls.

That’s not beginner work.

That’s psychological endurance.

If it were truly entry level…

You’d have thousands of elite BDRs.

You don’t.

And that tells you everything.

#BDR #Sales #Outbound #Leadership

If your best BDR leaves tomorrow:

• Pipeline drops immediately with no warning
• Ramp time goes back to zero
• ICP nuance and buyer context disappear
• Messaging quality regresses overnight
• Objections get pushed downstream to AEs
• Campaign momentum stalls or dies
• Marketing loses its most valuable feedback loop
• AEs feel the impact on day one
• Leadership shifts into reactive mode
• A new req gets opened to plug the gap
• A junior is hired to replace leverage
• Paid less to “prove themselves”
• All the learned knowledge leaves with them
• The cycle starts all over again

If your best BDR stays:

• Pipeline compounds instead of resetting
• ICP understanding sharpens over time
• Messaging improves with real market data
• Objections are handled before AEs get involved
• Campaigns launch faster with fewer mistakes
• Less management is needed to maintain output
• Knowledge compounds year after year

BDRs aren’t expensive.
Losing top performers is.

Pay top performers more.
Way more.

#BDR #Sales #GTM #Outbound

🚀 35 Software & SaaS companies hiring SDRs / BDRs in the US right now - February 2026 edition 👇

1. Snap Inc. (8,465 employees) — BDR — New York, NY
2. Slice | Global Equity (42 employees) — BDR — New York
3. Deck (80 employees) — BDR — SF Bay Area
4. Hopper (1,156 employees) — Founding SDR (Remote) — NY
5. Runware (30 employees) — Founding BDR — SF, CA
6. Storyblok (291 employees) — BDR — Boston, MA
7. PlaybookUX (36 employees) — BDR — US
8. Prospecta Software (299 employees) — BDR — US
9. Jumio Corporation (620 employees) — BDR — US
10. Syndigo (1,423 employees) — BDR — Chicago, IL
11. Yext (2,367 employees) — BDR — New York, NY
12. Rounds (12 employees) — SDR — SF Bay Area
13. Tessera Data (31 employees) — Enterprise BDR — Denver
14. Quantum Health (1,532 employees) — BDR — US
15. Inspiren (145 employees) — SDR — New York, NY
16. Adaptive Security (179 employees) — BDR — NY, NY
17. WireMock (12 employees) — BDR — US
18. Tangent (274 employees) — SDR — NYC Metro Area
19. Okta (7,056 employees) — BDR (East) — Washington, DC
20. Inworld AI (90 employees) — BDR — Mountain View, CA
21. ControlRooms.ai (17 employees) — BDR — San Jose, CA
22. Adaptive6 (48 employees) — SDR (Remote) — Seattle, WA
23. Nimble (135 employees) — BDR — New York, NY
24. Astrix Security (124 employees) — SDR — Boston, MA
25. Rilla (134 employees) — BDR — New York, NY
26. SafetyKit (18 employees) — BDR — San Francisco, CA
27. Mirakl (863 employees) — BDR — Boston, MA
28. Zartech (54 employees) — BDR (Entry Level) — Dallas
29. Telnyx (349 employees) — BDR — Denver, CO
30. Odoo (8,023 employees) — SDR — SF Bay Area
31. Dragonfly AI (51 employees) — SDR — Boston, MA
32. IXOPAY (160 employees) — BDR — US
33. CHAMP (138 employees) — BDR — US
34. Avvale (2,842 employees) — BDR — Chicago, IL
35. Timus (46 employees) — BDR — Tampa, FL

If you’re looking to break into tech sales or level up in a BDR/SDR role, this market is still very active.

Who should I add next?

#saas #salesjobs #sdr #bdr #techsales #startups

Most people think the BDR role is temporary.

A phase.
A stepping stone.
Something you “get through” before the real job starts.

That belief is exactly why lifelong BDRs have a massive edge.

Because the BDR role is built on fundamentals that never go away.

• Prospecting.
• Starting conversations.
• Handling rejection.
• Following up.
• Doing the unglamorous work, every single day.

Most people can do that for a year or two.
Then they get bored.
Or they think they’ve outgrown it.

Lifelong BDRs don’t...

They accept something early that others resist:
No matter how good you get, this work never stops.
And instead of fighting it, they lean into it.

While others move on and reset their learning curve,
they compound skill in the same role.

Every year adds:
• Better judgment
• Faster pattern recognition
• Sharper instincts
• Less wasted effort

What feels repetitive to most
becomes precision to them.

That’s the advantage.

Not because the role is bigger.
But because mastery in this role compounds longer than almost any other.

Being a lifelong BDR isn’t a lack of ambition.
It’s choosing the longest compounding edge in revenue.

P.S. Who's a lifelong BDR? I want to hear from you!

#BDR #Outbound #Sales #GTM

Florin Tatulea

Sales Leader | LinkedIn Top Voice 2023 | GTM Advisor | Focusing on Seed → Series B

I'm a passionate leader that lives and breathes all things sales.

I was lucky enough to be the first sales hire at Loopio and have had the opportunity to be a part of and contribute to the exponential growth that had led us to a sales team of ~50 strong. In my 6.5 years at Loopio we grew revenue by 65x. 

I am now doing it all over again at Common Room

Whether it's been as an SDR, AE, Manager or Director, I'm constantly looking for ways to reinvent myself and my team.

I'm a people-first leader that understands that leading a team is not about me. It's about lifting others up and seeing them succeed. My success is simply a bi-product of my team's success. 

As a sales leader, I'm curious about scaling sales teams, generating pipeline, increasing win rates and lowering ramp times in a remote world.

As an individual, I'm passionate about copywriting, sequence/cadence building, leveraging social selling and the future of sales technology.

Director of Sales

Last month, after 20 months of building at Common Room, I took some time away from being a full time operator. 

It’s been an absolutely EPIC journey. 

In a relatively short timeframe that I’ve been there: 

-We 4x’d ARR 
-4x’d the size of the SDR team
-Sourced 7-Figures in outbound revenue
-20x’d monthly outbound pipeline $ and built the outbound engine from scratch
-Re-architected our internal Common Room instance. This involved “GTM Engineering” the brain behind our outbound program using our AI agents
-Recruited and worked with the best operators I’ve ever had the chance to work with in my career. 
-Opened career paths and had our first rounds of SDR to AE promotions (this is a really important one for me)

The program is now in fantastic hands with Sara Hanegby . 
 
There aren’t enough words to say how grateful I am for everybody on this journey. You know who you are!! 

On the side, I’ve also been running my own 6-figure media company. 

I’ve given my career my all over the last decade and needed to slow down to focus on some other aspects of my life. 

It’s why I’ve been quiet on here the last month as I've stepped away from the tech echo chamber.

But… I am baaaack!!! 

I have some really exciting projects in the works and I’m looking forward to doing some advisory work and helping the start-up ecosystem over the next few months. 

If you are a company < $20M ARR and are thinking about scaling your outbound program I’ve figured out quite a few things over the last 12 years in B2B SaaS: 

1. I've built outbound from scratch at 4 companies and 3 have already been acquired.

2. I’ve designed and scaled sales programs, selling into SMB to large enterprise (Fortune 100 companies). 

3. I’ve cracked the code selling into Sales, Marketing, Rev Ops, Engineering & HR Leadership and have built systems that work across industries.

Im also excited to work with orgs on the content and thought leadership side. If you are selling to GTM leadership, I’ve built a curated audience of ~90,000 across LinkedIn, Substack & X. 

I’m only a DM away. 

It’s the most exciting time EVER to be building. 

LETS GOO!

GTM Leader | LinkedIn Top Voice | Advisor

I just took a look at the new Nooks launch.

Users of Outreach and Salesloft are going to want to take a look after what I saw with the their new AI Sequencer.

I believe they are going to seriously shake up the legacy sequencing space. 

Not a lot of people know this, but I was one of the first 10 customers of Nooks when the company was still just Dan, Rohan & Nikhil and a virtual sales floor.

As a multi-time customer, not even I could have predicted the level of execution that their team was going to put forth.

Apart from building a quality product FAST, Nooks did something (intentional or not) that is going to give them a massive competitive advantage over the next couple of years.

They owned the action/execution layer FIRST, and have now built the Data Foundation layer (Account Research, Signals, etc.) around it.

Most GTM tech orgs in the market today are doing the exact opposite.

They built the data foundations and are now trying to build an execution layer.

Why is this important?

Because the action layer is where the rep lives. If you own the action layer and do it well, it’s VERY sticky.

Reps will kick and scream if you take it away from them. Re-training tens or hundreds of reps on a new system of action is a nightmare for enablement.

Trust me, I’ve lived through the kicking and screaming.

Selling GTM tech, everybody was constantly asking us… “Can you integrate with Nooks? That’s where our reps live.”

Right now there is a full-blown race to see who will own the full “Sales OS”.

Today, Nooks made this race a lot more interesting by launching their new Agent Workspace for Intelligent Outbound.

They just added:

1. Signals (Combining live web intent with your CRM and past calls)
2. Autonomous Account Research Agents (Running in the background 24/7)
3. List Building Capabilities
4. An Omnichannel Sequencer (Executing across Email, Phone, SMS, and Social)

Imagine autonomous agents that monitor web intent in the background, cross-reference it with your CRM, draft hyper-personalized emails, and then drop the warmest leads into a power hour calling block.  Because it's actually an action layer, the feedback loop makes it smarter with each engagement. 

You can argue that they have a real chance at being the MAJOR player in the consolidation of the GTM tech stack.

They also have a massive moat of call data (50% of our own outbound meetings came from cold calls)... which a lot of other data platforms simply do not have.

​​GTM Leaders: what are your thoughts on this space? Let's debate below

(PS - go check out the massive Nooks launch ). 

#NooksPartner

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Obtained a GPA above 3.5 for the entire academic year 2011-2012

Dean`s List

E3 Business Case Competition

Top Ranked Junior Tennis Player - Canada  

Talk Master Certification 

Competed against 20 business schools across the U.S. including Wharton, Stern, Berkeley and Sloan. 
This competition asked students to choose a stock to either long or short, with the only requirement of it having a 30 day SMA of over $200m in market cap. Our team, being the only international presence in the competition,  chose to pitch Iridium (IRDM), a satellite communications company, and have received a final judgement score of 24/30 based on Stock Selection, Presentation, and Q&A. 

Georgetown Stock Pitch Competition

Cold Email Conversion Machine by Florin Tatulea

Prospecting from the Trenches | Florin Tatulea | Substack

Working with Local Food Plus, a not-for-profit aiming to drive a sustainable food model to the benefit of local farmers and retailers in Ontario

SDR teams are toast. 

In fact...

SDR teams are so screwed that OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring SDR teams aggressively. 

The thing is, outbound is not a game of AI and automation. 

AI is a tool. 

Outbound is a game of: 

Precision

Timing

Deep industry expertise

Human relationships

It's why orgs like Ramp recently shut off their autonomous outbound program. 

It's why the people that make these LLMs realize that humans are still necessary. 

At least for now :)

If you prospect on LinkedIn, you should watch this. 

This is something I’ve always struggled with that I’ve now found a solution for.

If you use sequencing platforms like Outreach, Salesloft and Gong Engage you’ll know that after you do the manual steps of sending connect requests, LinkedIn activity just gets lost to the void.

There is no easy way to systematically filter for:

1. New LinkedIn connections who are actually in your ICP vs general networking contacts

2. Prospects who have accepted your request but you never actually bothered to send a DM to

This has made systematic outreach that’s coordinated more difficult.

This is no longer a problem as I’ve started to use Kondo: Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs. 

I can now:

→ Filter for connections and bulk tag them as prospects

→ Search for specific personas very easily with a fuzzy search that actually works

→ Open a custom of these personas posts on LinkedIn to build more tailored outreach

SOOO much easier. 

They have a great promo running right now if you sign up by the end of the week (Feb 28):

2 months free with this code:  https://lnkd.in/gFETw84Z

You are welcome :) 

#KondoPartner

Most sales tools aren’t actually designed for the nuances and workflows of how sales reps operate. 

I know because I’ve tested hundreds of platforms over the last decade.

It’s usually the small decisions… sometimes even just simple UI/UX designs that determine whether a tool fits in your workflow or fights against it.

One platform with truly thoughtful design is Prospeo.io. 

They just shipped a V2 of the platform and I’ve genuinely enjoyed using it.

3 things stick out for me:

-Triple verified emails and mobiles 
-Weekly data base refreshes (most providers are every month or quarterly)
-Lowest price per mobile number ($0.010 VS. $1 for others)

They actually have the best match rate for verified emails in Clay’s waterfall. 

Sharing a quick video with what changed + why these product designs matter a real SDR workflows.

What’s been your favorite sales tool recently? 

#prospeopartner #sales #outbound

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