Why Sales Development Reps Fail and What to do About it

The Sales Development role is arguably the most difficult job in your organization as they attempt to book meetings with potential clients - however, the SDR responsibility often falls onto young, inexperienced workers who often fail. The SDR is your company's first impression to many of their prospects; doesn't it make sense to give this responsibility to someone who knows what they are doing?

The grim reality is that many SDRs fail within the first 10 months of their employment. As leaders, we ask, “What happened? Where did we go wrong? It is easy to blame the people; they just weren't cut out for it.” It is also easy to blame the company, “We did not provide enough leads, and we didn't train them.” Of course, there is some reality to both of these hypotheses. That being said, what I have found, is the reason for failing almost always stems from one of 5 key areas - here are those areas and how to prevent them from becoming the point of failure for your SDR team

Motivation

The first area to look into is your reps personal level of motivation, this can manifest in many ways. For example, they don't see “the light at the end of the tunnel” and feel like there is nothing they are working towards. If a sales development representative does not see an attainable path to promotion, or to hitting their quota, they won’t be able to motivate themselves enough to perform at their highest level. This is not to say that leadership should lower quota or make promotion easier, though in some cases this might be the correct action. More often it is about perception and this comes from leadership as well as the other representatives on your team.

Finding out what motivates each individual on your team is very important and should be a part of your onboarding process. When you have a SDR that lacks motivation it can be a challenge to find out the source. Often times it ties into one of our other categories I mention in this article, there may be an attitude issue, lack of strategy, or they just don't have the confidence to do the job. When it comes to keeping the team motivated a lot of that will come from leadership. People want a leader that they trust and look up to. Someone they respect and feel that they can learn from. It is important to be your team's leader, not their friend.

Every person has a different set of needs that they require on a subconscious level to feel good about themselves. For example, many people feel good about their own personal growth. If they don’t feel like they are growing in any way they will lose motivation for their current role or project. SDRs should not be looked at as people doing the “busy work.” They should be viewed as the future faces of your company and be respected and trained as so. If you aren't promoting the SDRs within your organization then there is a bigger problem.

Attitude

Another area to investigate is attitude and this is one of the most dangerous problems that your sales team can encounter because it is contagious. The biggest challenge with attitude is reversing the damage that it causes. Often times this is caused by a lack of transparency within the organization. The worst case scenario is you end up in a situation where one person's negativity “infects” all of the other members of your team.

If you have a team of negative SDRs you will have a real challenge helping anyone be successful. Furthermore, if you hire new people they are likely to adopt the same mentality as the people around them. Because of this, it is easy to feel “stuck.” The question to ask yourself here is WHY is there a negative outlook, a lack of trust, or issue of leadership. Once you answer the “why” you can move on to finding a solution.

For example, if your SDRs are lacking motivation because of the negativity of your team, your job is to figure out where that negativity is coming from. Sometimes it is founded through leadership as they haven’t been doing right by their employees and this would obviously be a huge problem that needs to be addressed immediately. More often, however, negativity is there because the team has a skewed perception. This can happen because of lack of communication, no transparency, or because an employee is a pessimist and only sees the bad. All of these causes can be solved; your job is to figure out WHAT is causing the negativity. From there you can take the actions necessary to rectify the situation.

Strategy

It is very common that a SDR may not feel like they have a handle on what they need to do to be successful, this comes down to strategy. Every SDR will have a different way of organizing their day or a different strategy that they use to book meetings. This is normal; promoting creativity with prospecting is great for everyone. The problem is some SDRs who are new and learning may not be able to find a way that works for them right off the bat. This is why we tend to see longer “ramp-up” times than we would like. The reason usually boils down to structure; what environment is the new SDR walking into?

Having a mapped out strategy for incoming SDRs is a great start but it isn't the end all be all. There is an indoctrination process that is necessary for a sales development rep to retain and fully adopt your process. Without this process, your mapped-out strategy won't stick, and you will be asking yourself where you went wrong. The key thing to remember is it isn’t just about having a strategy for your SDRs, it's about how you motivate them to take action with that strategy. You want your team on the same page about what works and what doesn't. Leave room for their own creativity and let them test different techniques. Just make sure that they have a fallback plan that, if their idea doesn't work, they can depend on.

Organization

It seems simple but another area that can be the cause of struggle is organization. You would think that a recent college graduate would know a thing or two about being organized but that isn't always the case. Regardless if your SDR is a recent college grad or not, it is always surprising to me that organization isn’t as much of a focus as it should be. A lot of it has to do with the tools we have available to us. How can we have a problem with our organization if our CRM automates so much of our work? The reality is salespeople are moving a mile a minute and will spend time on what they value. If they do not value inputting in valuable notes then they will forget this task regularly.

If you have been in a sales position for a long enough time you know the value of keeping good notes, funnel management, and following-up. The problem comes when someone doesn't understand the value of these things and they don't develop the habit of keeping them all together. Building these habits come with structure and actually holding your team accountable. Very few people enjoy writing notes after a call, but the benefits outweigh the time it takes to do it.

Making these tasks mandatory is only half of the battle, holding your team accountable is the other half. This is what your one-on-one or group meetings should be helping to enforce. Asking your team what happened on calls, checking in on their funnel, and how many follow-up calls they have. The average sales manager will ask some of these questions so they can fill out a spreadsheet to show their boss. That isn’t your goal here; you should be doing this for THEM, not so you look good with some extra data points.

Confidence

The most important and the hardest key area to help a SDR with is confidence. If a sales development rep lacks confidence it is virtually impossible for them to succeed. When someone is new to the job it is normal for them to lack confidence on the phone. Often times we are asking someone with little experience to speak with C-Level executives; their nerves are justified. For some new SDRs, they get over these nerves with practice. For others, it can be a crippling experience that will ultimately lead to their failure. “Sales isn't for me,” is a common phrase to those who can’t gain the confidence they need to make a cold call.

It is quite the challenge to build a reps confidence because a lot of it is self-inflicted. It is easy to write people off as being “not cut out for sales” and move on but this is taking the easy way out. Confidence comes quickly to some people and slowly to others and as a leader, you must figure out what kind of person your rep is. Are they going to get confidence by making more calls or are they the type of person who needs to be rewarded for even their smaller successes?

For example, let's say you have a sales development rep that is very hard on themselves. This can work in their favor, pushing them to make more calls and strive to better their performance. However, for some people, this could form as negative reinforcement; they will be overcome with self-doubt and ultimately fail. For those reps, you must reward them for small successes. Teach them how to celebrate the little wins and lighten up on themselves. Anyone can meet with a team once a week and go over metrics and this is a manager's job. A great manager leads with awareness of the needs of the individuals on their team.

Everyone has limiting beliefs, things that they believe that negatively impact their outlook. Some people hold these beliefs in areas that will affect their confidence on the phone. An example would be someone who believes that cold calls are annoying for prospects. If they believe that to the extent that it affects their ability to have quality calls with prospects they won't succeed as a sales development rep. It is a manager's job to identify what is keeping their rep from being successful and working to overcome that. Giving up on someone because they lack confidence is a cop out, focus on those people and help them overcome their limiting beliefs. You will impact them in a way that not only will help the whole team succeed but will help them succeed throughout their careers.

*****

Having a sales development rep work for months only to fail to meet performance standards is a tough pill to swallow for everyone involved. It is tough for the company because they spent money onboarding a new employee only to never see a return on that investment. It is hard for the rep because they came into the company excited with the willingness to succeed. It hurts leadership, they hired that person because they felt that they could succeed. A reps ability to succeed is in the best interest of the entire organization, so what do we do to prevent failure?

We must identify what is causing the failure and work to correct that issue before it spirals out of control. Talking to your reps is the most important piece to this puzzle, as leaders we must keep our hand on the pulse of what is happening within our team. If one of your reps is struggling you must find out why, and this goes beyond just asking them. Diving deep into the core issue: Is it a problem with their belief system? Are they surrounded by negativity? Do they have trouble staying organized? Once you can accurately identify what is causing them to struggle you can then begin to work on solving it.

There are 5 reasons your sales development reps can fail, and each of them is just as crippling as the next. We've covered how to identify and mitigate all 5 reasons, now it's time to take action.

Everyone has different methods on how to solve some of the core causes of poor work performance. Comment below if you have had success helping someone overcome a problem in one of the five key areas: confidence, organization, strategy, attitude, and/or motivation.

Interested in learning more? I just launched my book, Cold to Committed: Find leads, engage prospects, and book more meetings. To celebrate I have made the kindle version on the book free for 5 days. Feel free to share this link with your SDR team and happy hunting!

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