Top Sales Development Thought Leaders by Insidesales.com
2/2/2019
Comments
Sales Development continues to excel in strategic importance as a key driver to growth and success for high performance companies. Insidesales.com recently ran a poll to determine who to follow this year in the Sales Development space in order to grow your own career by learning from the best. Check out the graphic attached for the who's who of our industry.   Next week, we’ll be hosting the first ever conference 100% focused and dedicated to Sales Development, at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. September 21st.
When I originally thought up this conference, I had no idea what the response would be. Was I the only one who thought it was time to start treating Sales Development with the respect it deserves in 2017? Was I the only one who thought this topic was important enough to warrant an entire conference dedicated to it? Collectively, can we push this practice forward a few steps? Well my fears have been totally allayed as the response has exceeded even my wildest estimations. The hunger in the Sales Development world for fresh knowledge, leadership, networks, and research has been overwhelming, and even though the conference hasn’t happened yet, I already consider it a success.  TOPO’s research has shown that 100% of high-growth organizations have Sales Development organizations. We know for most businesses it's critical have a team consistently prospecting and following up on leads to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Sales Development can drive quality pipeline for your Sales team, and provide a Talent pipeline to build the future of your company.
We also know a key to a successful program is strong leadership. The right leader can make or break a Sales Development team. Sales Development is expensive; it involves people, processes and technology, and it needs to pay off fast. We're pouring thousands into the program each month. We know if we don't have the right leader in place, the whole thing goes off the rails. But how do we treat the leadership function in Sales Development? From what I've seen, two ways. One, find a high performing SDR and promote her to SDR Manager. Or, find someone from a big name company who raised up the ranks in a few years and bring them in to run the team. In both cases, there's little training, coaching or support given to the Manager. They're on their own.  Tuesday night, we hosted our first ever Sales Hacker Sales Development Executive Dinner at Sens in San Francisco. It was attended by some of the top Sales Development Executives in technology today, representing companies such as Google, Oracle, Square, Blackberry, New Relic, Nitro, Mulesoft, Brightfunnel, Box and others.
The conversation theme of the night was Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) and the intersection of Sales, Sales Development and Marketing to build new business pipeline. As the wise man Jon Miller points out, “accidents happen at intersections”, so you could guess the conversations were lively and some great relationships were formed between these high-powered Execs. Circling the room, I picked up on some of the major themes being discussed… |