Director Sales Development - Schaumburg, IL

Paylocity is an equal opportunity employer.

This role is ideally located in Schaumburg, IL.

Paylocity is an award-winning provider of cloud-based HR and payroll software solutions, offering the most complete platform for the modern workforce. The company has become one of the fastest-growing HCM software providers worldwide by offering an intuitive, easy-to-use product suite that helps businesses automate and streamline HR and payroll processes, attract and retain talent, and build a strong workplace culture.

As part of the Sales & Marketing team, you’ll help us solve challenges and succeed as you grow and understand the unique needs of our clients and tailor easy-to-use solutions to deliver the performance they need. With a position in Sales & Marketing, you’ll strengthen our relationships with clients, anticipate their needs, and think outside the box to unlock new possibilities.

Position Overview:

As the Director of Sales Development, you will lead our Sales Development Representative (SDR) team and own top-of-funnel pipeline generation. This role involves leading a team of SDRs, partnering with marketing and sales leadership, and optimizing inbound and outbound strategies to drive growth. You’ll be responsible for recruiting, onboarding, and developing SDRs, creating an efficient and scalable pipeline model, and ensuring tight alignment with the sales and marketing goals.

Reports To: Senior Director, Demand Generation

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and scale a high-performing SDR team covering the U.S. market to achieve targets for lead generation, scheduled meetings, and qualified pipeline.
• Establish clear performance expectations, deliver ongoing feedback, and conduct regular evaluations to ensure success.
• Provide mentorship and coaching to the SDR team and its leaders, driving career progression and skill development in outbound prospecting and sales qualification.
• Create and implement structured training programs to enhance team skills in prospecting, objection handling, and sales tools.

Sales Development Strategy:

• Align SDR quotas and activities with company-wide marketing and sales goals, focusing on enterprise, mid-market, and SMB pipeline growth within key target verticals.
• Develop and execute inbound and outbound strategies to maximize speed-to-lead, conversion, and multi-threading for senior decision makers.
• Drive collaboration between marketing, sales, and operations to refine account scoring, lead qualification criteria, and seamless handoffs between teams.
• Participate in account-based marketing (ABM) efforts to identify and engage high-value accounts, leveraging data-driven insights to optimize outreach.
• Act as a "Voice of the Prospect" liaison between Marketing and Sales, providing feedback to create winning marketing campaigns, messaging strategies, and offers.

Performance Management:

• Set team-wide pipeline targets and develop individualized plans to achieve them, ensuring accountability to company-wide lead volume goals.
• Monitor key performance metrics every week, including outbound call/email volume and response rates, speed-to-lead, meeting completion rate, pacing against targets, addressing performance gaps with data-driven solutions.
• Collaborate with marketing and sales leadership to refine and improve the SDR process based on performance insights.

Process Optimization & Technology:

• Continuously evaluate and optimize business development processes, tools, and workflows to improve team effectiveness as well as the prospect experience.
• Ensure best-in-class technology utilization of SDR tech stack, including Salesforce, Salesloft, Intercom, Drift, 6Sense, ZoomInfo, Sales Navigator, and other prospecting tools.
• Implement A/B testing of outreach cadences, messaging, and offers to improve engagement and results.
• Maintain a structured playbook for outreach strategies tailored to different verticals and business segments, with a focus on scalability and efficiency.

Qualifications:

• 7-10 years of experience in sales development or sales roles, with 5+ years of leadership experience, preferably in enterprise SaaS or a high-growth tech environment.
• Proven success in driving revenue growth through effective SDR team management and outbound sales strategies.
• Expertise in CRM systems (Salesforce), sales engagement platforms (Salesloft, Outreach), web chat (Intercom, Drift), and prospecting tools (ZoomInfo, Sales Navigator).
• Strong strategic thinker with exceptional analytical skills and the ability to turn data into actionable strategies.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with a proven ability to build relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
• Experience hiring and scaling large teams (15+ SDRs) is a plus.
• Bachelor's degree is preferred or commensurate experience.
• Chicago-based or open to 50% travel.

Paylocity is an equal-opportunity employer. Paylocity is committed to the full inclusion of all individuals. We recruit, train, compensate, and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, disability, age, veteran status, and other protected status as required by applicable law. At Paylocity, we believe diversity makes us better.

#J-18808-Ljbffr