Growing Engagement Through Sales Development

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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.