Background
When Lauren joined Justworks as the VP of Revenue Effectiveness in June 2025, she saw an SDR org in trouble.
Reps were working across an array of disconnected systems: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, SalesLoft, 6sense, and a bunch of static Salesforce reports someone had built years earlier and never touched again. "No one had taught them how to mine Salesforce," Lauren says, "and we have hundreds of thousands of accounts in there."
AI tooling was effectively nonexistent outside a few people quietly using ChatGPT on their own, and Revenue Effectiveness and Sales leadership were in disagreement over who should own SalesLoft cadence management.
Meanwhile, Lauren was actively rebuilding the rest of Revenue Effectiveness at the time, having just replaced the entire enablement team and rebuilt more than half of RevOps.
Three Things Breaking at Once
The SDR team's underperformance had one root cause with three faces. Pulling on any single thread wouldn't have been enough to fix it.
People. The team's frontline director left in October and was never replaced. The VP of Sales he reported to also left within the same stretch. That left roughly thirty five reps reporting to frontline managers with no director and no VP steering the group.
Process. A previous leader had merged the team into a single blended "Allbound" motion, combining inbound and outbound, without building the systems, tracking, or training the new model needed. Separately, some of the team's best SDRs, the ones on track to become AEs, had their quotas cut in half for up to a year so they could manually process health insurance paperwork for the company's biggest accounts, because someone had (inexplicably) decided that was necessary for them to learn to be AEs.
Technology. Systems were disconnected and nobody had real AI tooling to speed up the manual parts of the job. On top of that, reps didn’t have a dialer and hadn’t been taught how to mine Salesforce effectively.
Making the Case
Once Lauren really examined the math, the problem became impossible for her to ignore.
The team was generating around 6 pipeline opportunities per rep per month.
Run the numbers: a rep making 100 calls a day, 5 days a week, clears roughly 2,000 attempts a month. Getting 6 results out of 2,000 doesn't hold up, even accounting for ramp time, and the ride-alongs Lauren had done had already shown why. Reps weren't getting anywhere near a hundred calls a day because they were spending 30+ minutes to manually prospect a single contact.
Despite already being stretched thin, Lauren knew she could fix this, and had a series of conversations with her CRO.
She took formal ownership in April.
Closing the Gaps
In the first 4 weeks of taking over the SDR org, Lauren met 1:1 with all 35 reps. She used the insights from those meetings to prioritize transformation initiatives, telling the team there were two reasons the move into Revenue Effectiveness made sense:
1. “My team owns the tech stack and can bring you a fully integrated best-in-class stack. We are building efficiencies for you, and the closer you sit to the builders, the stronger the feedback loop will be.“
2. “I own the enablement function and it’s been proven time and time again at Justworks that our best reps are born and bred in the Sales Development Org. We want to build a world-class AE readiness program and with the SDO in close proximity to enablement, we can get there more effectively.”
Measurement & Reporting. Lauren implemented centralized reporting and P&L tracking for the team, and established clear activity metrics and capacity planning.
Splitting up ‘allbound’. Lauren split the team back into five reps on inbound and thirty on outbound, and let the existing outbound managers, who'd been coaching through the chaos with no support, actually run their teams again.
Intentional AI rollout. They rolled out Claude Enterprise org-wide in March, with 5 SDRs managing live outbound agents. There’s also an incoming director who will be focused on using AI for personalized outreach at scale.
Full tech stack overhaul in 30 days. Deploying Orum dialer in a matter of days showed the team what was possible, and was quickly followed by new data providers, new sequencing tools, signal-based prospecting, plus AI research and email drafting turned on for reps for the first time.
AE Readiness & Enablement. Under Revenue Effectiveness, enablement for SDRs included daily coaching with managers, weekly group coaching, AI upskilling, ICP education, and a comprehensive onboarding program. Lauren also built out a self-paced training program, and moved from tenure-based to performance-based promotion, which saw motivation and productivity skyrocket.
The Outcome
2X productivity on pipeline opportunities and pipeline ARR. In the seven or so weeks since the quarter began in June, the team ran at roughly double its previous productivity on both pipeline opportunities and pipeline ARR, with four fewer reps in seat.
Hit goals 17/18 weeks post-transformation. The one week they missed, goals had gone up significantly due to seasonality, and the team still hit its pipeline ARR target.
Trust built with the SDR team. Lauren describes the team as having been through "all-bound trauma." She gave the team the empathy and TLC they needed, fully winning them over with how fast she was able to make necessary changes.
Bringing in Sales Leadership
While Lauren and the Revenue Effectiveness team successfully built the foundation, she recognized the need for dedicated sales leadership. “I definitely need someone to manage the team, the hiring, the coordinating with TA and HR, on performance cases. But I was also really adamant about finding someone that has AI outbound experience, which [is tough] because it's so new."
They found a Director who met those requirements. Lauren says, “He's all in on AI and he's demonstrated that he has the right sequence-building and personalized outreach. And he's got a really good LinkedIn strategy and he comes with a playbook that's sound.”
Key Takeaway
Justworks’ SDR team needed consistent strategic leadership, a process that matched the motion it was actually running, and technology that worked the way reps needed it to.
Revenue Effectiveness could move that fast specifically because it already owned the systems, the data, and the AI tooling the fix depended on, so she could rebuild people, process, and technology in parallel.
That's also where the takeover has a limit. Once the foundation held, Lauren went looking for a dedicated sales director. Someone to run the floor, coach daily, and build the culture a systems leader isn't equipped to provide. RevOps didn't replace sales leadership here; it bought the org time to hire the right one.