The sales team works hard to close deals and generate revenue. But sales also requires the team to work on many other activities like reporting, researching, prospecting, and many other tasks.
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1 . What is a Sales Development Representative?
2. You should hire a Sales Development Representative when
3. What does a Sales Development Representative do?
4. Skills of a Sales Development Representative
5. Fitment of an SDR in the sales structure
It can be frustrating to do more of the different functions and a tiny bit of selling while their expertise is selling. Managing all the activities together and meeting the sales quota feels like juggling.
It results in decreased closures, a dip in the high-quality leads, and leaves the sales team confused about their objectives.
Interesting Read: Top 5 Attributes of Good Sales Development Reps
That’s why building a sales team is vital for the success of an organization. Dividing the sales team into different parts based on the strengths and weaknesses of the team helps them focus and perform better.
For example, while prospecting is a part of another team of SDR, the expertise of the other team lies in lead qualification, and another group of SDRs works hard on closures. It means each of them can do what they enjoy the most, focus on their job role, and excel in it.
Interesting Read: 5 Secrets to Successful Sales Team Management
This approach of managing the sales team helps generate high-quality leads, create a healthy pipeline, and improve productivity.
Since the SDR’s remove any dead leads, it makes way to fresh qualifying leads, and the focus moves to the high-value lead. It looks like a recipe for success.
Read on to find more tips about setting up an effective sales development team.
What is a Sales Development Representative?
The sales team member that manages the front end of the sales team is the sales development representative.
The job responsibilities involve calling/ mailing the prospects, building a healthy relationship with the prospective leads, moving them to different sales funnel stages, understanding the pain points, and finally handing them off to the sales account executives to close the deal.
You should hire a Sales Development Representative when
- Your team is juggling a variety of roles ranging from prospecting to selling
- There are no adequate leads in the pipeline
- CRM data suggests inferior quality leads
- Your sales team is not spending sufficient time to qualify the leads before moving them to the next stage.
- The team is consistently not meeting the sales quota.
What does a Sales Development Representative do?
The roles and responsibilities depend on whether they are a part of the inbound or outbound sales team.
An Inbound sales development rep:
- Manages the quality control of their sales team.
- Qualifies the leads before moving them to the pipeline
- Moves the leads to the account executive to pursue further.
In an outbound SDR role :
- Generate prospects
- Initiate the conversation and qualify them for the next part of the process.
- The number of sales-qualified leads is used to evaluate the outbound SDR.
Skills of an Effective Sales Development Representative
1 . Empathize
Empathizing with the prospect can lead to some interesting conversations and help the SDR understand the lead’s pain points better and address solutions accordingly.
2. Patience!
SDR’s face rejections regularly. The SDR needs to have a go-getter attitude and not get bogged down by rejections. Trying out new methods of engagement with a variety of strategies is helpful in conversion.
Interesting Read: Top 12 Sales Development Leaders that are Inspiring the new Generation Of Salespeople
While it can lead to transformation, there is always a possibility of rejection from the lead. That is why resilience is a good characteristic in an SDR.
3. Good listening skills
Expert listeners tend to understand the problems of a lead better than they are mentioning and those they are not by asking insightful questions.
4. Communication skills
Excellent communication skills are vital for the success of an SDR. Whether it is to initiate a conversation with a potential lead through mails, phone calls, or webinars helps them build a strong relationship with the leads.
5. Knowledge about the product
A subject matter expert of the product/ service will educate and convince the prospect with authority. Finding the prospect’s pain points and addressing them to sell the product is an excellent way of managing conversions.
6. Research
Extensive research on the product about its characteristics, uses, relevance, and key selling points to the potential lead is a few helpful pointers.
7. Stay organized and multi-task
From generating leads to closure, an SDR has to manage a variety of job roles. It means they need to manage multiple tasks, reach out through emails, create campaigns, and build the pipeline with high-value prospects.
Fitment of an SDR in the sales structure
The first part of the sales process involves SDRs to generate leads, qualify them and move them to the account executives for the next step.
A set of newbies are required to work along with the lead generation specialists and the account executives and learn the tips and tricks.
While it can be challenging to hire the correct number of SDRs per the account executives, it would be best to start by hiring at least two SDRs and build the team based on the required lead generation.
Insights for an SDR
1. Research
Digging deep into the market, finding data about the competitors, and researching the product to improve the knowledge about it helps stay updated.
2. On-the-job training
Shadowing the senior SDRs on their job and discussing daily activities to understand their opinion better, and having an open discussion about any high-value clients helps to understand the nitty-gritty of the sales process better.
3. Learning process
Conversational strategies, decision-making skills, voice mailing, and drafting cold emails are a few things that an SDR should learn from the seniors.
However, even though these skills look like anyone can ace them, the knack of convincing and keeping a prospect hooked in the conversation without boring them can require quite a bit of practicing.
Conclusion
Setting up and managing a team can be very challenging and more so with a sales team.
Recruiting professionals with the right attitude, training them to hone their skills in communication, convincing, knowledge of the product/ service, providing them with the right tools, and guiding them towards success is a process that requires patience and commitment.
However, once hired and inducted into the system, an SDR accompanied with the right tools can scale great heights and prove to be a great asset to the company/ team.
Hopefully, this article has helped to make the proper hiring and training decisions so that the SDRs can skyrocket their sales performance and productivity right from day one.
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