Sales Development with Smarter GTM?

Because of the importance of the human touch, sales development reps (SDRs) — also known as account development reps (ADRs) or business development reps (BDRs) — are the most important and common channel for engaging accounts in Smarter GTM?. Help them succeed and you dramatically increase your overall program performance.

In many companies, outbound prospecting by sales development reps was the sales department’s response to the inability of traditional demand generation tactics to make inroads into major accounts. Done poorly, sales development activities are run in a silo, completely uncoordinated with marketing.

But now, Smarter GTM? brings marketing and outbound sales development into alignment, focusing efforts across teams in a coordinated way.?

In this model, companies combine email, phone, and personalized social media interactions with marketing support and air cover to develop and deepen relationships at target accounts.

This goes way beyond simple sequences or cadences. Buyers can spot robo-spam a mile away. Smarter GTM? done right brings deep research and personalization to ensure each touch is relevant and personalized. Instead of sending more emails, it sends better emails.

Avoid templated emails

“Dear <insert SDR Name>: Please avoid sending me emails that are obviously automated.”

– Every executive ever

Sending generic, templated emails is bad enough for small deals. For the big opportunities, you’ve really got to raise your game. It’s so easy for your target to hit the spam button — why would you ever risk your ability to communicate with the most important people from the most important accounts by sending them a generic, irrelevant message?

The degree of personalization will vary by GTM style:

• One:One — Highly personalized, with little or no templating
• One:Few — Personalized, perhaps using the 10/80/10 approach (highly personalize the first and last 10 percent)
• One:Many — Customized rather than personalized (e.g., targeted to their industry and persona, uses their name and perhaps references an intent keyword)

The goal is to make sure the prospect feels the email really is written to him or her, as an individual. That’s not a trick, it’s the truth (if not, you’re doing it wrong). If you can swap out basic variables, such as name and company, and then send the email to someone else, then you probably have “robo-spam.”

Fortunately, SDRs have a lot of insights available to personalize the interaction: intent keywords, web pages they’ve visited, the content they’ve downloaded, and more.

A sample SDR play

Pre-designed plays are a way to ensure that all reps follow best practices throughout their account development work — from the first touch to the last — and that these touches are coordinated with marketing and account execs.

A sample play

Here’s a sample play based on one from TOPO, showing SDR and marketing touches.

Multi-threaded sales development tactics

If you have a hot marketing qualified account, a “no” from one contact is not a reason to stop. You know someone from that account is showing buying signs, so keep going until you find a “yes.” At a minimum, follow what experts call the “Two Nos” rule: An account should never be marked "no contact" until at least two of the key personas have said no.

Even then, deals that move forward on the basis of just one or two buyer contacts are the most likely to fail. Your contact can get sick, go on vacation, or leave the company — stalling or killing your deal. That’s far too high a risk for the deal sizes we’re talking about. You need to build connections with as many members of the buying / influencing team as possible.

This is called multi-threading. The term comes from the world of computer programming. It refers to a program or operating system that can handle multiple user requests — or threads — at a time. A nice metaphor for the simultaneous relationship building in Smarter GTM?.

Note: Above is an excerpt from my book, The Definitive Guide to Smarter GTM? with Account Intelligence and ABM/ABX. If you’d like your free copy, you can download it here.