The Future of Sales Development, with Rob Morris of Simplus

Rob Morris is a man with Sales Development in his veins. Currently the Director of Inside Sales at Simplus, he’s been working in Sales from day one. That’s why we were so excited when he agreed to share his insights with the Tenbound team. Read on to learn how Rob got his start in Sales Development, the main challenges teams can expect in 2020, and the future of Sales Development.

Starting with door-to-door salesRob started his career in sales doing door-to-door sales years ago, a job that he loved. When his mom got sick though, he realized he couldn’t do 12-13 hours days anymore.

He learned about an SDR role at an appointment setting company and decided to give it a shot. 

In three months, he was promoted three times.

Later, he got an offer at another company to do Sales Development, and he’s loved it ever since. Now at Simplus, he’s built their process from scratch—a process that is continually evolving. As a result, they've hit or exceeded quota for 26 months in a row.
 
Sales Development challenges in 2020

Most of the challenges Sales Development teams have faced in the past will continue to be a challenge in 2020. For example, reaching the right person at a company and getting them on the phone has never been easy.

Just figuring out the right person in the first place can be hard enough. For the consulting services Simplus offers, there could be hundreds of potential personas to reach out to at any one company. 

Hiring is a constant challenge in the SDR role, especially when you're looking for experienced people. What Simplus does is very complex, so Rob isn’t looking for people that need to be trained from scratch. It’s hard to find someone with two years of SDR experience when most people don't even want to be in an SDR role for two years. 

The Future of Sales Development

When you're dealing with anyone, their favorite topic of conversation is themselves. Pseudo personalization is quite easy, for example looking up where a prospect went to school and mentioning their team mascot.

But genuine personalization, where you’re able to explore their interests and personalize in a relevant way, is much harder to do at scale. Like it or not, the name of the game is still volume, and tailoring a stack of pitches so they’re truly personalized takes time.

When someone finds a way to make it possible to send 200+ truly personalized emails every day, that’ll change the industry forever. 
 
QUICKFIRE ROUND

Rob’s Sales Development stack

• Salesforce (CRM)
• ZoomInfo (contact data) 
• Orum (multiline dialer) 
• Outreach (email cadences and click-to-call solution)
• Bombora (intent data)

The tech tools that didn’t deliver

• 6sense. “We got it to map our whole digital strategy with our account-based marketing, but it just didn't map well for us.”
• G2 (paid version). “The only people that requested our services were low-level companies that we don't want.”
• Vidyard. “Another one that we tried, but video doesn't fit our model.” 
• Nova. “Personalization is important (see above), but this didn’t deliver what we needed.”

Conclusion

​Working his way up from door-to-door sales to Director of Inside Sales has given Rob a comprehensive overview of the Sales Development world. Some challenges, such as finding the right prospect and hiring experienced SDRs never change. However, focusing on personalization and finding ways to scale that is the key to future success.

If you’re looking for ways to improve your Sales Development program and overcome those challenges, contact us at Tenbound today for a no-obligation exploratory call.