Roland Varga

Twenty-five years in sales. Eight of them running SDR and inside sales teams, and four more building the programmes that make them work.

I have spent my career on both sides of the pipeline problem. Twelve years carrying a number myself, closing enterprise deals across the Nordics and Eastern Europe. Then eight years running SDR and inside sales functions, and four in enablement building the programmes behind them.

That order matters. I know what an AE needs before they will accept a meeting, trust the pipeline and stand behind the forecast, because I was the AE waiting for those meetings. It is why the handoff is the first thing I look at in any SDR function.

Where this comes from

Dynatrace

2011 to 2017

I joined two months before the company was acquired by Compuware for $256M, as an inside sales rep covering the Nordics and Eastern Europe. White space, no inbound to speak of, and a post-acquisition organisation working out what it wanted to be. I finished the year at 117% and took EMEA Inside Sales of the Year.

A year later I took over the SDR function, starting as a player-manager with a quota of my own alongside four SDRs and two ISRs. Over the next five years it became 32 SDRs and 4 ISRs across four managers.

That is where the operating system started. I built the SDR playbook, the onboarding and bootcamp programme, and the lead routing model with marketing and RevOps. I also chose the tooling: Rainking, Leadlander, LinkedIn Navigator, and Salesloft, which I evaluated, selected and deployed while sales engagement was still a new category rather than a standard line item.

President's Club in 2012 and 2014. 154%, 111%, 107%, 104% across those years.

SailPoint

2018 to 2020

A newly public enterprise business where the demand for predictable pipeline was absolute, which is a completely different problem from a late-stage startup.

I started with eight SDRs across EMEA North and hit 100% of the manager target in year one. Then the scope changed. We transitioned SDRs into inside sales reps who co-owned smaller deals alongside AEs, running their own demos, pricing conversations and proofs of concept. That became 26 ISRs and three managers.

The two things I would point at: block-based prospecting, which lifted meetings booked per rep by 15%, and regional call-out days, which pulled SDRs and AEs into the same room and lifted discovery meetings by 12%.

On tooling, I replaced Salesloft with Outreach across EMEA and prepared conversation intelligence rollout.

By the time I left, 27% of the SDRs and ISRs I had led had moved into AE, SDR leadership or other roles. That number matters more to me than the attainment figures.

Contentsquare

2020 to 2025

A deliberate sidestep, and the best decision I made for the way I work now.

I joined during hyper-growth and moved into global enablement rather than back into an SDR leadership seat. The reason was twofold. I wanted to understand how programmes actually land in a region, rather than how they look when you announce them. And I wanted to get properly good at coaching, which is a different skill from managing and one most SDR leaders never get taught.

I owned SDR enablement for the first three years, then ran SDR and sales programmes across EMEA and APJ. I designed the SDR onboarding, including cold call certification, co-architected SDR playbooks, and rolled out MEDDPICC and value selling to SDRs and AEs. Onboarding got new reps job-ready in four weeks.

Four years of coaching, at both levels. Individual reps on calls, discovery and objection handling. And frontline managers on how to coach their own people, which is the harder job and the one that decides whether anything you build survives. Most SDR managers were promoted for being good reps, and nobody ever showed them how to develop somebody else.

I also brought in Clari Copilot, which is where the coaching argument I make now comes from. Once every call is recorded and analysed, a manager stops coaching on impressions and starts coaching on what was actually said.

CRO Excellence Award in 2022. More usefully, four years of watching what makes a programme stick and what makes it quietly get ignored, which is knowledge you cannot get from the leadership seat.

Genesys

2025 to 2026

Director of Business Development for EMEA, inside worldwide demand generation. Four frontline managers and around forty BDRs across multiple regions.

I was brought in to modernise an established organisation: outbound execution, pipeline governance, and the operating rhythm of the management layer. Forecasting, KPI inspection, manager coaching, opportunity hygiene, rules of engagement, and joint accountability with RevOps, marketing, partnerships and sales leadership.

Why I keep saying the stack has moved and the function has not

There is a thread running under that career. At every company, I was the one bringing new tooling in and getting the team to actually use it. Salesloft at Dynatrace, while sales engagement was still a new category rather than a standard line item. Clari Copilot at Contentsquare.

Buying the tool was never the hard part. Getting a team to change how they work is the hard part, and it is where most of these programmes die.

That is the whole problem with the current wave. The capability arriving now is real and it is a bigger jump than anything in the last decade. But an SDR function is not short of software. It is short of a design that makes sense of the software it already has.

In 2025 I stepped back and built the operating model properly. AI-assisted prospecting and account research, so a rep reads a brief instead of assembling one. Practice and roleplay run against AI rather than booked into a calendar and cancelled. Coaching built off recorded calls and analysis. Tiering that puts human effort where it earns its keep and automation everywhere else.

That is the standard I build to. It is a design position rather than a product, and it is why I think a function built this way needs fewer people doing more valuable work rather than more people doing the same work faster.

How I work

I do not take anyone's account of what is happening until I have seen the behaviour behind it. If lead quality is the suspected problem, I sit with a rep while they build a list. If a process is failing, I audit the raw records rather than reading the aggregated reports.

I would rather write down what a system needs and be argued with than get unanimous agreement in a room. Unanimous agreement is usually what a team produces when nobody wants the meeting to overrun.

And I build for the handover from the first week. If it only works while I am in the room, it is not finished.

Now

PipeGen Turbo builds and scales SDR functions for B2B technology companies where pipeline is the constraint on the number. Built for how pipeline actually gets created now: leaner teams, an AI stack that actually works together instead of six tools nobody integrated, and reps spending their day on the part a person is still better at.

I hold an MBA in Leadership with Distinction and I am based in the UK.

Tell me what is actually happening

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