Prospecting has changed significantly in the past few years, and methods must be updated to meet today’s new demands and challenges.
No industry has been immune to the changes and disruptions of the past couple of years. As businesses around the world continue to adapt to the new sales and marketing landscape, the need to keep up with constantly evolving customer demands is greater than ever. But with any challenge comes new opportunities, and Sales Development is no exception.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, many of your customers have new needs and work remotely. They have different priorities and pain points that must be addressed if you are to continue to earn their attention or to acquire new customers. Having a strategy for whom you intend to prospect will prove vital to your success. After all, successful prospecting requires, just as it always has, comprehensive knowledge of your target customer.
Dogma does not equal performance
In today’s technology-driven world, change is inevitable and necessary for keeping up with the constantly changing sales landscape. This is why one of the most harmful phrases in the business world is ‘we’ve always done it this way’.
Dogma does not equate to performance, which is why every process must be taken back to formula. In the case of Sales Development, this means starting with the right questions.
Firstly, how do you yourself buy today? Putting yourself in the shoes of today’s customers is an essential first step towards better understanding their needs and pain points.
Then, looking at what your current data is telling you, determine how your customers buy. Finally, look at how your existing Sales Development processes work. Chances are there are misalignments between these variables, which will need to be addressed in order to refine your prospecting strategy.
Applying the scientific method to Sales Development
Sales Development is effectively just a form of project management which, in turn, follows the scientific method.
The basic steps of the cycle are as follows:

• Ask a question or carry out background research to describe a problem
• Construct a hypothesis in an attempt to answer the question
• Test your hypothesis to determine how accurate it is
• Draw conclusions from your hypothesis and refine it accordingly

The modern Sales Development process is all about uniting people, processes, and technology in pursuit of a common goal. In this case, the ultimate goal is to increase sales. However, this can be further distilled by setting measurable KPIs, such as the number of repeat sales, and the customer lifetime value (CLV).
Sales Development Reps (SDRs) should also apply the scientific method. In a modern context, that means referring to existing data to determine how sales are currently performing. You can then identify opportunities for improvement, make the necessary changes, and then test them.
With A/B testing, you can also put multiple hypotheses to the test simultaneously, thus saving time and developing your sales processes even faster. The entire cycle is one of continuous improvement. At Tenbound, we recommend reevaluating your Sales Development processes approximately every three months.
Key takeaways for SDRs
Sales Development success depends on determining how your existing processes align with today’s buying experience. Wherever there is a misalignment, you need to go back to recreate or refine your strategy to achieve better results. This requires the optimal combination of expert guidance, a strong peer support community, and a consistent strategy that matches the unique requirements of your business.
Check out my talk at the recent Tenbound Sales Development Conference where I go into this further

https://youtu.be/pGY0HFIO_xY?t=55
Tenbound is a Sales Development research and advisory firm. We provide expert guidance and integrated technology solutions to help you take your business to the next level. Contact us today to get started.

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​Tenbound, a Research & Advisory firm focused 100% on Sales Development, announced the winners of this year’s BEAST Awards for excellence in Sales Development, at The Tenbound Sales Development Conference 2021 on October 27th, 2021 in San Francisco. 

The BEAST Award is a voting award specifically for the Sales Development community, run each year in leading up the annual Conference. 

It includes four categories, with the highest number of unique votes winning in each category. 

The categories include Best Sales Development Team, Best Sales Development Technology, Best Sales Development Leader, and Best Sales Development Representative. Once again this year, Tenbound received a record number of votes in each category.

David Dulany, Tenbound Founder & CEO stated: “Sales Development is growing in importance in B2B SaaS companies and in many other industries. The Tenbound BEAST Awards represent the best in the burgeoning Sales Development industry, the top-rated Leaders, Reps, Teams, and Technology out there performing at the highest level in our field. We are proud to be associated with all the nominees and winners!”

The 2021 Winners:

Best Sales Development Leader

Patrick Jeter, Groove

Best Sales Development Representative

Alex Trca, LeadIQ 

Best Sales Development Team 

LeanData led by Rob Simmons 

Best Sales Development Technology 

Regie.ai led by Matt Millen 

CONGRATULATIONS to all our winners!

This is the future of Sales Development.

Sales Development used to be a numbers game. "Smile and Dial."

Make enough calls, knock on enough doors, send out enough emails, and eventually, you’d set an appointment. 

The arrival of the digital age changed the platforms, but not the overall strategy: send out enough emails, make enough cold calls, spend enough on ads, and eventually, you’d land an appointment. 

But as Sales Development teams grew and technology was created to support them, it unleashed a spam tsunami on the buyer community. If you could mass email ten people, you could just as easily mass email tens of thousands. 

Concurrently, as Demand Generation became an accepted practice, SDRs spent time sifting through inbound leads looking for anything worth calling. While efficient, it doesn’t allow for specific targeting. 

For some companies, especially targeting Enterprise accounts, instead of the traditional spray-and-pray system, they have taken a laser-focused approach to crack into new accounts. 

Enter the world of Account-Based Sales Development.  

Sales Development and the Big Fish

At its simplest, Account-Based Sales Development is a technique that targets accounts identified as a best-fit and highest return. It’s personalized marketing for an audience of one account. 

It eschews casting a wide net in favor of precision fishing using bait specifically chosen for a single target.  As Jon Miller puts it, it’s spearfishing versus net fishing. 

And while it may seem like putting all your eggs into one proverbial basket, it can be very profitable and lucrative if you’ve done your homework. According to the Alterra Group:

97% of marketers achieve a higher return-on-investment from Account-Based initiatives than any other approach
Sales Development produces 208% more revenue in businesses with strong alignment between Marketing and Sales departments

The nitty-gritty details may differ, but Account-Based Sales Development has five components in common across the board:

Targeted, high return accounts
High levels of cooperation between marketing, Sales Development, sales, and customer success teams
Data is the engine that drives the machine
Buyer experiences are tailor-made
Coordinated, frequent, and active outreach

Companies using account-based methods at every stage of the customer life cycle can often limit their focus to up to 1000 accounts (38%) or even fewer than 100 (13%). 

Source

Fewer accounts mean more time and energy that can be devoted to each one. And that’s typically the difference between success and failure in modern marketing and sales: the personal touch. 

To that end, 80% of marketers and reps say Account-Based Sales Development improves customer lifetime values, and 86% report it increases win rates. 

The Account-Based Quickstart Guide

Account-Based Sales Development can be boiled down to three broad steps:

Source

Step1: Target Accounts

You want to design your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — a hypothetical description of the kind of company that would benefit most from whatever it is you’re selling — at this stage. Once you have that, go find them amongst your existing accounts and out in the real world. 

Step 2: Research Those Accounts

Once you’ve zeroed in, you can drill down on each one’s specific wants, needs, and challenges, creating unique experiences and outreach based on that data.

Step 3: Find the Gatekeepers

Which individuals at each business need to be involved in a purchase decision? What is each one looking for in a solution? Whereas your ICP is a fictionalized description of a company, here you’ll create a buyer persona for each decision-maker within it. 

Armed with those, you can craft your Sales Development outreach for the best chance of getting each to say ‘yes’ to you and your solution. 

The devil’s in the details, of course, but that’s it in a nutshell.

In the age of Big Data, automation, and digital communication platforms, you really can’t afford not to take the account-based approach. Stand out. Market and create for a target of one rather than thousands. 

Not sure where to start? Contact us at Tenbound for a no-obligation exploratory call for more details on this and other Sales Development strategies. 

Becoming a successful Sales Development Revenue Alignment leader requires three key ingredients:

Community
Consistency
​Coaching

Let’s find out why in this blog. 

In the age of the consumer, Revenue Alignment is critical to Sales Development success. No longer can Marketing, Sales Development and Sales happen in a bubble.

Revenue Alignment places customers at the heart of business success by emphasizing the importance of delivering customer-centric solutions and creating measurable outcomes.

When all teams, whether they are in Sales, Marketing, Support, R&D, or any other role, share a singular focus on customer success, everything they do adds value to the business.

For Sales Development leaders, Revenue Alignment is an enormously important opportunity. It can accelerate your career by giving you the resources needed to create a predictable revenue and pipeline model.

But success in Revenue Alignment requires three key ingredients:

Coach – someone who provides expert guidance and helps keep you accountable.
Community – a group of peers you can lean on to ask questions and learn new things
Consistency – a strategy that you follow to build up your skills and abilities

All three of the above are essential for becoming a successful Revenue Alignment leader, but the real power lies in combining them into a unified model.

Here’s why:

Coaching + community

…but no consistent system

= great ideas and connections, but little execution

You might have many great ideas and goals that you plan and discuss with your mentors, but it’s not likely to amount to much without a consistent system. You could lean on the community for support and guidance, but what you really end up with is a lot of connections and ideas but no standardized way to put them to use.

Without a consistent system, there is no structure nor discipline. As such, you try new things every day, but the lack of strategy means it’s hard to tell what works and what doesn’t in the longer term. Since Revenue Alignment is all about creating measurable outcomes, it requires strategy which, in turn, requires consistency.

Coaching + consistency

…but no community

= grinding away in isolation with little support and a high risk of burnout

Having a structured approach and being accountable are essential ingredients to becoming a successful leader in any space, and Sales Development is no exception. You might get plenty of great ideas from your mentors, but they alone cannot give you the inspiration you need to succeed in today’s highly changeable sales environment.

Without community, you end up working in isolation. However, success comes with spending time with successful people, preferably a lot of them. With the right community to lean on for ideas and support, you will always have fresh insights to discuss with your mentors. There will also be a greatly reduced risk of burnout, since you won’t always be working alone.

Community + consistency

…but no coaching

= following the crowd, but lacking your own goals

You can learn a lot from a professional peer community, and with a consistent strategy, you can also apply what you’ve learned. Unfortunately, without the right mentors, you will inevitably end up following the crowd and going with the flow. This means you’ll effectively lack your own goals, which should instead be tailored uniquely to the business you work for.

It is hard to maintain consistency if you’re relying only on a peer community. However, mentors give you a crucial point of reference that can help you distill your thoughts and ideas into plans of action. In other words, with the help of your mentors, you take what you’ve learned from your community and extract from those insights the individual objectives that matter most to you and your team.

How Tenbound can help

Tenbound takes the all-in-one approach to create success by offering:

Coaching – certified Tenbound coaches
Community – pre-screened peer community at tenboundplus.com 
Consistency – a proven Revenue Alignment process; The Tenbound Way 

Accelerate your Revenue Alignment program by joining today.

During a recent engagement on the Sales Development podcast, David Dulany from Tenbound and Kyle Coleman from Clari dove into the tenants behind driving Revenue Alignment through Sales Development.

Throughout the conversation, the duo unveiled the key forces that empower leading organizations to accelerate sales and revenue growth. 

1. Cross-Departmental Coordination

In the same way that individuals are at risk of focusing exclusively on their unique KPIs (key performance indicators), departments can lose sight of their shared organizational purpose.

When departments come together to understand the relationships that connect Sales Development, marketing, customer service, and beyond, they are in a better position to pursue their revenue-driving activities.

With reinforcement over time, these cross-departmental contributors begin speaking apples-to-apples, tracking their efforts as a revenue team while understanding the importance of each piece of the pie. 

Once cross-departmental contributions are understood, team members can strengthen their value even further by looking down the funnel.

2. Looking Down the Funnel

From Kyle’s first sales-oriented position as a financial advisor at Edward Jones to his current role as the VP of Growth at Clari, the ability to look beyond immediate KPIs has been key to making an organization-wide revenue impact. 

For example, a marketing team might be tempted to focus solely on lead generation numbers while a customer success team might base their own success exclusively on customer satisfaction metrics. Instead, what if each team member bought into the system as a whole? 

In turn, teams would be in a better position to support the entire company as opposed to their unique subset. This means asking the right questions, such as:

Are the leads that I’m generating converting down the funnel?
How will existing customers or clients translate into future revenue?
What day-to-day processes are most helpful to close deals? 
Which content items attract the prospects who are most likely to convert?
Do I understand exactly how my actions are driving revenue? 

Ultimately, each action has a direct or indirect impact on an organization’s most important goal: revenue generation. When teams understand the impact their efforts are yielding, the company as a whole is in a better position to make sound decisions and achieve overarching objectives.

3. Onboarding Unique Perspectives

Departments with uniform backgrounds yield uniform thinking. Instead of challenging the status quo on their Sales Development team, these individuals reach conventional solutions that are ineffective in the face of unconventional challenges. 

By bringing together a myriad of perspectives, encouraging team-wide collaboration, and building a culture centered on experimentation and flexibility, organizations are in a better position to unveil an optimized strategy that maximizes revenue. 

In turn, organizations can bridge the gap between lead generation and actualized revenue, developing agile approaches that are current with the ever-changing global economy. 

Interested in Learning More?

We wish you the best of luck with your Sales Development and revenue alignment efforts and invite you to tune into the Sales Development podcast for insider perspectives from leading industry experts. 

For key information, updates, and insights, be sure to visit Tenbound and Clari today!

Thank you for reading!

​In the current ever changing market, it is common for hiring managers to feel dissatisfied with the candidate pool for open SDR roles on their team. 

Having a solid process in place is the key to ensuring you have the best possible candidates to bring on your team. 

Here are 5 ways to improve your SDR hiring process, and ensure that it is working for you:

Determine your timeline.

With a clear outline and understanding of your goals, you can then work at a pace that will meet your hiring needs.  Need 4 reps within 60 days?  The time to start interviewing is approximately 30 days before your desired start date for a 1-2 week long interview process. Reset your expectations, yes you can hire fast when you have the candidates. It’s the procurement piece that will require more time especially with multiple companies competing for the same talent. 

Create a candidate scorecard

Are you comparing apples to apples when it comes to interviews? The foolproof way to ensure that you are remembering interviews correctly and assessing candidates on the same qualities and characteristics is to create a candidate scorecard.  By comparing candidates equally, you can see where they rank on your scale.  Just because someone is charming or confident does not mean that they are the best person for a Sales Development role.

Streamline your process 

An average hiring process should take no longer than 2 weeks time.  Candidates drop off, lose interest, or assume you are not enthusiastic about them for processes that take longer than this.  A solid interview process should be between 3-4 rounds to include the critical stakeholders and make an informed decision about a candidate.

Create a simple project or assignment as part of the process

Assign a project with a deadline.  Not only are you testing for skill level, you are testing for the soft skills necessary to be successful in the role.  How well does a candidate handle deadlines?  Do they ask clarifying questions? Can they perform the tasks necessary to be successful in the role?  A short project is a great way to find out!

Do not hesitate when you find a strong candidate 

The biggest mistake in the hiring process is hiring managers being unwilling to pull the trigger on solid candidates “ just to see what else is out there”.  The current start of today’s hiring market gives you zero opportunity to wait on strong candidates.  If you interview someone who earns incredible marks on your scorecard DO NOT WAIT!  There is a very strong likelihood that they are also interviewing with other companies and you can miss out on the right candidate.

Regardless of the quantity of reps you are hiring for, it can be said that one great hire is worth their weight in gold (or revenue!).  By simplifying your process, creating safeguards to keep you on track, and keeping your goals in sight, you are sure to hire great reps for your team.


Alexis Scott is the Manager of Employer Partnerships for Aspireship. She is passionate about supporting sales leaders and job seekers with hiring, career transitions and upskilling. In her downtime, she can be found volunteering to help veterans career transition through Hire Heroes USA and traveling as much as she possibly can with her family.

Scaling an Enterprise SaaS Entering Hypergrowth

People.ai is a leading revenue intelligence platform that helps customer-facing teams at enterprise companies capture sales activity to unlock growth.

After acquiring a new slate of customers and bringing on experienced marketing leadership, People.ai achieved triple-digit growth in 2020. But with meteoric growth comes challenges.

The Challenge

People.ai’s VP of Growth Marketing Joe Lee summarized the challenge ahead as he saw it:

“We needed to change from ‘do whatever it takes’ customer acquisition tactics to thinking about laying the foundations for scale... I realized improving Sales Development would be the longest lever I had to do this.”

Read on...

Click here to download full case study 

Dealing with these same challenges? Set up a call with Tenbound today to discuss your Sales Development program. Click here