Tom Greenwood is a BDR Team Lead at Paddle. He has been there for just over two years. This year, he averaged 145% of quota and in May alone, he hit 366%. When Tom joined Paddle, he intentionally kept his day-to-day system simple. Alongside the CRM, he built a lightweight personal cockpit in Google Sheets to stay consistent and run tight learning loops week after week..

Why you should read this ? If you’re an outbound rep who wants to consistently exceed targets by mastering habits, relevance, and time protection, this playbook is for you

Paddle helps over 6,000 digital product companies operate and grow, automatically. As a Merchant of Record, Paddle manages the complexity of global payments and currencies, refunds, and sales tax compliance on your behalf.

Paddle’s ICP has three main verticals: AI native companies, SaaS tools and app-builders More broadly, it is any company selling software through the web store.

Tom works for company with 100+ employees. Deal size varies by vertical and customer profile, ranging from mid‑market to larger commercial opportunities.

Tom is purely outbound. AEs have inbound and outbound. Outbound is split between Americas and Global. Paddle has started hiring reps with owned regions and languages.

Tom optimizes for qualified meetings completed. Quality over volume.

In most sales organizations, BDRs are compensated based on the number of meetings booked and held with the right target personas - ensuring the entire team stays accountable for building a high-quality pipeline that can be converted into opportunities and, ultimately, closed deals.

Otherwise, AEs would be flooded with meaningless meetings, with little time left to focus on deals that actually generate revenue.

If it’s the wrong stakeholder, it creates rework. And if your product can’t genuinely help the company, it’s a fast disqualification.

Tom’s most practical KPI is replies across channels. He tracks replies in one place and uses that to understand where wins are coming from (Voice notes, looms videos, human personalized linkedin message…) and what to tweak next.

Tom’s week is designed to protect his best hours for outreach and push everything else to the afternoon.

He says he is most productive and switched on in the mornings, so he blocks two to three hours every morning, often from 9:30 to 12:30.

He labels these blocks “do not book over”. In that time he does the work that moves his number: LinkedIn messaging and dialing. “And that is like non-negotiable. I’ll label them, do not book over.”

He places one to ones, internal meetings, and prospect meetings in the afternoon or later. His goal is to avoid reacting to a calendar that eats the day.

Time boxing is key. Sales reps are over-solicited, both externally and internally. They need to protect their calendars. Everyone needs to understand that reps’ priority remains hitting - and exceeding - their quotas in order to generate their OTE and money for the company.

Tom works backwards from his own stats month over month and quarter over quarter. He monitors trends in reply rate, reply to meeting rate, meeting to QMC, and onward conversion. If there is a significant drop at any step, he changes the input.

For the activity levels he tries to maintain:

A critical part of his routine is that he sets up tomorrow today. By the end of the day, he prepares the accounts for the next day so the morning outreach block is pure outreach.

Tom’s stack is worth copying because it is simple and intentional. He uses standard tools, but he is very clear on what he actually relies on every hour.

Even with a strong stack, performance often comes down to what you consistently do every day. Tom’s approach is intentionally simple: a few tools used extremely well

Tom’s first tool is Google sheets . He built his own outreach tracker and keeps it open all day. It holds him accountable to minimum activity and gives him visibility on what is working.

He uses it to track outreach across channels and centralize replies, especially because LinkedIn is hard to track cleanly inside most systems.

Salesforce: CRM to manage accounts, keep data clean, and filter lists.

Gong: call recording and conversation insights, plus follow up support via Gong AI.

Cognism: contact data, mainly phone numbers for calling.

Sales Navigator: find and target the right stakeholders on LinkedIn for prospecting.

lemlist (enrichment): fill missing contact data when Cognism is missing something.

Tom’s biggest lesson is to avoid false wins. If you book meetings that get disqualified because the company cannot be serviced, you waste your own time and the prospect’s. That’s why he spends 2–3x more time on diligence than many BDRs

Tom does not pretend he has a perfect system. He uses Salesforce filters, Sales Navigator, and builds focus lists around events and regions. He also uses reactive triggers like LinkedIn updates.

He frames the mindset as intent based: the timing does not need to be perfect, it needs to be good enough.

Tom calls timing the million dollar question and gives several concrete triggers he uses:

Tom’s main sources are LinkedIn and phone. He also highlights events and in person as valuable, and uses voice notes and videos to stand out.

He does use emails, but says he has not fully sussed out his technique yet, and prioritizes time on what gets him to target.

On LinkedIn, he targets 20 per day and wants to keep weekly consistency.

On the phone, he calls top accounts without chasing extreme volume.

Tom is strict about relevance. He dislikes generic follow ups like “any thoughts” or “bumping this” because they add no value.

He believes being human can outperform being perfect, especially with voice notes and video. He even says the cringe factor is part of why it works.

He also draws a clear line around the BDR role.

Tom uses Gemini in a way most BDRs can replicate quickly. He does not only use it for copy. He uses it to learn faster and keep his own skills sharp.

After conversations with prospects, he plugs transcripts into Gemini for feedback. He also creates a Gem that looks across his last 10 calls and summarizes what to focus on, what objections he is seeing, and where he can improve.

This matters because it supplements manager coaching when time is limited.

Tom uses Gemini to do research faster by generating similar companies to a list or a case study set.

He believes a well trained Gemini copilot can produce messaging that is mostly there, then the rep edits to make it human.

He uses Gemini to quiz himself on concepts from books and reinforce what he forgets.

Linkedin message :
Hi {{firstName}}

Call Script :
Hi {{firstName}}

*(probe for pains, mention similar case study with X uplift using paddle, book in)

Video on Linkedin
(Sent to VP of Growth after connecting on Linkedin)

Great to connect! Personally recorded a 50s video for you:

{{link}}

Appreciate things will be pretty hectic with the apple vs epic case updates, curious if this has put app2web on the table for {{companyName}} ?

P.S. This wasn't made by AI