Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) play a fundamental role in the success of your business.
Improving SDR sales performance is key to pushing more potential customers through your funnel and ultimately closing more sales.
In fact, according to research conducted by Crunchbase, SDRs are responsible for producing up to 45% of new sales revenue.
Here, we will guide you through SDR investment methods you can use to improve lead generation, bring in more custom, and create a winning sales environment
What does a Sales Development Representative do?
An SDR predominantly focuses on inbound leads.
These inbound leads may come in the form of a live chat on the website, lead generation forms, emails or through social media.
Their aim is to qualify prospects to ensure they are a good fit and set up a meeting with a senior member, such as an account executive or Inside Sales Rep, to close the sale.
A Sales Development Representative can often act as a go-between, working with both sales and marketing to identify prospects, compile data and then reach out to them through various communication channels.
What’s the Difference between an SDR and a BDR?
With their job roles so closely linked, and all kinds of acronyms flying around, it can be difficult to know the difference between BDRs, SDRs and ISRs.
So let’s make it easier by defining each one:
BDR
A Business Development Representative deals with outbound prospecting.
SDR
A Sales Development Representative deals with inbound prospecting.
ISR
Once a lead is qualified, an Inside Sales Representative owns the sales cycle through the various stages right through to closing the sale.
The question remains, however, ‘how important is it to split your sales cycle up and assign specialists at each step of the customer journey?’
‘Couldn’t you just employ a team of one-shoe-fits-all salespeople?’
Well, yes. Of course you could.
But we wouldn’t recommend it. Here’s why:
Why are Sales Development Representatives so Important?
SDRs allow your business to cope with the volume of inbounds by breaking up your lead generation process into manageable departments.
They also create strong relationships with prospects early on in the sales cycle, making the chances of closing the sale much higher.
SDRs also alleviate pressure from senior sales staff, giving them more time to manage their workload and close more deals.
By bridging the gap between prospects and sales qualified meetings, SDRs can increase the quality of leads, ensuring each potential customer aligns with the company’s ideal customer profile.
Again, this will reduce wasted time of senior executives and increase the conversion rate.
With the Bridge Group reporting SDR’s bring an average of 3 million USD per year through the pipeline, it’s clear they can play a crucial part in driving more revenue for your business.
How to Hire Great SDRs & Build a Successful Sales Team
In our experience, building a successful sales team consists of three fundamental elements; people, process and technology.
Firstly, hiring, managing and leading the right people to fill the SDR role and beyond will make all the difference when it comes to business growth.
So ensure your recruitment process is precise and thorough to give you the right personnel for success.
The next thing to consider is the processes you have in place. At Excelerate360, we believe in using a metric-first approach.
The responsibility will land at your leadership team to measure performance and study the best industry practices to create an effective sales strategy.
Lastly, it’s important to possess enough tools in your sales arsenal to enhance performance.
If you can, invest in sufficient technology such as a tech stack to reinforce your efforts and give your sales team everything they need to succeed.
To make things easier for you, we have created a checklist of six key steps to building a thriving sales team.
1) Create an Ideal SDR profile
Just like you would create an ideal customer profile for new business, you should be creating an ideal persona for new staff.
This way, you can narrow down on the exact type of person you want to fit into your company structure and bring you tangible sales success.
Hiring talented SDRs can be a difficult task, but having a clear recruiting policy will make it much easier.
You need to factor recruitment costs including sourcing candidates, screening, interviewing, onboarding and training.
One way in which you can increase your chances of hiring and retaining great sales staff is to introduce an employee referral program within your workplace.
This is the cheapest method for bringing in new staff members, and they are also more likely to stay in the job for longer.
According to Forbes, almost half (45%) of referrals stay for four years or more, compared to 25% of employees sourced from job boards who stay longer than two years.
You can improve sales by recruiting great staff, but it helps to know how.
At Excelerate360, we’ve interviewed thousands of salespeople, narrowing down the key character traits needed to be successful within a sales team.
You can read this list of skills here.
2) Hire Leaders First
By hiring staff with the right skills to be successful, you have made a great step towards consistent sales success.
But without a true sales leader to guide them, your new staff’s potential is at risk of being wasted.
That’s why hiring brilliant sales leaders should be your first priority.
Excellent leadership will set the tone for your business, affect strategic decisions, and motivate the rest of the team to smash their targets.
A top tip is to find a leader, NOT a manager.
Of course delegation is important for productivity, but a true leader will build a playbook, tweak sales scripts and actively play a part of the sales efforts.
Especially when it comes to training.
3) Train SDRs Effectively
Investing in SDRs does not just mean money, it means committing time, effort and knowledge to get the best sales results.
So often sales training includes a theoretical approach.
We find too many sales leaders are telling their team what to do, but not showing them how.
Therefore, the key thing to remember for any sales leader is ‘show, don’t tell.’
To train SDRs effectively and have them double, triple, or quadruple their amount of meetings booked each month, it’s important the training is relevant and impactful.
Two incredibly effective sales training methods include live demonstrations and role play.
By allowing new members of staff to shadow the sales leader and listen into real sales calls, as well as regularly practising role plays, they will learn much faster.
I would also recommend building a structured sales script.
Yes, you want your sales team to be individuals, not robots. But a salesperson’s individual personality should act as seasoning to an already well prepared steak.
By having a base to build from, you will allow your SDR’s to have more confidence which can result in more qualified prospects moving through your sales funnel.
4) Offer SDRs Opportunity for Growth
Generating motivation is a huge part of SDR success.
That’s because Sales Development Representatives will constantly have to smash daily, weekly and monthly targets and with that can come a lot of pressure.
Mapping out long term growth plans for your staff members can provide a great sense of purpose for your SDRs, as they can see a clear path for career progression.
Without committing to any guarantees, you can paint a picture of how success could lead to your SDR becoming an account executive or beyond.
Short term incentives are also important for staff morale.
For example, perhaps the sales team could split into teams and get competitive.
By generously rewarding the success of your sales staff, they will feel a sense of belonging within your company and produce better results.
These incentives can be whatever you can budget. Whether it’s a £20 Amazon gift voucher or a 5* trip to Paris, it doesn’t matter, as long as it serves as motivation for the team.
5) Invest in Technology to Support SDRs
With the right team and SDR staff in place, the next step is to support them by investing in a sophisticated tech stack.
This investment is key if you want to reduce unnecessary hours of administration; you want your SDRs speaking to prospects, not bogged down in paperwork.
There is technology available to help automate administrative tasks and free up time to book more meetings with prospective clients.
For example, Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM which caters for a multitude of tasks including audience segmentation features.
Or LinkedIn Sales Navigator enhances social selling by allowing SDRs to browse through a large database and contact decision makers directly.
Technology can help organise effective cadences for your salespeople to follow, which can help them to keep track of prospects as they move through the pipeline.
This can be useful for keeping your SDRs up to date with when they should be following up to prospects on several platforms such as LinkedIn, email, or phone calls.
6) Measure Performance with SDR Metrics
To measure the effectiveness of your SDRs, it’s important to measure metrics consistently.
This can be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, or all of the above.
Equally important is to analyse what these metrics are showing.
Where is the SDR being successful? How many daily activities are needed to book a Sales Qualified Lead?
At E360 we regularly sit with our SDRs and BDRs to identify what level of activities are needed to exceed quotes and fulfil their financial goals.
Are they saving for a new car? Planning a holiday to the Caribbean? Getting married?
What if you could show an SDR that by upping their LinkedIn activity by 20% for the rest of the month they will achieve 150% of their bonus?
You can measure your SDR’s activity by seeing how many calls, emails, or InMails they are sending, and the results by how many sales qualified meetings they are setting up.
Often, results can be skewed for a number of reasons, but by also tracking the behaviours of your team, you can be assured that the results will ultimately take care of themselves.
Key performance indicators to look out for are:
- Volume of calls
- Volume of LinkedIn connects
- Talk time
- Volume of sales qualified meetings
- Conversion rate from the meetings
It’s important to remember that quality beats quantity when it comes to sales qualified meetings.
The SDR’s job is to qualify the prospects to find good leads, so a higher conversion rate from the inside sales rep is a great reflection of this.
Speed Up Your SDR Sales Performance
To recap, an SDR in charge of qualifying inbound prospects and setting up meetings with senior sales executives.
A great sales development representative (SDR) is hard to come by, let alone a team of them.
That’s why your recruiting process is so important to get right.
Recruiting great sales staff is the key to your sales success, but don’t forget your sales leader, processes, training and technology all need to align for the best results.
If you need help recruiting, we’ve been hiring sales reps for over three decades, so we’d be happy to help.
Or, there is an alternative.
An Alternative to Hiring SDRs
Instead of spending time, money, and resources to hire internally, have you considered outsourcing?
At Excelerate360, we provide instant access to our sophisticated tech stack and professional SDRs and BDRs to help our clients to achieve accelerated business growth.
If you need a helping hand generating consistent leads for your business, get in touch today.