Why is your Sales Development Department Broken?

https://calendly.com/Martin_tsd/Why Your Sales Development Department is Broken

According to The Bridge Group, the average sales development rep generates 50 - 100 sales activities per day resulting in 5 conversations. Other studies year after year state that sales reps miss their quota. After spending more than 10 years in the seat as an SDR and now talking with Head of Sales and Sales Development Managers, the reason why their sales developme nt department is broken is because reps are not focusing on the fundamentals. As a society we have become so reliant on technology that we forget how to build a meaningful relationship that is built on trust, transparency, and authenticity.

How do we get back to basics and help our SDRs generate more sales activities per day resulting in more conversations with our next best customer? First off, invest in the right tech stack to accelerate your reps’ outreach efforts. If they do not have the tools to accelerate that, then they will be 5 steps behind. Then, start implementing the bucket process that we wrote about in our best-selling book, Outbound Sales, No Fluff.

Bucket 1: Uncontacted

This is a targeted list of contacts within your swim lane or your ICP. It is a perfectly curated list of prospects that have been researched, validated, and enriched. Do not go outside of your swim lane. Your reps should know that their prospect is at the company, their job title is accurate, their email is deliverable, their social profile is up to date, and/or their phone number is validated with a documented path to the prospect. This ensures your reps are not wasting precious time trying to find a profile on LinkedIn, looking for an email only to find out it has bounced, and spending time navigating phone trees, IVRs, and gatekeepers.

Bucket 2: Working

When you have your perfectly curated targeted list, your reps can start to generate their daily sales activities and start working the various channels. Do your prospects engage with a phone call? Do they respond to an email? Or are they active on LinkedIn? Far too often, reps will continue to try and engage with their prospects on one channel, create a cadence, then once that cadence is complete they move on to the next prospect. What if you knew which channel your prospects engaged on so you could spend your energy crafting your messaging for that specific channel?

Bucket 3: Priority

This bucket is all of your prospects you have talked to in bucket 2. When most SDRs hear the outcome “No”, they tend to leave that prospect and move on. However, what if you wrote some notes as to why that prospect said “No”, “Not Now”, or “Not Me”, then could follow up in a couple weeks or months from now? You would have a much warmer conversation at that point. Your priority bucket is full of previous conversations and are much easier calls to make than a completely cold call.

Bucket 4: Meeting Scheduled

This bucket is all the folks you have booked a meeting with and who you want to follow up and confirm meetings with if they have not confirmed up to 2 hours before the meeting.

The way to set your reps up for success and efficiency each day is to work your buckets in reverse order so you are spending time on all of your warm conversations first. When a rep comes into the office in the morning, they are first going to confirm anyone who has not responded to a meeting invite for the next day or today. Secondly, they are going to contact everyone in their priority basket either by phone, email, or LinkedIn. Thirdly, they are going to start reaching out to all the folks in their working basket. Lastly, they will start to build their targeted list of prospects in their swim lane.

If you would like to learn more about how you can implement buckets and start filling your sales buckets today to enable your SDRs to have 4X the number of conversations, schedule time with me for a Zoom and coffee meeting!