Mercer MBA candidate with Fortune 200 operations leadership. HubSpot certified across three disciplines. Salesforce trained. I don't just understand sales - I understand the business behind the sale: supply chains, margins, fulfillment, and the cost of getting it wrong.
At Tractor Supply Company, I ran daily shift operations for a distribution center serving 2,000+ stores. I audited 500+ bin locations, coached floor teams on root-cause prevention, and drove fill rates to 99%. I sustained throughput 50-125% above target by reading production data the same way a BDR reads a pipeline dashboard - find the bottleneck, reallocate resources, keep the numbers moving.
At Premier Color Group, I redesigned production scheduling to cut lead times by 8% and became the go-to trainer for new hires within 90 days. Nobody asked me to do either of those things.
Operations taught me what happens after the deal closes: how fulfillment breaks, what margin erosion looks like, and why the best salespeople understand the entire business, not just their quota. That's the lens I bring to business development.
I'm now HubSpot certified across three disciplines, building toward my Salesforce SDR credential, and completing an accelerated MBA at Mercer with a concentration in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. I've already run real cold outreach campaigns and built the prospecting portfolio on this site from scratch. I didn't wait for a job to start doing the work.
This section demonstrates how I research, target, and engage prospects. Every piece below was built from scratch to show how I think about outbound sales development.
Mid-market B2B SaaS companies in the Southeast with 50-500 employees, active hiring signals, and products where operational credibility strengthens the sales conversation.
Hi [Name],
I spent last summer inside a Tractor Supply distribution center auditing bin locations, coaching floor teams, and recovering $20K+ in misplaced inventory. One thing I kept seeing: the gap between what the WMS said and what was actually on the shelf.
That experience is exactly why Deposco's approach to real-time inventory visibility caught my attention. I'd imagine your prospects deal with the same disconnect I saw firsthand.
Would it make sense to connect for 15 minutes? I'm building my career in sales development and I'd bring the kind of operational credibility that makes outbound conversations with warehouse leaders feel genuine, not scripted.
Best,
Colby
Hi [Name],
Before applying, I built a 30-day mock pipeline: 200 contacts reached, 400+ touchpoints executed, 26 conversations generated. Not because someone told me to, but because I wanted to understand what realistic outbound performance looks like before day one.
I'm HubSpot certified in three disciplines, building toward Salesforce SDR credentials, and finishing an MBA at Mercer. More importantly, I led 20-30 person teams at a Fortune 200 company, so I know how to operate under pressure and hit targets.
I'd love 15 minutes to walk you through my approach.
Best,
Colby
Hi [Name],
I've reached out a few times and haven't heard back, so I want to respect your time. If the timing isn't right, no hard feelings. I'll keep building and stay on your radar.
If anything changes, I'm always a reply away.
Best,
Colby
Each message is designed to earn the next response, not close the deal. The sequence builds credibility through specificity, offers value before asking, and gives the prospect an easy exit at every step.
As Social Chair of Phi Delta Theta, I ran a multi-channel outreach campaign to re-engage 200 alumni for chapter fundraising and event sponsorship. This was real cold outreach to professionals who hadn't engaged with the chapter in years.
The objective: Drive alumni engagement for chapter events and secure sponsorship commitments for our annual fundraising campaign. The challenge: most of these alumni hadn't engaged with the chapter in 2-10+ years. I was reaching out cold to professionals who had no reason to respond to an undergraduate they'd never met.
Sourcing the list: I built the initial contact list from chapter records, LinkedIn, and alumni directories. I segmented the 200 contacts into three tiers: Tier 1 (recent grads, 1-5 years out, most likely to engage), Tier 2 (mid-career, 5-15 years out, higher giving capacity), and Tier 3 (senior alumni, 15+ years out, hardest to reach but highest potential value). Each tier got a different messaging angle.
Email framework: I kept every email under 100 words. The structure: (1) one sentence establishing the shared Phi Delt connection, (2) one sentence about what the chapter is doing now that they'd care about, (3) a specific, low-commitment ask. Subject lines were short and personal - "[First Name], quick update from Georgia Delta" outperformed generic subject lines by roughly 2x on open rates. I A/B tested subject lines across the tiers and iterated after the first 50 sends.
Cold call approach: For Tier 1 and Tier 2 contacts who opened emails but didn't reply, I called directly. My opener acknowledged the cold nature of the call and asked for 30 seconds. The key insight: leading with a chapter update before making any ask dramatically increased willingness to stay on the line.
What I learned that translates directly to BDR work: Personalization is the single highest-leverage activity in outreach. The emails where I referenced something specific about the alumnus converted at nearly 3x the rate of templated messages. Follow-up timing mattered more than follow-up frequency - Day 3-4 follow-ups consistently outperformed Day 1-2 follow-ups. And the most valuable commitments came from contacts who initially ignored my first message but responded to a well-timed, non-pushy second touch. Persistence without pressure is the framework that works.
The mechanics are identical. The alumni campaign required me to build a segmented list, write personalized multi-touch sequences, make cold calls to people who didn't know me, handle objections, track activity and conversions, and iterate on messaging based on what was converting. The only difference between this and enterprise BDR work is the product being sold. The outreach muscles - research, personalization, persistence, conversion tracking - are the same.
In a BDR seat, I'd apply the same tiered approach: prioritize accounts by likelihood to convert and potential deal size, personalize every first touch, and use engagement signals (email opens, LinkedIn views) to decide who gets a follow-up call versus a second email. The 42% open rate and 5.5% overall conversion rate I achieved on this campaign are benchmarks I'd aim to match or beat in a professional setting.
To prove I can generate pipeline on day one, I picked a real company and broke down exactly how I'd run outbound for them. This isn't theory - it's a playbook I could execute tomorrow.
Company profile: Mid-market e-commerce brands and 3PLs doing $10M-$500M in annual revenue, operating 1-5 warehouses, with 100-1,000 employees. They've outgrown spreadsheets or entry-level inventory tools and are bleeding money through fulfillment errors, slow pick rates, and poor real-time visibility across locations.
Decision makers: VP of Operations (owns the pain), VP of Supply Chain (owns the budget), COO (signs off on platform purchases over $50K ARR). Secondary influencers: Warehouse Manager (daily user), IT Director (integration requirements).
Buying triggers: Opening a second warehouse, peak season failures, switching 3PL partners, investor pressure to improve unit economics, or a recent competitor outage that exposed their own vulnerability.
Inventory accuracy gaps: System says 500 units, shelf has 420. That delta causes oversells, stockouts, and emergency reorders at premium freight rates. I've seen this firsthand - at Tractor Supply, I audited 500+ bins and the variance was costing real money every day it went unaddressed.
Manual processes during peak: Companies that run fine at 500 orders/day collapse at 2,000. Manual pick sheets, paper-based receiving, and Excel-driven allocation don't scale. The pain is seasonal but the cost is year-round.
Multi-location blindness: Inventory sitting in Warehouse A while Warehouse B ships from a supplier because nobody has real-time cross-location visibility. This is a margin killer that ops teams know about but can't fix without better tooling.
I'm not pitching supply chain software from a script. I've lived inside the distribution center. I've held the scanner, counted the bins, coached the floor team, and seen what happens when inventory data is wrong: stockouts cascade, stores lose revenue, and the DC scrambles to emergency-ship replacements.
When I call a VP of Operations and say "the gap between your system count and your physical count is costing you more than you think," that's not a talk track. That's a conversation I've already had with real warehouse leadership, backed by $20K+ in variance I personally identified and resolved. That credibility is the difference between a prospect hanging up and a prospect saying "tell me more."
Not just what I know. How I use it.
I'm actively seeking Summer 2026 BDR and sales development opportunities in the Atlanta metro area.