A Pipeline Plan for the SDR Seat at Mercury
Prepared for Katie Kester and the team at Mercury
By Vincent Hembrick
Why I'm sending this
Katie, thanks for the conversation. I built this pipeline plan going into the process as my own read on the SDR seat at Mercury, and I want to leave it with you now as a reference for where my head is on the role. Startup banking is a category where the buyer is the founder who already knows fintech, the comparison set is Brex post Capital One, Ramp, and Chase Business, and the same conversation is happening with three different audiences at once: pre seed founders, seed stage operators, and Series A finance leads. The pages below are my read on how an SDR connects with all three at the right stage, the accounts I would stack rank, the cadence I would run, and the 90 day ramp I would commit to. Treat it as a leave behind, not a deliverable. If any of it is off from how the team actually sells, that is useful feedback for me to hear.
Mercury's stated SDR territory, plus the persona shape inside it
The JD says SDRs at Mercury work a wide range of businesses. The brief and the customer mix make clear that means early stage US incorporated startups with recent venture capital, where the buyer changes by stage: founder at pre seed, operator at seed, finance lead at Series A. One ICP, three persona shapes inside it.
Early stage US startups, pre seed to Series A, that just raised or are about to
Firmographics
- US incorporated, Delaware C corp by default (the Stripe Atlas pipeline lives here)
- Pre seed to Series A, raised in the last 60 days or planning to raise in the next 90
- 1 to 60 employees, scaling 2 to 10 hires in the next quarter
- Strongest verticals: AI and ML software, vertical SaaS, devtools, B2B marketplaces, healthtech, plus the fastest growing cohort of ecommerce and professional services (73 percent of Mercury's new 2025 customers came from outside AI and tech startups per the 2026 annual letter)
- Banked today at Brex, Chase Business, a regional bank, or stitching across two of those plus Bill.com
Buyer titles
- Founder, Co founder, CEO at pre seed and seed
- Chief of Staff, Head of Operations, COO at seed to Series A
- Head of Finance, Director of Finance, VP Finance, CFO at Series A
- Controller and Finance Manager once the first finance lead is hired
Pains and triggers
- Five to fifty million dollars from a recent round sitting in 0 percent checking while the runway model still assumes a yield drag, $5M at 0 percent versus Mercury Treasury at 3.65 percent gives back four months of runway
- Capital One acquired Brex on April 7 2026 for $5.15B and roughly 25,000 Brex customers are now evaluating alternatives ahead of next renewal, the highest conviction outbound list in fintech right now
- The first finance hire walks in to four to six disconnected fintech tools (bank plus Brex or Ramp plus Bill.com at $79 per user plus a treasury platform plus accounting) and a 2 to 3 day month end close
- Term sheets in 2025 and 2026 increasingly require two banking relationships post SVB, and setting up the second bank at Chase takes 4 to 8 weeks versus under an hour at Mercury
- Bill.com per user pricing scales linearly with the AP team while Mercury Bill Pay is free unlimited as of December 2024
- AI native startups burning $25K to $500K a month on AWS, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Vercel are leaving 1.5 percent IO Mastercard cashback on the table, $18K to $90K a year of foregone yield
- Non US founders incorporating a Delaware C corp through Stripe Atlas cannot open a Chase account from abroad, Mercury is the default path
Vertical concentration and the persona splits by stage are inferred from Mercury's published customer references, TAM disclosures, and 2026 annual letter rather than spelled out in the JD itself. I would calibrate against the actual SDR territory definition in week one.
Five accounts I would stack rank day one
Five real companies with a public funding trigger inside the last 60 days, a clean Mercury ICP fit, and a pain that maps cleanly to one of the seven Pain Qualified Segments I would build sequences around (Brex Refugee, Idle Cash, Stack Consolidator, Post SVB Diversifier, Foreign Founder, Cash Burn, Audit Pressure). None of the five appears on Mercury's published customer references (Linear, Phantom, ElevenLabs, Supabase, Lovable, Tempo, Deel, On Deck, Sprig, Forage, Lunchclub, Mighty).
All five are illustrative best fits. I verified each one is not a current customer of Mercury (Mercury's published customer references, recent press, founder LinkedIn). I would still dedupe against the live CRM and pull in real time triggers (new funding, hiring, vendor announcements) before adding any to a sequence.
A 4 touch sequence I would run on Glimpse, day one
Persona: Founder CEO at an AI Series A, NYC, 1 to 30 employees, banked at Brex or Chase. Example target: Akash Raju at Glimpse, illustrative. 4 touches over 11 days. Voice matched to Mercury's plain spoken founder grade tone.
How I would ramp at Mercury in my first 90 days
The plan below mirrors how I ramped at Certara, where I went from zero sales experience to the top of the BDR table inside 12 months by pairing tight learning loops in month one with disciplined high volume execution through months two and three.
Learn the Mercury stack and where it wins
- Articulate what Mercury solves at three buyer levels: founder at pre seed (banking onboarding and IO Mastercard), Chief of Staff at seed (Brex plus Bill.com plus Chase stack consolidation), and Head of Finance at Series A (Treasury yield, $5M FDIC sweep, NetSuite ready Pro tier)
- Shadow top SDRs and AEs across each stage to see how the same Mercury value prop gets reframed from founder to operator to finance lead
- Listen to recorded discovery calls to internalize how the seven Pain Qualified Segments (Brex Refugee, Idle Cash, Stack Consolidator, Post SVB Diversifier, Foreign Founder, Cash Burn, Audit Pressure) actually land in conversation
- Get fluent in Salesforce, Salesloft, Apollo, Gong, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator (named in the Sales Development Manager JD as the stack), plus the Mercury Raise community as a warm pipeline source
- Study three competitors (Brex post Capital One, Ramp, and Chase Business) and map where Mercury wins on banking depth, no per user pricing, $5M FDIC, OCC charter momentum, and the founder community moat
- By day 30, have my own call script and personal email playbook tied to the three highest leverage trigger types in 2026: a fresh Series A close, public Brex usage in the prospect's footprint, and Stripe Atlas formation
Run the cadence, hit ramp quota
- Lock the daily schedule: research and list building 9 to 10, cold calls 10 to noon, email and LinkedIn outreach 1 to 3, follow ups and CRM hygiene 3 to 5
- Hit the Month 2 ramp quota Mercury sets on this seat
- Roleplay objections daily with peer SDRs and AEs: the Mercury Treasury $250K minimum, the Mercury is a fintech not a chartered bank caveat, the BAA limitation for healthtech, the IO Mastercard 1.5 percent versus Brex points math, the second bank speed claim against Chase
- Weekly feedback loop with my manager on what is converting, then iterate the sequence week by week with the coaching cycle the Sales Development Manager JD describes
- Fail fast, log everything, adjust
Analyze the funnel, build the personal playbook
- Pull conversion data across the funnel: dials to connects, connects to meetings, meetings to qualified opportunities, broken out by PQS and by persona stage (founder, operator, finance lead)
- Identify which PQS and persona combinations produce the strongest pipeline contribution into the AE team, and double down (my prior is PQS 1 Brex Refugee at CFO and PQS 2 Idle Cash at Founder)
- Consistently hit quota and lead the SDR team in call activity, the metric phone weighted JDs reward first
- Continue ongoing development through Immad Akhund and Steve Pearlman's public commentary, the Mercury annual letter, the Mercury Personal cross sell data, and the OCC charter milestones so I stay sharp on a category that moves every month
- By day 90, have a personal playbook documenting which triggers, personas, and openers work best for me at Mercury, ready to share back to the team
- That playbook is the artifact that signals AE track readiness, the 18 month goal I would be working toward
Thanks again for the time, Katie. If any of this is in the ballpark of how the team is thinking, I would be excited about the next step in the process. If the plan misses the mark anywhere, that is also useful feedback I would want to hear. Either way, I appreciate the conversation.
Vincent Hembrick