This post was co-authored by Sam Laber, the Director of Marketing at Datanyze. He began his career in sales development at Gigya, where he managed a team of 8 SDRs conducting outreach in Europe and Latin America. Sam is decent at tennis, average at painting and miserable at guitar, but loves all three.
At Salesloft and Datanyze, we spend the majority of our time helping sales development teams. We’ve learned lessons from some of the best (and worst) efforts in sales development. Here are a few best practices we’ve gleaned from this experience:
1. Create An Efficient And Standardized Hiring & On-Boarding Process
a. What To Look For In Candidates, Managers, Etc
One of the key points to hire around is culture. The best SDR teams are comprised of a team that meshes strongly and follows the same core values.
At Salesloft, our core values are to hire candidates who we’d classify in the top 1% of the following traits: positive, supportive, and self-starting.
[box]A great approach when hiring a new rep is using the “canoe test.”[/box]
Let your current reps spend time with the candidate until they decide whether they would enjoy being in a canoe with them. Would they trust the new candidate to paddle? Or enjoy the time spent talking with them? Answering yes to these questions is far more valuable than hearing that he or she is a “nice person,” or “seems smart”.
Leaders such as JJ Imbeaux and Derek Grant suggest hiring millennials who don’t exhibit bad habits and are willing to prospect, cold call, and learn. The goal is to look for candidates who can “punch above their weight class” It will grow your business while simultaneously allowing the reps a chance to build a sales career.
Pro Tip: Look to hire candidates in these three industries: Recruiting (they live or die by the phone and must overcome rejection very quickly), financial services sales reps, and call center reps.
b. What To Cover In Training
The key to developing a successful SDR is to dedicate an on-boarding strategy and training process that focuses heavily on your buyer and your process.
The key on-boarding strategies that we implement at Salesloft:
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Define Expectations:
Make sure that new hires understand their role, what is required of them, who they report to, and how they know if they’re doing it well. Outline a measurement for success at the onset.
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Implement Best Practices:
Leverage the best practices that have been successful for the company to date, and to translate those into an on-boarding document that walk reps through all the steps needed in order for them to become great.
The categories of on-boarding that are essential to an SDRs success are: team culture, technology tools, process implementation, significant time spent with role-playing, and getting comfortable with the offering.
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Establish Measures of Success:
An SDR is successful when they are consistently hitting their numbers, asking good questions, and providing solid answers to objections from prospects.
A well-defined on-boarding process will position an SDR to have confidence, focus, and provide value to prospects. Sales is a game of confidence, where two people come together and the person with the most confidence has the most influence.
Provide these tools, training and support to your SDRs so that they have the resources to be successful.
c. Devise Ramping Goals
Team goals are set knowing what can be accomplished based on historical success. It takes time for reps to learn the best way to connect with prospects and feel comfortable talking about a new product. You want them to become as confident as possible, as early as possible. Give SDRs one month to gain experience and confidence before going on quota.
Outlining these goals are the onset will manage expectations from a leadership and team perspective, get results as fast as possible and eliminate micro-managing.
2. Support Personnel Growth With Account Growth
a. Identify Your Addressable And Available Markets
A good way to forecast how many SDRs your business will eventually need is to understand how many companies have the potential to buy your product and how many accounts each SDR can cover.
The former we can help with — the latter is up to you.
First, let’s define addressable and available market. Addressable market is the total revenue opportunity available for a product or service – for SaaS, this typically translates to every business that has the potential to buy your software. In contrast, the available market includes every business with the potential to buy your software, but is limited to the companies that you have the ability to support (think geographic, technical and resource constraints).
There are a variety of ways for SaaS companies to quantify both markets, such as 3rd party market research, journals and government studies; however, I think a great place to start is LinkedIn.
The below example search I did using the free LinkedIn ‘Company Search’ tool shows every business in a consumer-facing industry with over 200 employees on LinkedIn and over 100 followers. I have only included English-speaking countries, as this particular vendor does not have the resources to support other languages.
b. Consistently Grow Your Available Market
One thing every SDR manager wants to do is add more companies to the list. It gives SDRs more shots at securing a meeting, which gives the sales team more at bats.
But how can this be done?
A great way to uncover new accounts is to look at web technology data. Let’s say the example company mentioned above is a B2C analytics vendor. The below list shows all websites in the Alexa 1 million that are currently using my two main competitors: Adobe Omniture and IBM Analytics (formerly Coremetrics). That’s over 12,000 accounts with the potential to buy your product!
3. Give Your SDRs The Tools They Need To Succeed
a. Identify And Track Buying Signals
A great way to empower your SDRs is to give them the gift of timing by helping them identify and act on buying signals.
The Datanyze Alerts feature enables sales reps to setup daily email notifications highlighting websites that have added or dropped a specific technology. By revealing when a competitor’s software has been added or dropped by a target account, your SDRs will have the ammunition to send a personalized email to their prospect, knowing that the company is experimenting with software in your specific category.
b. Leverage Social Networks To Create List With The Right Contact
Salesloft leverages the power of LinkedIn for the most valuable source of accurate prospecting information on the Internet. Professionals update their pages because they feel the social pressure to keep their information fresh.
Salesloft’s Prospector application leverages this valuable LinkedIn data to provide accurate and targeted lists of leads.
The tools provides you the ability to segment prospects by location, job title, or industry to get lists tailored to your needs.
By quickly building accurate and targeted lists of leads, your Sales Development team can spend more time reaching out to prospects and setting qualified appointments and demos.