One critical component in sales pipeline growth is to build an effective inside sales development process with Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). SDRs improve demand generation and brand awareness through prospecting and nurturing, and discover business opportunities for sales executives (quota-carrying salespeople) to close. They also help align marketing and sales efficiently and effectively by connecting marketing and sales executives. This article explains step-by-step how to build an efficient MarTech-enabled inside sales development.
GOAL SETTING
You need to be super clear about what value you expect SDRs to create for the company. Your strategy, operations, and measurement are going to be developed based on your objectives. The following are some common goals:
- Provide sales-qualified contacts filtered from marketing-qualified contacts
- Prospecting research
- Offer personal follow-up through calls and emails
- Strengthen the connections between marketing and sales
- Improve brand awareness and develop relations between your company and target audience
Once the goals are set, you need to understand where your SDRs fit into the entire business operations. From an organizational point of view, SDRs can be a separate team parallel to marketing and sales, or it can be under marketing or sales. However, regardless of the hierarchy, from the operational point of view, SDRs are the joint connecting marketing and sales. Often marketing captures mass contacts, which could contain some noise. Through personalized air cover marketing campaigns, each contact is nurtured and scored, and marketing-qualified ones are identified. SDRs then take over these marketing qualified leads, along with the additional leads they prospected, provide a “personal touch” to further screen and nurture them and hand the sales-ready ones to sales executives.
TOOLS NEEDED
Outreach Automation Tool
This is the most important tool for SDRs. The main goal for having it is to be the front-facing tool that SDRs use daily. It should be the place for SDRs to organize tasks, prioritize leads to target based on engagement, and track engagement on their prospecting.
Marketing Automation System
- Check every touch point of your prospects
- Send personalized emails to each prospect, and track their responses in real-time
CRM
- Learn about each prospect, especially the previous conversations with sales
- Learn each target account where the prospect belongs, its relationship with your company, and any existing notes, especially ones from sales
- Learn current business opportunities of each target account
- Learn other contacts that are in the target accounts
- Enter the answers to your qualification questions and a summary of the conversation after speaking to each prospect
SDRs Task Tracker
You can choose from many tools, such as Excel, Google Sheets, etc. to construct your tracker. However, what’s important is to build a tracker that is easy for your SDRs to go through their calling lists yet provides the most insightful results. You may consider the following checkpoints as a starter:
- Campaign Name
- Calling Date
- Prospect Owner
- Prospect’s Email
- Prospect’s Name
- Calling Status
- Qualification Flag
- Conversion Date
- Next Call Date
- Email Status
- Meeting Status
- Quick Notes
BUILD YOUR CAMPAIGNS
Campaign Preparation
These are not marketing campaigns but campaigns for your SDRs to make calls. You may have a mass contact list for your SDRs to follow up. The most efficient and effective way is to segment the mass list into several sub-lists, each of which represents a campaign. The segmenting criteria are usually based on the buyer’s journey and your specific goals. For example, for people who have watched your product demo video, your primary CTA could be connecting them with sales engineers or sales executives to start a trial or make a purchase. For people who have just requested to download a gated asset, your primary CTA could be assisting them with further relevant content. For people who registered for a webinar but didn’t show up, your primary CTA could be offering them the record version and reminding them of the next webinar date if scheduled.
For each campaign, make sure you have the following items covered:
- Priority – so that SDRs can switch between different campaigns based on the priority and workload
- Campaign briefing – this describes the campaign overview and why grouping these contacts together
- Campaign size – it shows the number of contacts in the campaign
- Campaign start date and deadline
- Primary CTA and Secondary CTA
- Campaign owners – it marks which SDR owns which campaign
Study the Prospect before Calling
Before getting in touch with the prospect, SDRs need to have their homework ready – research the target contact and the target account. However, depending on SDRs roles and goals, it is sometimes recommended to do max 1-2 mins of research on a prospect for high-volume SDRs. The research can be done with outreach and marketing automation tools, CRM, as well as the periodical touching base with Sales Executives:
What to look for in the Outreach and Marketing Automation Tool:
Marketing touch points (Prospect’s behaviors)
- Forms submitted,
- Questions asked,
- Web pages visited,
- Videos watched,
- PDFs downloaded,
- Social media interactions, etc.
Prospect’s profile:
- Lead score,
- Lead source,
- Lead status,
- Job title,
- The area of interest,
- Industry, etc.
What to look for in the CRM:
- Target account: company’s overview, account score, products/services, major recent news releases, leadership, target market, customers, etc.
- Existing notes left in the CRM – this allows you to understand what happened previously and then carry on the conversation
- Target contact for any other information about this individual that is not in the Marketing Automation System, and other contacts of the target account.
- Current potentials of the target account – this is very important but often overlooked. While trying to establish a new opportunity, you don’t want to hurt any existing opportunities that are already in the pipeline. In some instances, having parallel conversations about multiple opportunities that compete or conflict with each other can jeopardize your business.
However, depending on SDRs' roles and goals, not every item above is required to be studied. For example, if the primary goal is prospecting, SDRs typically spend no more than 2 minutes doing research and will focus on outreach tools but won’t be looking at CRM at all.
Touch base with Sales Executives
To further ensure you have the right conversation about the right opportunity with the right prospect without hurting any ongoing opportunities, you need to work with your sales executives. A simple but effective way is to develop a DO NOT CALL LIST that contains all the accounts and individuals that you should not call. Add this remark to your CRM so that it can be easily toggled.
START MULTI-TOUCH FOLLOW-UP
Creating a common touch process enables your team to have a standard operation. There are many ways to build your contact tactics based on your resources, campaign, and target audience. What’s important is to make multiple touches within a defined time window. The following is an example of multi-touch in a span of three weeks.
- Place a call and leave a voice message if no answer
- Send an email if no callback
- Place a call and don’t leave a voice message if no answer
- Send LinkedIn InMail if no response yet
- Place a call and leave a voice message if no answer
- Send an email if no callback or email reply
Immediately after each touch point, make sure that you record the results, which includes updating your calling tracker, filling out qualification questions, and adding a conversation summary. You can define your frequency and span. If no response after you have gone through all your touchpoints, don’t keep pushing. You may want to hand this contact back to marketing for further nurturing before the next personal follow-up.
