 Over the summer, Tenbound Research Labs organized the different sectors specific to the Sales Development landscape into this map to make it a bit easier to get an overview.
When we released the map and announced it at The Sales Development Conference, over 50 companies involved in Sales Development reached out to get on the map. It seems we have more support than we ever dreamed of to score that next appointment and build more pipeline. And of course, leave a comment below with what we missed, misclassified, forgot, etc. Tenbound Research Labs stands ready to begin work on Version 3.
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Feel like you’re getting lost in the noise? Not sure how to create better engagement in your current playbook? Involve your SDR team. SDR’s are often your first point of contact with prospects and can be the make or break in your sales cycle. Whether it’s uncovering needs that your sales team can then help meet, or just creating an authentic connection, SDR’s are invaluable to your entire process. Our guest today on The Sales Engagement Podcast was David Dulany, CEO of Tenbound. He chats with Mark about how your sales development team is indispensable when it comes to the effectiveness of your engagement, especially when it comes to connecting on an authentic level with your prospects. Here are the highlights of David’s interview. The Importance of Sales Development Sales development ultimately impacts your revenue and when you reverse engineer what it takes to create revenue, that’s when you see the SD value. What does it take to create revenue? It takes a pipeline. What does it take to get a pipeline? It starts with a conversation. What does it take to have a conversation? It takes all the things that your SDR’s do and coordinate on a daily basis–research, cold calls, networking, etc. Does that mean salespeople are off the hook for prospecting? Obviously not. Sellers still need to keep hunting and building those vital relationships, all the time. It’s naive to think that SDR’s will solve all your lead problems. However, there are always times when you literally can’t be looking–maybe you’re closing a deal or on a plane, so it’s critical to have someone who’s helping to fill your pipeline. It’s a partnership, with both sides having an equal need of each other. If you’re relying on yourself 100%, you can get yourself in trouble. If you’re relying on someone else 100%, they can get you in trouble. Keep Having Authentic Conversations Sales Development is all about conversations, whether that’s through cold calls, social platforms, or going to events. David Dulany: Growing Engagement Through Sales Development At the same time, there’s a lot of noise that can make it difficult to get in front of new prospects. More and more SDR teams are relying on the same systems and generating the same emails–it’s all starting to be white noise, which is why having authentic conversations are the key to breaking through the noise. What does that look like? Start with the buyer–who are you actually going after? Get a good idea of what they are dealing with day to day. What’s the persona of who you’re talking to? Immerse yourself in the marketplace you are getting into by reading blogs or going to trade shows and conferences. People want you to solve their problems–they don’t want you to start your conversation by leading with your product. It’s a dead end. A lot of people are selfish and worried about getting the sale, rather than being empathetic and listening and responding to what the buyer really needs. Many salespeople get caught in the trap of feeling too much pressure to perform, or else they’re stuck in an industry they don’t understand (or care about) and end up only going through the motions. You have to actually care about who you’re trying to sell to. From a macro perspective, the market is increasing, so it’s only going to get more and more competitive. SDR’s need to think and create conversations more strategically to perform better. This post is based on a podcast interview with David Dulany from Tenbound. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Sales Engagement Podcast. There's a hunger in the market for high quality information about Sales Development.
However, why does a one sentence brain f#rt on Linkedin get 100,000 views and a well researched article which took hours to write get 34 views? These are mysteries only known to God and the Algorithms. In the meantime, we were curious about what you're most interested in on the Tenbound Youtube channel, and have collected the most viewed video/audios right here for your enjoyment and education. 1. Sales Development Leadership Today, Andrew Berger, Square 2. From CEO to SDR Astronomical Growth Through Maniacal Focus on Sales Development, Henry Schuck, Discoverorg 3. From $0 to $10MM in 2 Years Through Sales Development, Manny Medina, Outreach 4. SDR Messaging Break N' Build #1 - Ryan Reisert, The Sales Developers and David Dulany, Tenbound 5. STOP hatin' on SDRs and listen to this please! Sales Development Podcast, Trish Bertuzzi, The Bridge Group 6. How Sales Development is Evolving, with Kristina McMillan, TOPO Inc 7. Key Strategy or Functional Irrelevance: Which is YOUR SDR Team?, John Barrows, JBarrows 8. Discover your Prospects' Pain Points Sales Development Podcast, Scott Leese, Qualia / Surfandsales.com 9. Using Data and Analysis to Run Sales Development, Russ Hearl, Hire by Google 10. Doing Whatever It Takes to Succeed in Sales Development, The Sales Development Podcast, Brandon Bornancin, Seamless.ai Which one did you like the best? Coming up next, the Top 10 most underviewed and underappreciated videos on the Tenbound Youtube Channel! Stay tuned for that. Which one should we feature in the next round up? Subscribe here for all the vids David Dulany has built high-performance Sales Development programs for Glassdoor, OpenDNS, Infer and Act-On Software. At Tenbound, he helps companies start, optimize and turn around Sales Development programs. For more information, visit daviddulany.com and tenbound.com.  Leave a comment below if you would like to receive a PDF version of this map.
Making sense of the Sale Development landscape is becoming more complex all the time. Here at Tenbound, we've worked hard to organize the different sectors specific to the Sales Development landscape into this map. Going beyond just tools, we also look at bootcamps, recruiting firms, training and consulting firms, and others that specialize on Sales Development. This is V1, and we stand ready to update. Leave a comment below on what we missed, misclassified, forgot, etc! Thank you Ken Smith for your guidance putting this together. Guest post on the Operatix Website
Building an SDR / BDR team is a crucial step for companies looking to grow revenue and accelerate sales cycles. There are a few burning questions you should be asking if you’re serious about doing so: Is it best to own this function in-house, or outsource it? Who should look after the SDR team? What tools and technologies are needed? To help understand the challenges businesses come across, we had a chat with David Dulany from Tenbound who’s helped several companies to start, optimize and turn around Sales Development programs across North America and Europe. Avoid hiring Sales Development Representatives before leadership is in place. An all too common mistake when companies implement an SDR team is the lack of leadership and strategy. Often companies start hiring SDRs expecting them to deliver results straight away, without giving them the adequate training, data-set and tools to succeed. Product training in itself isn’t enough to make the rep successful, but a valuable message about the product benefits, not just the technical details, is extremely useful. The first step a company should take in building a successful SDR team is to hire a Sales Development Leader. This person can look after the team (independent if it’s outsourced or internal) and outlay a clear strategy to make the team as effective and efficient as possible. Who should the SDR Team report to? The classic case scenario when it comes to the reporting duties of a Sales Development Leader usually boils down to two options: sales or marketing. According to David Dulany, the best possible answer to this question, however, is neither of these options. In the best-case scenario, the Sales Development Leader would report directly to the CEO. A direct channel of communication between the Sales Development leader and the CEO leaves that person with the required degree of autonomy to make the right decisions regarding the SDR team’s business direction. A Sales Development Leader must liaise with sales, marketing, operations, product marketing and various other departments; hence, a level of autonomy is key for them to execute their goals. Failing a direct report system between the Sales Development Leader and the CEO, and if the choice absolutely has to be between the VP Sales and the CMO, Dulany believes it’s better to have the Sales Development Leader report to the CMO. In the recent research “The State of European Demand Generation” Sirius Decision found out that in 70% of companies the SDR/BDR team is lead by marketing, which proves Dulany’s point. The sales department can often look at the SDR team as its little brother. SDRs often have ambitions to move into the sales team in the future, and it’s true that representatives between the two departments share similar qualities. It’s all a rather romantic concept, but sales leadership rarely have enough time to mentor an SDR department, as they’re far too busy closing deals and generally executing the nuances of their role. When you look at a marketing department, their job is to drive the brand and awareness surrounding it, as well as pipeline for the company. As such, it makes better sense for the SDR team to sit as an extension of the marketing department. It will hugely benefit both the SDR and marketing teams if they’re working in tight coordination for field events, marketing campaigns, content and the like - all of which are typical aspects of a marketing team’s job. Will technology solutions support the SDR team? It’s inevitable that technology vendors will catch wind of your venture into building an SDR team. Once they do, the sales calls will start to roll in regarding fancy pieces of software. Software solutions can be an incredible tool to enhance the workflow of an SDR team, but without the right planning and thought - they can be a big hindrance to the operation. Think of a shiny new software solution like a toolbox; it can be the most incredibly toolbox in the world, but those complex tools are useless if not operated properly. Vendors will naturally promise great results with such solutions, but the reality is that they need to be implemented carefully and properly. It’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling as though these implementation processes can be autonomous in nature, but there needs to be a dedicated person left in charge of making them work for the SDR team. Some final thoughts. Outsourcing an SDR team adds another dimension to this conversation. The mental trap that companies quite often fall into is that an SDR team has to either be in-house or outsourced - one or the other. In reality, and on a case-by-case basis, it doesn’t have to be like this. Companies may often find that a hybrid mixture of in-house functions and outsourced help, to varying degrees, is the best solution for them. David Dulany has built high-performance Sales Development programs for Glassdoor, OpenDNS, Infer and Act-On Software. At Tenbound, he helps companies start, optimize and turn around Sales Development programs. For more information, visit daviddulany.com and tenbound.com. Guest post this week by Tenbound friend Samuel Holzman at Zoominfo
There’s no way around it– the tools and technologies we use to execute our work have a direct impact on our success as Sales Development professionals. For this reason, more companies are prioritizing their sales technology in an effort to build the perfect technology stack. The numbers don’t lie– companies with access to top-flight sales enablement tools experience 205% more revenue growth and 725% higher sales velocity than their competitors (source). But, if you’re new to Sales Development technology, you may be scratching your head and asking: “What tools do I actually need?” You don’t want to overwhelm your SDRs with “tool confetti”. Of course, every Sales Dev organization is unique, so technology that works for one company may not work for yours. But ultimately, there are four basic guidelines you must follow to build the perfect sales technology stack. Keys Considerations Before Building Out Your Technology Stack Whether you’re starting from scratch or just looking for ways to improve your Sales Development organization, here are a few best practices to keep in mind. 1. Involve key stakeholders early on. Often, when you’re purchasing a new piece of technology, it’s because you’ve identified a pain point you need help remedying. And, if you are in a leadership position, this pain point may not directly impact you. Your SDR’s will be the ones using the tools you choose. So, don’t wait to include them in the process until after you’ve already made a purchase. Bring in key stakeholders early in the process. Ask them if it meets their needs, if they have any concerns, and if it will make their job easier. Remember, if you want people to use any new tools or technologies you purchase, they need to be on board with the purchase decision. 2. Prioritize ease-of-use. The purpose of sales technology is to make your Sales Development team more efficient and effective. If your team is overwhelmed with a bunch of complicated tools, however, this will have the opposite of the intended effect. They’ll struggle to use the tools effectively or, even worse, they won’t use them at all. Make sure you select tools that are easy to understand and enjoyable to use. Otherwise, you’ll make things more difficult for your team, which will ultimately impact quota attainment. 3. Select tools that integrate. A sales stack full of tools that don’t integrate will cause you more problems than it will solve. The reason? Your data will be stored in different silos, meaning your team will have to manage it as they switch back and forth between tools. This can lead to confusion, painfully slow workflows, and even data inaccuracies. Make everyone’s life easier by choosing tools that integrate with the other technologies you use. Here's where things get a little trickier. Not only do your Sales Dev tools need to integrate with one another, but it’s also important that your sales stack integrates with your company’s marketing technology stack. If sales and marketing use disparate platforms and metrics, there will be very little cooperation between the two teams. Using tools that integrate allows both teams important insight into the other team’s best practices and goals. This is particularly helpful when it comes to lead quality, marketing content, and reporting. We touch on this again later. 4. Re-evaluate your tech stack regularly. Your sales stack might have been top-of-the-line when you built it two years ago– but if you haven’t re-evaluated it recently, you’re likely falling behind. Your business needs change frequently, as does the sales technology market. Maybe a product you’re using no longer fits your strategy, or a new solution has emerged with superior features. Look closely at your sales stack often, so you can make any necessary improvements. Most important tools for your tech stack: If you still have questions about the specific types of sales enablement tools to invest in, we’re about to get into it. While only you know for sure whether a tool is a necessary investment, here are a few standard technologies that most sales teams rely on. We’ll break those down for you now: 1. CRM Table stakes. Interacting with prospects and customers is a significant part of a sales rep’s job. Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is essentially your sales contact database. Tools in this category allow you to manage your relationships with customers and gain valuable insight into the buyer’s journey. The right CRM can streamline much of a sales rep’s workflow and improve sales productivity. In fact, the right CRM can boost sales productivity by 30% and increase sales by up to 29% if used effectively (source). 2. Sales prospecting tools. 33% of sales reps identify prospecting as the part of their job they struggle the most with (source). Identifying and reaching out to qualified prospects takes up a significant amount of time. Fortunately, the more tedious parts of the sales prospecting process can be automated by the right tool. Sales prospecting tools can provide your team with up-to-date, accurate contact information so they can identify and get in touch with qualified prospects faster. 3. Social selling tools. Social selling has emerged as one of the most effective sales tactics in recent years. In fact, 78% of salespeople who use social media outperform their peers (source). If you want your reps to use social media to its full potential, you must invest in tools that will streamline and improve their social selling efforts. Collaborate with your marketing team and determine what tools can benefit both departments. They might already have some suggestions for you! 4. Contact Data. Data is the lifeblood of a Sales Development organization. It is oxygen. It must clean, relevant, organized and up-to-date. It needs to include the contact information your SDRs must have to be able contact their prospects in the methods the prospects respond to, be it direct dials, email address or physical addresses. Data has a very short shelf life, so it must be constantly refreshed. 5. Content management tool. Finding sales and marketing content to send to prospects should be a seamless and straightforward process– but for many sales teams, this isn’t the case. In fact, 65% of sales reps say they can’t find content to send to prospects, and 31% of the average rep’s time is spent searching for or creating content (source). Invest in an asset management tool that can organize your content library for easy sharing. As an added bonus, some tools can recommend specific content that best applies to certain situations. These tools will save your reps time and dramatically improve their relationships with prospects. Final Thoughts There you have it – your guide to building the perfect Sales Development technology stack. Keep in mind, every organization is different, and thus requires different tools and solutions to fit their needs. We can’t tell you exactly which sales enablement tools are right for you. The key is to break down your sales process and aim to improve every step with the right technology. Remember, more tools doesn’t make your tech stack more efficient—the right tools do that. Constructing a tech stack takes time, critical analysis, and a lot of effort. But, it’s well worth it. With the right tools and technologies your reps will be able to get their work done faster and exceed quota. About the Author: Sam Holzman is the Content Marketing Specialist at ZoomInfo where he writes for their B2B blog. ZoomInfo is a leading B2B contact database that helps organizations accelerate growth and profitability. Sam regularly covers topics related to sales, marketing, and recruiting, and likes to write about sports and travel in his free time. Are your Sales Development Reps (SDRs) ramping too slowly?
According to The Bridge Group’s latest study, onboarding an SDR is taking a little more than three months, on average. If the typical SDR stays on the job for about a year, three months is a long time to ramp up. Here are four fresh ideas you can use today to help speed up this process for your new SDRs. 1. Instead of Product Training, Start with Persona Training Many SDRs are coming into the Sales Development profession with little or no experience in the field of selling, and also know little or nothing about the people they will be calling on to set up meetings. SDRs are usually given a bit of product and company training, then cut loose to start calling on prospects, many of whom have 20+ years experience in the industry. With limited knowledge or context, the SDR has immediate difficulty connecting with prospects, faces massive resistance and, to compensate for these deficiencies, onboarding gets extended longer than necessary. Instead, give your new recruits a fighting chance by educating them on who they’re calling. Get them started with Personas — the people who are involved in the buying process of your product — versus going straight to product training. By enabling them to grow into experts on the people they will be calling on every day, rather than going immediately to what your product or service does, you’ll help your reps build a foundation of success not only as an SDR but also as an Account Executive, if they choose to continue on to that role. It is with that context that they can begin to have value-add conversations instead of going straight to their product pitch and becoming just another cold caller. For the first few weeks on the job, make it easy for your new recruits to “get into the head” of their target personas by giving them a crash course in understanding the people they’ll be calling every day:
Ideally, they should strive to know the typical goals and pain points of each of those personas like the back of their hands within the first couple weeks on the job. Your SDRs should also gain a deeper understanding of the events, blogs, resources and other material that their target audience uses every day to gain information and intelligence on their the field, and begin to follow those as well. The goal here is to ensure that SDRs are really inside the head of your personas and can understand their world — at least the surface level — so your reps can begin to understand where they fit into their prospects’ priorities, and how your product or service can potentially alleviate pain points and add real value. 2. Connecting your Solution to the Personas’ Goals or Pain Points Now that your new SDRs have a solid understand your target personas and the world they inhabit, it’s critical for them to understand how your product or service can help these people alleviate their pain points and/or achieve their goals. Based on what they know about the person they’re calling, they should be able to get a better understanding of whether their intended messaging is actually going to make an impact and get the person’s attention, or simply be deleted or ignored. They will also better understand how important it is for them to get in touch with the person, to help them attain their goals or to help them alleviate pain, through the amazing product or service you’re offering. It’s important to teach your reps that they have an important job: helping companies succeed. Yes, they’re selling your product, but it’s bigger than that. SDRs are in the business of solving serious problems for companies. This understanding should help build motivation and sense of urgency on the part of the SDR, helping them move faster and with more energy, speeding up ramp time. It also imbues reps with a sense of purpose. They’re not just call and email machines, they’re bringing life-improving technology to those in need. 3. Persona Interviews Next step is to delve deeper into the understanding of the target personas by conducting live interviews. Help new SDRs find at least five people each who fit their target personas, both within your company and in the market. From there, have your reps conduct 30-minute interviews with the goal of discovering more about their personas’ pain points and goals. During the interviews, the new SDRs should ask questions about their background, their goals for the year, their current responsibilities, their top pain points, what they worry about, what would they do if they had a magic wand and could alleviate all their problems in one stroke, etc. The interview should also have questions about how they interact with their greater industry, what conferences they attend, what blogs they read, what podcasts they listen to, and how they keep up with the competition. All of this is great intelligence on the very people the new SDR will be calling every day. The information gathered will give them some great conversation starters and ways to open with some great questions, speeding up the cycle. For example, if you sell sales engagement software, and your target persona is a Vice President of Sales, have the new SDR conduct these interviews first with your own Vice President of Sales and their direct reports. Then make a list of five people outside your company who will give your reps 30 minutes for an interview to discuss their day-to-day. You're not selling here, you are simply asking them for help. They gain a mentorship opportunity with a young SDR, and the new SDR gets some great context. Outlaw sales pitches during these interviews. The last thing you want your reps to do is to burn bridges by turning an informational meeting into a sales pitch. Record these interviews via Zoom video call to use as a training library for new recruits, and a refresher for veterans. Which leads to our next step... 4. Document, Document, Document Throughout the process of educating your new SDRs on the target personas they’ll be calling, the Sales Development Manager or Sales Trainer should be capturing all of this valuable information and documenting it in a way that can be used as a template for further training, and for onboarding future recruits. By collecting this information, date stamping it and revising it quarterly, the manager can ensure that new recruits have fresh information and the entire team has their finger consistently on the pulse of the market they're selling to. Markets change, so it’s vital you revisit this information so your reps can keep up with how their target personas operate. Conclusion While there’s obviously no way a brand-new SDR will suddenly become a sales leader with 20+ years of experience overnight, a new recruit can absolutely control the amount of focus and energy they apply to becoming masters of their craft. By understanding the world of the people they're calling on, understanding their goals, pain points, aspirations and how they fit in with the overall industry landscape, your new SDR can use that knowledge as a foundation of their sales conversations, and the sales skills necessary to achieve massive success. And, by having this context and knowledge, the SDR can start having quality conversations a lot faster than the average, raw rep, and start to cut down on that 3+ month ramp time! David Dulany has built high-performance Sales Development programs for Glassdoor, OpenDNS, Infer and Act-On Software. At Tenbound, he helps companies start, optimize and turn around Sales Development programs. For more information, visit daviddulany.com and tenbound.com. Registration is now open for The Sales Development Conference on August 30th, 2018 in San Francisco. Join the top minds in Sales Development for full day of learning, networking and growing your skills!
An amazing number of companies have been founded and are still based here in San Francisco. Here at Tenbound we've been blessed to work in this Sales Development teams ecosystem.
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The seismic changes in the Sales Development landscape over the past few years have been nothing short of phenomenal.
Just a few years ago, the Sales Development process was much slower and more manual; pretty much just a combination of Salesforce, Google searches, Excel sheets, Post-it notes and duct tape. Whether qualifying inbound leads or going outbound, it was slow, clunky and difficult to execute. Fast forward to today, where the explosion of technology to support Sales Development around data quality, workflow organization and email messaging has been amazing. The power and speed afforded by this technology now in the hands of SDRs is incredible. They now have the ability to work faster, be more organized and send out more messages to more people than ever. However, having all this great technology available can also damaging. “With great power, comes great responsibility” As we have seen, putting that much power in the hands of an untrained, disorganized SDR team can lead to negative reactions on the part of prospective clients. We all know that a bad message, sent out to lots of people, over and over, is still a bad message. You may recall a few years ago when only the Marketing team had access to Marketing Automation programs set up to send out one email after another. Those campaigns were generally planned, approved and vetted. Not so much anymore. Now even the newest SDR has that same power, at their fingertips. The result? Not always good. Prospects are bombarded by irrelevant messaging. Potential clients are tuning out or getting annoyed. Brands are being damaged. And all-in-all it’s getting tougher to break through the noise. Then you have the rash of “SDR shamings” on Linkedin; where people actually post emails and social outreach made by SDRs and complain about how badly they were executed. Ironically, this SDR shaming is usually done by Sales Leaders who are then turning around and pushing their own SDR team for more meetings, using the similar tactics. lol So how can SDR teams breakthrough in 2018? After working with several Sales Development programs over the past few years as a manager or with my firm Tenbound, I’d recommend starting with the fundamentals: how we think about the SDR team org chart. I argue that the current way SDR teams are set up in the first place ignores the reality of what is actually needed today to be able to reign in this tech explosion and align with the way prospective customers operate. Most Sales Development organizations are still set up in a way that doesn’t give SDRs a chance to establish context and build basic trust and value with prospects, leading to the situation we have today. Many SDR programs simply fall back to the spray-n-pray tactics of yesteryear. The current set-up also doesn’t harness the incredible power created by the new SDR technologies and the explosion of data being created by those tools, which if set up correctly, could be used to improve overall team performance. Instead, the current usual Sales Development organization is now set-up to require the SDR, usually someone fresh out of college in their first job with little or no experience, to do several different, and at times conflicting, jobs. The average SDR is tasked with researching massive amounts of prospect information, email copywriting, script building, mastering new SDR technologies, list building, cold calling, mass emailing, product knowledge and keeping up on social media updates. It’s a jumbled mess. In the face of this daunting list, many get overwhelmed and end up falling back to silently researching and sending out mass emails all day. I argue that SDRs need to be better enabled, trained, organized and equipped in order to regain focus on their true purpose; having high quality conversations with target prospects and setting up Sales appointments. The current organization asks the Sales Development Manager to not only be a trainer, coach and administrator for the SDR team (a more than full time job), but also to be an expert analyst of the mass amounts of data being created by the different tools being used, and to translate that data to actionable and relevant insights. It also asks the Sales Development Manager to be an expert in the SDR technology tools and back-end connections to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. These are two very different jobs that can and should be separated to maximize efficiency. In order to break through in 2018, to really maximize investment in the many new tools out there, and to test and iterate best practices to gain more appointments you may want to consider setting up your SDR organization in a totally different way. I believe this structure will become the common practice in the future: First, we should break the SDR role into two parts: Sales Development Representative (SDR): Focus their time on quality conversations with prospects. They own phone calls, emails and social outreach to a high number of target prospects per day. They customize their messaging specifically to the personas and pain points of each prospect based on available research, using their creativity, training and experience. They own responsibility for ensuring quality Sales appointments are set and take place. Account Researcher: They ensure all contact information is correct on Leads, Contacts and Accounts in the database. They find relevant and timely facts and trigger events to inform rapid SDR customization. They maintain a quota of facts and trigger events entered per day, week and month to create lists. They own data cleanliness and research readiness for a set number SDR accounts per month or quarter. They ensure all information needed for the SDR to make high number of phone calls and send out a high number of highly customized emails is available and delivered daily. By dividing these two roles, the SDR will have the research needed to touch a large number of prospects each day, in a customized and focused way, so the messaging is relevant and no longer spammy. The SDR is also freed up from the researching to focus on getting better on the hardest parts of the job, calling and talking to people versus spending a great deal of time each day searching for contact information and trigger events, ie “The Silent Sales Floor” effect. Next, break the Sales Development Manager into two roles: Sales Development Manager: Owns overall team results and relationship with senior management. Focuses on daily Sales training, coaching, mentoring, administration, reporting up and gathering target market intelligence. Spends time doing “ride alongs”, call coaching, reviewing game tape, doing 1:1’s, team meetings and setting the strategic direction for the team. Stays updated on industry best practices. Sales Development Productivity Analyst Reporting to the Sales Development Manager, this role owns data quality, quantity, integrity, analysis and compliance for SDR team. Ensures the team has enough data, tools and efficient processes to run smoothly and continuously improve performance. Runs split tests on messaging. Tracks and reports on all analysis and insights regularly to Sales Dev Manager and upper management. Suggests course corrections based on data. Contributes to direction of SDR training plan based on data-driven choke points. Finally, clarify the role of Sales Ops to support the Sales Development Organization Sales Ops. In addition to all usual duties, as it regards Sales Development: Owns all Sales Development tech systems and connections. Ensures tools truly enable the team and are fully utilized. Owns all vendor relationships, negotiations and contracts. Liaisons with Marketing operations and Sales Leadership with regards to processes and technology. Works closely with the Sales Development Productivity Analyst to ensure maximum ROI on the Sales Development team. So how could this work? Let’s say you have headcount for a 6 person SDR team. Before you hire the usual structure of 5 SDRs and 1 Manager, consider this approach: Hire an experienced Sales Development Manager with a proven track record first, before any SDRs. Give them a month to set up all the systems, process and technology to support building a team. Then, hire one SDR and one Account Researcher. Sales Development Manager gets them up to speed. Then repeat that process with one more SDR and one more Account Researcher. Finally, bring in the Sales Development Productivity Analyst to walk in lockstep with the Manager to translate the data being produced by the team into actionable insights that helps improve messaging, training, morale and performance. An upward spiral of performance is created. Sales Development Nirvana. It’s interesting to note that this structure is how larger companies are already doing it. And they’re winning. No reason you can’t replicate that success at a small company. Consider it! What do you think of this structure? Leave it in the comments. Thanks! David Dulany has built high-performance Sales Development programs for Glassdoor, OpenDNS, Infer and Act-On Software. At Tenbound, he helps companies start, optimize and turnaround Sales Development programs. Podcast and newsletter at daviddulany.com and tenbound.com Let's take it back to basics. What is this thing called Sales Development, and is it right for your company?
Quite simply, Sales Development is the practice of creating sales pipeline for your company through proactive outreach to prospective customers and of following up on inbound leads created by your marketing efforts. The practice of Sales Development has exploded since the economic downturn a few years ago, especially in software as a service (SaaS) technology companies. As the economy crumbled during that downturn, companies realized the importance of having someone in the organization always laser focused on sales pipeline generation; whether through proactive outreach to target accounts, or ensuring proper follow-up on the high quality inbound leads created by marketing. As documented in his groundbreaking book Predictable Revenue, Aaron Ross described how companies like Salesforce.com and others attributed their reliable, machine-like pipeline generation to a well-trained and organized Sales Development organization. However, despite its documented success, Sales Development continues to be a head-scratcher for many companies and executives. How does it work, where should it report, what are the metrics the unit should be producing? Of note: “Sales Development” in this context is sometimes called “Business Development”, which is confusing because Business Development is also the specialty of forging strategic partnerships with complementary companies for integration and cross-selling purposes, something totally different than Sales Development. For this article I'm talking about Sales Development, as defined above. Sales Development Reps (SDRs) are alternatively called Business Development Reps, Lead Development Reps, Account Development Reps, Revenue Development Reps, or a plethora of other creative terms. For most folks reading this, the first question which may come up is something like; “wait, isn't the role of sales pipeline generation the responsibility of Marketing?” Or, “isn't prospecting what Salespeople are supposed to do?” Well yes, kind of. Marketers create your brand image and generate leads coming into your company from various activities and channels. However once a lead comes into the company generally the marketing job ends. Marketing has created the interest, and now it's the job of Sales to take that and convert it into close revenue. On the other side, you have the salespeople, who theoretically should take the leads created by Marketing, contact them and work with them until they close. They should also be cold calling new companies in order to forge new relationships. However, in practice, these things rarely actually happen. Salespeople have a quota of closed sales that they need to hit each month or quarter. Therefore, they are naturally going to be focused on talking only the most interested parties and closing them so they hit their quota. Thus, unresponsive leads ignored, and cold calls go neglected. And therein lies the gap covered by Sales Development. Marketing creating brand image, community and leads, and then wondering what happened to all those leads they created. Most leads never get called, and Sales under extreme pressure to hit their quota and wondering when they're going to get some decent leads from the Marketing! Meanwhile the leads being created are either been lightly touched if they're Red Hot and ready to buy, or ignored completely and put into a marketing drip campaign, which usually is a series of emails. If by some miracle one of those marketing email drips causes the lead to re-engage and raise their hand, they are again sent to sales where the entire process starts over again. Hopefully, a sale is made, but usually it just recycles back into to the marketing database. This is where Sales Development plays a critical role. The department can be broken down into two basic categories: Outbound account-based and Inbound lead qualification. Outbound prospecting has been around for many years, basically since invention of the telephone. For example, in the movie Tin Men, the Sales Development team is seen briefly making calls from little glass boxes (noise cancellation!) on the office floor. This group of people used to be (and is still sometimes) called “telemarketing” or “appointment setters”, and their job is to call the companies and attempt to set quality appointments for salespeople. The salespeople would then go out and meet with that potential clients to discuss the business issues. With the advent of Sales and Marketing technology of the last 10 years, the telemarketer has been superseded by the professional Sales Development Representative (SDR), who has a whole plethora of tools at their disposal, such as email automation, call recording software, and contact databases to assist them in finding and contacting cold prospects and set appointments. On the Inbound side, that same technology stack has developed over the past 10 years to assist in ensuring that when marketing creates a lead that it is contacted in order to determine interest as to whether the lead is qualified to take an appointment with the salesperson as quickly and seamlessly as possible. This focus on both Outbound and Inbound Sales Development has helped companies such as Salesforce, LinkedIn and Oracle create astronomical growth, especially as it pertains to subscription as a service business. Ensuring that greenfield opportunities are being covered and aggressively worked by the Sales Development Representative team was critical and landing accounts, and getting in front of the right people, whether proactively or reactively. The technology has also enabled the Inbound lead process to become measurable and manageable and ensure that any interest that is shown in the company and expressed by potential clients is followed up on expeditiously by a human being, and not left to rot in a database. Over the course of the last few years, most well funded start-up software as a service companies have attempted to replicate the model of those larger companies by hiring Sales Development teams and enabling them with the plethora of tools that are available today to make them successful. This has created a situation where a potential prospects are inundated with phone calls emails, social touches and other outreach to the point where it seems that we've reached a saturation. As the explosion of these tools has taken place, prospects demand more sophistication from SDRs. Moving forward, Sales Development Leaders and practitioners will need to become a lot more creative and resourceful in creating the type of ROI that their leadership is looking for from the investment in their programs. Sales Development involves a tremendous investment in people, processes and technology. To make it pay off, it needs to be taken very seriously and set up correctly. The good news is that Sales Development Leaders with with several years of experience in this field are beginning to emerge and create an executive class who up to now has not been seen in the Sales Development world. I'm optimistic that this new generation of Sales Development Leaders will bring the energy, creativity and leadership that we need to push the practice forward. Need help starting or turning around your Sales Development program? Contact Tenbound at tenbound.com |
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