Marketing automation is invaluable.
It helps score and grade leads, run outbound email and drip campaigns, letting sales and marketing teams make educated decisions. It can also track links, build forms, and post on social.
All of which can help your business thrive.
But it was built for marketers.
At its foundation it is a volume based approach. Once you start a campaign, having full control over each and every interaction is impossible.
Sales development is focused on maximizing the response rate of a smaller group of targeted prospects. It needs to automate the manual labor, but leave room for tweaks before a rep hits “send.”
Here are five reasons sales development teams should use a dedicated tool:
1. Sales Development Demands Quick Adjustments
SDRs need to have full control of their outreach process.
They need to be able to adjust any part of an email to a specific prospect before sending it. They need to add people to a cadence on the fly, and accommodate prospects who are out of the office.
A perfect sales development tool removes the manual labor and monotony of writing a new email to every prospect, while maintaining the ability to fluidly adjust an outreach scheme.
It’s maintains the balance between control and efficiency.
2. It Can Avoid Sending Through Transactional Servers
Cookie cutter mass emails end up in spam folders or promotional tabs that screams, “this is an email template.”
Sales development reps can’t allow that to happen. They need to send emails that build rapport, not ones that never get read.
3. Sales Development Is A Day-To-Day Process
SDRs build lists of targeted prospects on a daily basis.
Each and every day, SDRs are launching mini-campaigns to a very specific group of prospects.
They need a self-contained list that can be changed on an individual basis.
Reps need to be prompted exactly when to send another email or make another call, otherwise they’ll spend all their time struggling to follow up strategically.
4. It Allows Higher Customization For Logging In CRM
As reps get responses and set demos, they’re able to log notes on an individual basis.
This helps smooth the transition between SDRs and Account Executives as reps’ actions can be mapped to specific methods for tracking in CRM.
Reps can have more focused follow-ups, simply by leveraging information that’s already been logged.
5. Features Are Based On Interaction
Next steps aren’t the same for every prospect. Sales development is reactionary, so it depends on when and how they respond.
While a great tools automates the process by providing reminders and suggestions, it doesn’t take full control of what’s been sent (like many campaigns).
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What sales development really needs, is a tool all its own. One that incorporates the strengths of marketing automation (like tracking clicks and opens), as well as addressing the nuances of the sales development process.
