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The metric, Average Deal Size  is one of the most powerful and least utilized levers for increasing overall sales. 

When companies think of increasing their sales, they typically think of hiring more sales reps, attending more conferences, or running more marketing programs. While these may increase sales, they will also increase costs at the same or greater rate. In other words, these are not scalable strategies.

So, how can companies increase sales without a proportional increase in costs?

Increasing the average deal size doesn’t incur any associated costs. It doesn’t require a change in your product price—therefore, your ROI remains the same. It just means you sell more per opportunity.

Therefore, it doesn’t require any new activity. Nothing is changed at the product level—no additional product reconfiguration or support is required. It comes about by changing how your prospective buyers see their own problem (s) and solution (s). It is about the effectiveness of your sales organization in bringing about this change in the buyer’s viewpoint.

Before we discuss how to change it, let’s first discuss the most useful way to look at your Average Deal Size.

The Right Way to Think About Average Deal Size

When we ask clients what their Average Deal Size is, we typically get a response like, “Well, it ranges from ‘x’ to ‘y…’’ or “I will have so and so run those numbers for you since it changes from year to year…”

We reply back, “Can you give us a list of all the deals each of your sales rep closed in the past 12 months? What we need is the amount and the name of the sales re.”. We then create a chart similar to the one you see below. Please note that the numbers below are simply for illustration purposes and yours could be quite different.

Let’s unpack the above chart.

• The chart shows the sales performance for ten (10) sales reps in the order of their total sales for a given period.
• All ten reps sell into comparable territories and have access to all the products/services that the company offers.
• We grouped the ten reps in three tiers to show their effectiveness at selling the company’s products and services: the top two reps in Tier 1; the next four reps in Tier 2: and the bottom four in Tier 3.
• If we simply took all 100 deals sold by the ten reps and divided it by the total Sales ($5.81 million), we would arrive at $58,145 as the average deal size.
• However, when we look at the Average Deal Size (ADS) by tier, we see starkly different numbers. In fact the ADS for Tier 1 is 3.4 times that of Tier 3 and 2.1 times that of Tier 2. 
• This is the same as saying that Tier 1 sales reps are three times as effective as Tier 3 reps, and twice as effective as Tier 2 reps This is a huge gap in sales effectiveness!
• One more point to note:  you will notice that the top tier reps work on fewer deals than the bottom tier reps—which is again, an indication of gaps in sales effectiveness.

Closing The Sales Effectiveness Gap to Improve Overall Sales Growth

Next, let’s see what happens to overall sales growth when we close the effectiveness gap—i.e. We closed the Average Deal Size (ADS) gap between the top and bottom sales performers.

Let’s say we improved the ADS of Tier 2 and Tier 3 reps by 33.34% two thirds 66.67% respectively. You may ask, “Why not improve it by the same amount?”. We are just following the nature of how change happens: It is easier and quicker to change the performance of those who have a lot to improve than those who have less to improve. For instance, it is easier to improve our grade from ‘D’ to ‘C’ than from ‘C’ to ‘B’—it gets harder to go from ‘B’ to ‘A’ and significantly harder to go from ‘A’ to ‘A+’.

So, to make this a practical exercise, we will improve the bottom performers at twice the rate of the middle performers—who are also being improved at a sizable rate.

Let’s unpack this second chart.

We see that the Average Deal Size (ADS) for Tiers 2 and 3 have been adjusted by 33.34% and 66.67% respectively.

• We see that the gap in sales performance between the top and bottom performers was cut to 2.1 from 3.4. Rather than the top performers being three times as effective as the bottom performers, they are now twice as effective. Similarly, the gap between the Top and middle tier also improved to just 1.5 times (50% more) as effective, rather than twice as effective. 
• We also see that the total sales improved by nearly 14% to $6.62 million—without any change to sales payroll or marketing expenses. I don’t know about you, but I consider increasing sales by 14% without any additional spending a pretty good deal.

But, can we do more?

Stage 2 Improvements to Maximize Sales Growth

Remember what we said earlier? That increasing the performance of those who have a lot to improve is relatively easier than those who are reaching peak performance? Following that principle, we continue to work on the bottom performers first before going to the middle tier

What happens if we improve the performance of Tier 3 by another 30%?

• We see that we closed the gap between Tier 1 (top performers) and Tier 3 (bottom performers) some more to just 1.6 times. Or, Tier 1 reps are now just 60% better than tier 3—not 340% better, which is where we started.
• Also, the total sales grew by 45% from what it was when we started—again, with no additional spending required!

Next, what if we improved Tier 2 by another 15%?

Now, we see that Tier 2 is within 30% of the performance of Tier 1.

And, sales are 54% higher than when we started at $8.93 million.

In other words, we achieved a 54% increase in sales—without any additional spending or product change—simply by improving the performance of the sales team.

Next, let’s see how we can do that.

Factors That Driver the Average Deal Size

So, what drives the average deal size? Why did Tier 1 reps show average deal sizes that were 3.4 times larger than the tier 3 performers?

At its essence, the Average Deal Size metric is a function of three factors:

1. The Buyer’s pain – how compelling and urgent it is
2. The Seller’s Product Value Proposition – how clear and compelling it is with respect to the Buyer’s pain and needs.
3. The Sales reps competency – how well the sales rep can discover the Buyer’s pain, show the Buyer’s the extent of the problem in quantifiable terms, demonstrate the ability of the Seller’s solution in addressing the pain, and proving to the Buyer that the Seller’s solution is the most cost-effective and best fit of all alternatives.

Therefore, the key variable is #3—a particular sales rep’s competency. The Buyer’s pain and the Seller’s solution are common to all your sales reps. The most competent sales rep will make the most out of any given sales situation and generate the largest deal size possible there.

What do we mean by Sales Competency?

Our last question is: What drives sales rep competency? What makes one sales rep two or three times more effective than another?

The difference is competency as demonstrated by value to the buyer. If the Buyer perceives your sales rep as immensely valuable to her, she will trust that sales rep’s recommendations. If not, she sees that sales rep as a waste of her time.

Everyone wants to talk to the relevant Subject Matter Expert (SME)—Buyers do, so do your own internal people, suppliers, partners, even your competitors. The SME has insights into how to solve a big and pressing problem that others don’t.

But, becoming a SME takes years of dedicated work, which is why there are so few true SMEs. And, it is the nature of the SME to want to be an expert—to have the curiosity, interest, drive, and work ethics to be an expert.

Your average sales reps likely don’t have these characteristics—at least not to the extent necessary to be a SME.

However, even the average sales rep can be Subject Matter Knowledgeable (SMK), which means that he or she is still of great value to the prospective Buyer and certainly not a waste of her time.

Here is a checklist to help you analyze and resolve gaps in performance within your sales team:

The Average Deal Size Maximizer Checklist

Industry Knowledge

1. Do your sales reps understand the industry or segment into which they are selling? Do they understand the dynamics of that industry—how companies in that space compete and make money?
2. Can they outline the key challenges this industry faces?
3. Do they see where the major trends are for this industry?
4. Can they help prospective Buyers identify and navigate through the opportunities and threats that are unfolding in the near future?

Buyer Persona Knowledge

1. Have your reps carefully picked who they want to speak with?
2. Can they picture the daily life of that prospective Buyer? Do they know what she deals with, what she is responsible for, what she is expected to deliver?
3. Do they understand how she is measured and compensated? What risks and rewards are she keeping her eyes on?
4. Do they know who her influencers are? Where does she get her trusted information from?

Uncovering Pain

1. Do your sales reps know how to get your prospective Buyers to open up and talk to them freely? Why would prospective Buyers do that and when will they do that?
2. Do your reps know what to research themselves and what to ask Buyers? Do they know in what order they need to ask questions so that the Buyer is more and more willing to share information?
3. Are your reps equipped with the right follow up questions to ask so that the Buyer begins to see the magnitude of her problem and sees it urgently for herself?
4. Do they know how to ask the questions in such a way that the Buyer volunteers to bring in others so the scope of the problem is now much bigger than it was initially thought to be?

Dollarizing Pain

1. Does your sales rep know how to ask the necessary background questions so he can do basic calculations to turn the problems discussed into dollars for the potential Buyer?
2. Can your sales rep create a compelling presentation around this so that the cost of the solution is far less than the cost of the problem?

If your sales rep can competently do the above, not only are they likely to increase their Average Deal Size, but also close these deals at a higher rate.

This is essentially what your top reps are doing: they are focusing on fewer opportunities, doing a thorough job of helping their prospects understand their situation and how to improve it, and thereby closing large deals at a higher ratio.

So, What Does This All Mean?

If you have read this far, you are wondering if what is required here is sales training. Sure, sales training is useful and probably a good idea to have your reps go through sales training once every year or every other year. 

However, numerous studies show that we tend to forget about half of what we have learned within days.

A more effective way of improving the performance of your Tier 3 and Tier 2 reps is to provide them with the tools that help them effectively navigate through a prospecting or a discovery call—having the answers to the questions in the checklist above at their fingertips while they are doing the prospecting or discovery call.

Customers who use the SOMAmetrics Intelligent Prospecting solution are realizing up to 50% improvement in their sales pipeline within 90 days.If you would like to discuss this more, please click here to schedule a call at your convenience.

New Revenue Math

To make money and create wealth, businesses must drive predictable revenue growth at a flat or declining cost curve. Yet, while a few companies know how to achieve this on a consistent basis, many struggle to grow without a correspondingly increasing marketing and sales cost. That’s why the modern B2B seller needs new revenue math.

Why is it difficult for B2B sellers to predictably grow their revenues and do so without a corresponding high marketing and sales cost?

We will get to the reasons shortly, but first, let’s introduce the new revenue math for driving predictable revenue growth at a declining cost curve (PRG@DCC).  That should be the goal for any business—predictable revenue growth attained at a declining cost curve.

Why it’s Hard to Generate Predictable Revenue Growth without New Revenue Math

Let’s start by understanding why predictable revenue growth is hard to achieve in the first place. There are at least four good reasons why:

• There are now more B2B Sellers than B2B Buyers
• Geographic boundaries no longer protect any firm from remote competition
• B2B Buyers are getting harder and harder to reach
• B2B buyers are far less brand loyal than ever before

Furthermore, each creates a situation that exacerbates the others, and the vicious cycle escalates like a cyclone.

More B2B Sellers than B2B Buyers

There are now some 233 million businesses worldwide. Of these, roughly 22% are B2B companies, which means there are roughly 51 million B2B companies worldwide.

To understand how this impacts B2B Sellers, think of the Fortune 5000 companies. Let’s assume that there are an average of 1,000 decision makers per Fortune 5,000 company. That means there are about five million decision makers worldwide.

If there are roughly 51 million B2B companies worldwide, then the ratio of Sellers to Buyers is about 10:1 That’s a lot of competition.

Now, you might say that you only compete with two or three companies, but that is mostly incorrect. If you are targeting Jane Doe who heads the marketing division in ABC Corp, then everyone who targets Jane Doe competes with you for her limited budget regardless of what you or they sell.

And that’s just the easy part to figure out. If you think about what competes for Jane Doe’s limited attention, then you have a big problem. You will have to include tens of thousands more consumer product vendors. After all Jane is a consumer too.

Geographic Boundaries are Mostly Irrelevant

You probably have heard of the saying “location, location, location”. It’s now mostly irrelevant, even for B2C companies. During the COVID lockdown, B2C firms had to go eCommerce and sell to anyone regardless of where they were located, if they wanted to survive.

 Practically all goods today can be shipped to wherever the customers are. Even heavy manufactured goods such as lumber and steel beams can be shipped now to anywhere.

There are literally no B2B good or services that can be protected by physical boundaries. Your competitors can be anywhere in the world and compete with you in your backyard.

B2B Buyers are Getting Harder to Reach

With the alarming ratio of ten B2B Sellers for each B2B Buyer we saw, you can imagine how many calls, emails, and text messages B2B buyers receive each day. B2B buyers also happen to be consumers, and so, in addition to the vast amount of B2B spam they receive, they also get endless B2C spam calls, emails, and texts as well.

Do you blame them for hiding from all of the junk they get that adds no value to their day? You are also a B2B buyer, and you also receive similar junk all the time. You hide from that too.

And as long as we B2B Sellers continue to send out “Quick Question Jane” type of emails, Buyers will continue to hide. And they are getting really good at it.

But wait! It gets worse!

B2B Buyers are Less Brand Loyal than Before

A 2019 Accenture study showed that 80% of B2B buyers changed vendors within 24 months.

Today’s B2B Buyers are more sophisticated, more digitally savvy than ever before. Even after your best rep just spent months selling them one of your gizmos, they are back researching for a better alternative. After all, their incredibly powerful research tool (their mobile phone) is always with them wherever they go.

Your annual contracts protect you at most for a few months, not even the full year. As soon as they find something “better”, Buyers are working with the new vendor to find ways to replace your gizmo.

One more bad news and I will stop.

All of the above trends are getting worse because we, B2B Sellers, are part of the problem, not the solution. As Buyers get harder to reach, and as customers leave us for a competitor, all we seem to know how to do is try to spend our way out of the problem by hiring more people who will call more, and send out more emails and text messages.

We are making things worse by the day.

There must be a better way.

How B2B Sellers Can Drive Predictable Revenue Growth with New Revenue Math

Enough with the problems. Let’s get down to the solution.

First thing to remember is that B2B Buyers are in exactly the same situation, because they too for the most part are B2B Sellers. They too have customer churn problems. They also face huge competition.

Both Sellers and Buyers are spiraling out of control, caught in the same cyclone.

To slow down this cyclone and escape it, we must change our behavior—we need to stop being part of the problem.

For starters, we must adopt these simple, fundamental, and game-changing principles.

1. Unless we deeply understand our Buyers, we cannot help them. All we do is make noise, and increase the size of the haystack from which these Buyers will have to search for their needle (their ideal solution).
2. In order to deeply understand our Buyers, we have to laser-focus on them—we have to deeply understand their industry, how money is made, the trends of opportunities and challenges in that space; what they as decision makers do in their organization, what their responsibilities and goals are, what risks and challenges they face, how they are compensated…
3. Once we deeply understand them, then we must put them first and show them how we can help address their challenges. It has to be all about them. Every email, every voicemail, every text message, every conversation has to add new value to them. Win trust and confidence first, then win their business.
4. Make it easy for them to find us. They need to find the needle (you) in the haystack. That means a lot of very good SEO and a lot of hours spent crafting email subject lines and preview texts, voicemails, and text messages. Differentiate yourself not just from the ten other B2B companies you compete with, but also from the thousands of B2C companies that target your buyer.

These four changes are the foundation for the new revenue math: PRG@DCC

• Increase your sales pipeline by 10% and the quality of the pipeline by another 10% and you will see a 21% increase in sales at no additional cost.
• Increase each by 15% respectively and you will see a 32% increase in sales at no additional marketing or selling cost.

How B2B Sellers Can Control Costs with New Revenue Math, while Driving Predictable Revenue Growth

A very wise man called Peter Drucker once said, “The less an organization has to do to produce results, the better it does its job.” This is a profound observation that can fundamentally change the cost structure of any organization.

What Drucker is telling us is that results are found in the quality, not the quantity of what we do.

And yet, as we have lamented above, most B2B Sellers focus on the quantity of activities they produce. Activities are just another name for cost. When we increase the number of activities, it is almost a given that we also increase costs, but there is no reason to assume sales will grow as fast, let alone faster than the costs.

Nine simple initiatives to see a 21% increase in sales at no additional cost:

1. Identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – forget meaningless “verticals” like manufacturing or healthcare. Each can be segmented into dozens or even hundreds of highly profitable ICPs.
2. Make sure your CMO focuses all of her marketing budget and resources (email, social, advertising, event and other campaigns) on these few, highly targeted ICPs
3. Make sure that your Sales Development team is focused on only these ICPs and that each SDR focuses on only one ICP and fully understands what’s going on in that ICP.
4. Ensure that each SDR intimately knows the three personas for that ICP—the target role that needs the benefit derived from the solution you are selling, his or her boss who is the final decision maker, and the manager under your target role. Your SDR must clearly understand each persona: his or her role in the company, responsibility, top-of-mind concerns and pains, and how your solution can remove these.

But also:

5. Ensure each SDR has no more than 100 accounts with the three personas at any given time so he or she can adequately reach out to each in order to connect with them. It is far better to call 300 people 10 times than 3,000 people once.
6. Arm your SDRs with at least six (6) emails and voicemails per persona. Do not let them write their own emails or craft their own voicemails. That’s when your team becomes part of the problem. Have the emails and voicemails crafted for them professionally to use.
7. Emails can be automatically sequenced, but calls must be made manually after researching the company and understanding what the company sells and to whom.
8. Once your SDRs connect, they must talk at a high level to immediately prove to the prospect that your company is different, understands their challenges, and can really help them. Then, having earned permission, your SDR can ask a few questions to pre-qualify, and if appropriate, book the meeting for the Sales Rep.
9. Use automated nurture emails to send high-value content to the prospect to keep her engaged, and have your SDR call to remind the prospect 48 hours before the meeting and then the day before the meeting. Each voicemail should add a new value, perhaps a quick customer story, or an interesting stat.

Change the size and quality of your pipeline

These nine fairly small initiatives will change the size and the quality of your pipeline—by at least 10% each. If you do that, you will see a 21% increase in sales from the pipeline developed.

But it is also very possible that you can increase the size and quality by 15%, or even 20%. In that case, you will see a 32% or 44% increase in sales respectively. You can do the math yourself and verify.

To summarize, improve the quality of your prospecting programs and see a dramatic increase in sales without any increase in your sales or marketing spend. That’s powerful. That’s the new revenue math for the modern B2B Seller.

About SOMAmetrics

SOMAmetrics builds and delivers solutions that drive predictable revenue growth at the lowest cost by dramatically improving our clients’ pipeline development operations. 

Ask us about SIP, the most complete pipeline development solution to help all your prospect facing teams increase their sales pipeline by at least 50% in 90 days.

In most of the organizations we work with, we typically see a significant performance gap between the top and bottom performers. In this article, we will focus on the SDR performance gap because it is an especially glaring problem due to the following reasons:

1. The role is considered entry level, and companies invest very little in it in terms of pay, training, or support.
2. Consequently, most companies tend to hire very junior people for the SDR role, typically straight out of college or with just 1-2 years of work experience.
3. Because of the lack of support for the role, many new hires find it difficult to succeed.
4. As a result, it has one of the highest attrition rates (at around 37%) and the average tenure is less than 18 months
5. Which only causes companies to hire cheap and invest very little as they consider their SDRs as merely transient employees, perpetuating the problem.

What Sets Top Performers Apart

The ones that tend to be successful SDRs are those who, through their own efforts and initiatives, figured out what they need to know in order to say the right things to the right prospect—and get a quality meeting.

In this article, we will first examine the SDR performance gap and its adverse impact on sales. Then we will examine the potential reasons for that performance gap. And finally, we will recommend an approach to close that SDR performance gap.

The Adverse Impact of the SDR Performance Gap

To illustrate the impact that a SDR performance gap can have on sales performance, let’s start with some assumptions:

• Average sales price (ASP): $100,000
• Average quarterly pipeline target per SDR: $1.8 million
• Number of SDRs on your team: 5
• Below, we will show the performance distribution for the team of five as follows

In other words, the top SDR (1) is at 100% of quota, and has double the performance of the bottom two SDRs (who are at 50% of quota).

The result is that this SDR team currently produces an average of $5.9 million in quarterly sales pipeline, where the top SDR produces 30% of the quota (pulling more than his/her share).

Another Illustrative Example

Now, take a look at this new chart.

In this second chart, we increased the performance of the bottom two SDRs by 50% each, without changing any other SDR performance.

That alone increased the quarterly sales pipeline by 15% (from $5.94 million to $6.84 million). 

This is very significant. A 15% pipeline improvement typically translates into 15% sales increase from the same pipeline, all things remaining the same.

Assuming we are in agreement that closing the SDR performance gap between the highest and lowest performers is important, we will next examine why this happens.

Why SDR Performance Gaps Exist

In many of the companies we work with, we typically find that, while they provide exhaustive training to their new sales hires, they don’t necessarily invest as much in their SDR training.

• They use the same training content, only removing parts that they don’t think SDRs need to know.
• The training is typically about the company’s product(s), with minimal training in basic prospecting techniques, and training on the company’s CRM and call automation tools the SDR will be using.

That’s it.

And while most sales execs have extensive sales experience before joining the company, the average SDR typically has less than two years of experience if that.

In short, the average SDR is left to his or her own devices to figure out how to get qualified meetings. 

Therefore, those with the strongest work ethics and drive take it upon themselves to:

1. Learn about the prospects they are calling (their roles, industries, pains, concerns, etc)
2. Take extensive notes on each call and figure out why they weren’t able to get a meeting, what objections they received and how to overcome them in future.
3. Figout out why a prospect who agreed to meet didn’t bother to show up and what they can do to prevent that in future
4. Read sales books and learn better prospecting techniques
5. Find a mentor on the sales side and discuss each call with them to see what words and phrases they can use to improve their pitch, and so on.

That’s why they excel. To the extent the rest of your SDRs do some of the above, they will find relative  success. Those who don’t will struggle to get any results, and either quit in frustration or are fired. Either way, back to square one for you in finding a replacement.

As the Head of Sales Development, the question to you is: how realistic is it that you can staff your SDR team with ONLY super-driven hires?

In especially very tight labor markets, you are more likely to find ordinary candidates. You just need to figure out how to transform them into high performers. 

Next, let’s explore how you can do that.

Fixing the SDR Performance Gap

Remember that practically every SDR you have hired is reasonably intelligent, presentable, and sufficiently proficient at basic (college level) skills, or you wouldn’t have hired them.

Your challenge is how to use that basic foundation and transform that individual into a high performer. To do that, ask yourself what your best SDRs know that enables them to excel. Do they…

1. Know the industry that they are calling into pretty well?
2. Understand the role of the person they are calling—what they are responsible for, what their pains and concerns are, what risks they face and so on?
3. Know which competitors they face under which scenarios, and what the relative strengths and weaknesses of these competitors are?
4. Have questions to ask and in a sensible order, to get the prospect to feel like this is not a waste of their time and keep them engaged?
5. Know how to pitch their product to precisely this person in this industry?
6. Know how to manage any objections they get and get the prospect’s interest piqued enough to agree to a meeting?

Situational Fluency

We call the sum total of the above Situation Fluency—the ability to customize a conversation based on who you are talking to in such a way that the prospect believes he or she is talking to an insider. Your top SDRs have high Situational Fluency, while your bottom performers don’t.

If you were to have some way of delivering Situational Fluency to every SDR, then even your most junior hires will sound like experts when talking to a prospect—and consequently book quality meetings on a regular basis.

Which is why we built the SOMAmetrics Intelligent Prospecting solution (SIP) that delivers expert-level situational fluency for every product you sell.

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.

SDR Best Practices – Knowing the Inflection Points

There are four inflection points in a SDRs workflow from the moment of starting to dial a prospect, to a booked meeting that goes on the sales executive’s pipeline: Improving Connect Rates, Improving Conversion Rates, Meeting Attendance Rate, and Meeting Acceptance rate.

We will discuss each the fourth one in detail below.

4. Best Practices for Meeting Acceptance Rates

So far, we have been talking about how we maximize booked meetings—focusing on quantity. At this point, we switch to the quality of meetings.

The question is: of the meetings set and attended, how many actually end up on the sales pipeline? What is the actual pipeline size built?

Let’s say you have a prolific SDR (let’s call him MIke) who books an average of ten meetings a month and through his relentless follow up, gets eight of them attended. And, as a result, Mike builds an average of $500K sales pipeline a month.

Let’s suppose another of your SDRs (let’s call her Sarah) sets an average of five meetings a month, and gets at least four attended. However, Sarah consistently builds on average around a $600K sales pipeline per month.

What’s going on here? How is that MIke sets twice the meetings and gets 20% less pipeline?

Obviously, you care about the sales pipeline, not meetings (meetings are a means to the end—sales pipeline).

Here is what likely is happening:

• Mike is setting meetings with anyone who agrees, including junior level people who can’t get a decision, or senior execs who are looking at something that they either don’t have a budget for or don’t yet want to fight to get a budget for.
• Sarah, on the other hand, qualifies better, and while she talks to junior level people, only books meetings with their bosses. And just as importantly, Sarah takes trouble to identify real pain and make it explicit to the prospect, then takes her notes and enters it in the CRM. 

Remember not all sales reps are elite pros, either. Some are way better than others. So, with Sarah taking some trouble to ferret out real pain and get that in front of her sales exec, she ensures that this is more likely to end up on the pipeline, for a larger deal size, and closes faster than otherwise would.

Takeaways

To summarize, everything we did through the first three inflection points is about maximizing the number of meetings attended.

The last one is about the quality of the meetings set, so more end up on the sales pipeline. However, that groundwork is laid out starting from the first inflection point, and especially during the actual call. Sarah does a much better job prior to booking a meeting in finding out about the size and urgency of pain than does Mike. So, she gets the bigger wins.

Operationalizing SDR Best Practices

We listed a whole bunch of best practices so far. If you agree these are good principles to follow, your next question is likely: “Well, how do I implement them?”

The first thing to keep in mind is that we are talking about automation that ensures that all your SDRs follow the same steps, say the same things, and take the same actions.

Operationalizing these best practices means you bake them into your SDRs’ daily workflow so they are less likely to skip, or cherry pick what they want to do and not do.

The biggest challenge is the list segmentation, which requires alignment between Sales, Marketing, and Sales Development. All three have to agree on what segments to pursue, which personas to pursue, what the messaging is for each segment-persona combo.

If you get that agreed upon, then the rest builds on that and is mostly grunt work. 

SOMAmetrics Intelligent Prospecting

This is perhaps a good place to let you know that SOMAmetrics has built a cloud-based intelligent prospecting solution. SIP delivers the product value prop, industry, persona, competitor, and campaign data your SDRs need to conduct expert-level calls and book quality meetings and generate a viable sales pipeline.

Unlike generic sales productivity tools, SIP is a sales effectiveness solution that comes fully configured with all the right market information, transforming even your most junior SDRs into elite performers within days.

SIP operationalizes these best practices in a single solution.

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.

SDR Best Practices – Knowing the Inflection Points

There are four inflection points in a SDRs workflow from the moment of starting to dial a prospect, to a booked meeting that goes on the sales executive’s pipeline: Improving Connect Rates, Improving Conversion Rates, Meeting Attendance Rate, and Meeting Acceptance rate.

We will discuss the third one in some detail below.

3. Best Practices for Meeting Attendance Rates

Simply booking a meeting doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. It is a means to an end (quality pipeline built). Prospects can cancel, reschedule, or just not show up at all. A meeting doesn’t count unless it is attended.

Therefore, during the third inflection point, the focus is ensuring that meetings are attended. 

Bad Practices to Stop

• Don’t leave it up to your SDRs to follow up and make sure prospects are attending the scheduled meetings. Only your best SDRs will have the work ethic to relentlessly do whatever it takes to meet their pipeline quota. Your average SDR will get the meeting and leave it at that.
• Don’t leave that to the assigned sales exec either. While most sales execs are more motivated than the average SDR, and have more financial upside at stake, they will likely forget to adequately follow up.

Best Practices to Follow

Always automate all of your meeting follow-ups:

• As soon as a meeting is booked, automatically send out a short (7-10 question) survey that asks the prospect some basic questions that can be answered before the meeting. This will:
  • Help the sales exec better prepare the call
  • Avoid wasted time asking these questions during the first meeting
  • Provide a stronger indication that the prospect is serious, and
  • Impress the prospect you have your act together
• Automatically send the prospect one high-value, bottom-of-the-funnel offer such as an analyst guide that includes you by name, a strong reference story, a video conversation with a customer, etc. within 48 hours of the meeting being set. 
• Auto-send a meeting reminder three days prior to the meeting date. This should come from the sales exec, should look like a personal email (not a marketing email) and should include one strong customer testimonial or quote to keep the prospect engaged.
• Auto send a meeting reminder 24 hours from meeting date, and then another one-hour prior to the meeting, each a little bit different, coming from the sales exec

Takeaways

1. Automate all of the above and not rely on humans to follow up
2. Each follow up should continue to impress the prospect that she is working with a professional group of people who won’t waste her time. That’s the only reason she will take the trouble to attend the meeting when the time arrives.

Operationalizing SDR Best Practices

We listed a whole bunch of best practices so far. If you agree these are good principles to follow, your next question is likely: “Well, how do I implement them?”

The first thing to keep in mind is that we are talking about automation that ensures that all your SDRs follow the same steps, say the same things, and take the same actions.

Operationalizing these best practices means you bake them into your SDRs’ daily workflow so they are less likely to skip, or cherry pick what they want to do and not do.

The biggest challenge is the list segmentation, which requires alignment between Sales, Marketing, and Sales Development. All three have to agree on what segments to pursue, which personas to pursue, what the messaging is for each segment-persona combo.

If you get that agreed upon, then the rest builds on that and is mostly grunt work. 

SOMAmetrics Intelligent Prospecting

This is perhaps a good place to let you know that SOMAmetrics has built a cloud-based intelligent prospecting solution. SIP delivers the product value prop, industry, persona, competitor, and campaign data your SDRs need to conduct expert-level calls and book quality meetings and generate a viable sales pipeline.

Unlike generic sales productivity tools, SIP is a sales effectiveness solution that comes fully configured with all the right market information, transforming even your most junior SDRs into elite performers within days.

SIP operationalizes these best practices in a single solution.

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.

SDR Best Practices – Knowing the Inflection Points

There are four inflection points in a SDRs workflow from the moment of starting to dial a prospect, to a booked meeting that goes on the sales executive’s pipeline: Improving Connect Rates, Improving Conversion Rates, Meeting Attendance Rate, and Meeting Acceptance rate.

We will discuss the second one in some detail below.

2. Best Practices for Improving Meeting Conversion Rates

If your SDRs follow the best practices we recommended here, they will see their connection rates increase in the form of returned emails and calls, and more calls picked up, as prospects begin to recognize who is calling them, and why.

Now, it’s time to make sure that every connection counts, and none are wasted. After all, you spent more money to get to this point.

And again, just as in the first step of increasing connection rates, the secret to increasing meeting conversion rates is to focus on the prospective buyer and conduct the call from her point of view.

The best way to look at this is to insert yourself in the prospect’s shoes. Imagine you just got a call (one of many you have received today) and you recognize the company calling. You decide, “What the heck, let’s see if they really have something worth checking”. You don’t know who you will be speaking to and how that conversation will go. Hoping it won’t be a total waste of your time, your interest is piqued and you hope for the best. 

That is the bar your SDR has to meet at this point—not blow the call. And unfortunately, that happens quite a bit.

Bad Practices to Stop

1. Don’t let your SDR assume the prospect already knows what this is about and waste time asking, “Did I catch you at a bad time”. It is almost always a bad time to interrupt someone.
2. Don’t let your SDRs figure out what to say, when and to whom. As we explained in detail in a related blog, only your best SDRs will take the time and effort to really do their own research to be good at this. Most wing it, and since they don’t connect enough, they won’t have a chance to really hone their pitch.
3. Don’t let your SDRs figure out their own objection management responses. Most will not develop effective ones.
4. Don’t leave it up to the SDR to figure out how to set an appointment for the sales rep. Worse, don’t leave it up to the prospect to do that. Your SDR should never have to say, “Let me get back to you on times that can work for you and our sales exec.” That is likely a lost prospect.
5. Don’t let your SDRs be chatty, ramble on, etc. That just increases the likelihood they could blow the call.

Better Practices to Follow

Under increasing connect rate, we said that a major best practice was to use highly segmented lists and that your SDRs should only call on one homogeneous group each day. The reason is that when they actually connect with a prospect, they only have to think of what to say to a specific role that works in a specific industry—financial controllers in medical device makers, for example.  If you do that it now becomes easy to:

• Give your SDRs a specific call guide or navigator per specific industry-role combination. This call guide/navigator should give them what they need to know to talk at the level of the prospect:
  • How to introduce themselves, their company and the reason for calling
  • What they need to know about the industry they are calling into
  • What they need to know about the role they are calling
  • How to pitch the value prop of their product customized to this industry-role combo
  • Handling objections including competitor related “We have that”
  • handling frequently asked questions (such as, “how much does it cost” or “can I see a recorded demo” or other)
• Once the SDR has buy-in from the prospect to arrange a call or demo, your SDR should quickly and easily be able to tell the prospect the next two available slots for the meeting. If the prospect prefers a specific range of dates and times be able to quickly book that even if it is with a different sales exec than the one assigned to the SDR. 
• Make sure your SDRs spend as much time as necessary to deliver their pitch handle objections, and book the meeting. No more.

Takeaways

1. We had given a prospect every reason to pick up a call since the prospect already felt we had something of value to offer them
2. When they pick up we continue to demonstrate our full understanding of their world and deliver a customized pitch that shows them a potential way to address their major pain
3. When they agree to meet, we can book a meeting quickly while we have them on the call.

Operationalizing SDR Best Practices

We listed a whole bunch of best practices so far. If you agree these are good principles to follow, your next question is likely: “Well, how do I implement them?”

The first thing to keep in mind is that we are talking about automation that ensures that all your SDRs follow the same steps, say the same things, and take the same actions.

Operationalizing these best practices means you bake them into your SDRs’ daily workflow so they are less likely to skip, or cherry pick what they want to do and not do.

The biggest challenge is the list segmentation, which requires alignment between Sales, Marketing, and Sales Development. All three have to agree on what segments to pursue, which personas to pursue, what the messaging is for each segment-persona combo.

If you get that agreed upon, then the rest builds on that and is mostly grunt work. 

SOMAmetrics Intelligent Prospecting

This is perhaps a good place to let you know that SOMAmetrics has built a cloud-based intelligent prospecting solution. SIP delivers the product value prop, industry, persona, competitor, and campaign data your SDRs need to conduct expert-level calls and book quality meetings and generate a viable sales pipeline.

Unlike generic sales productivity tools, SIP is a sales effectiveness solution that comes fully configured with all the right market information, transforming even your most junior SDRs into elite performers within days.

SIP operationalizes these best practices in a single solution.

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.

SDR Best Practices – Knowing the Inflection Points

There are four inflection points in a SDRs workflow from the moment of starting to dial a prospect, to a booked meeting that goes on the sales executive’s pipeline: Improving Connect Rates, Improving Conversion Rates, Meeting Attendance Rate, and Meeting Acceptance rate.

We will discuss the first one in some detail below.

1. Best Practices for Improving Connect Rates

Connect rates refer to the number of dials needed to connect with a targeted prospect. Connect rates are different when calling a person’s direct number versus calling a company directory to reach the target number. In fact, it takes at least 50% more time and effort to improve connect rates when using a company directory.

Furthermore, many companies have disconnected their company phones and even say they don’t welcome unsolicited calls. You either know the direct number of the person you want to reach, or you are making an unsolicited call and you will not be assisted in reaching your target.

Ideally, you want to get mobile numbers since post-COVID many continue to work from home and have their direct numbers forwarded to their mobile numbers anyway 

Here are some practices to follow, and some that we recommend you stop doing.

Bad Practices to Stop

List Quality

1. Don’t have your SDRs waste time calling company numbers. As we said above, companies are disconnecting their company directory services. You will waste valuable SDR time trying to navigate directories that don’t even accept voicemail anymore.
2. Don’t give your SDRs a long list of 1,000 and have them call each one time, and then get back to the beginning when they are done. This significantly reduces the likelihood you reach anyone since there is one in a thousand chance you reach that person at the right time they are inclined to pick up a call.
3. Don’t use a list of prospects from various types and sizes of companies, industries, roles, etc. This only confuses and slows down the SDR as he/she tries to figure out what to say to each prospect.
4. Don’t make your SDRs call a list just one time per prospect on any given day—you don’t know when that person is available during that day. 
5. Do not exceed more than 2-3 days in between voice mails, or your prospects will not have that “repetition” effect.

Messaging

6. Don’t try to fool prospects into thinking they are receiving a local call by using fake local numbers. Not only doesn’t this really work since it is done to death now, but even if you tricked someone into picking up the phone thinking it was their mechanic or kid’s school calling them, your SDRs are already starting on the wrong foot.
7. Don’t leave unhelpful voicemails that say, “This is Joe again hoping to connect. Please call me back at…”. 
8. Don’t let your SDRs write or use meaningless emails with the subject line, “Amy, quick call?” and then say, “Hey Amy, don’t know if you read my previous email…”. This is probably what the prospect sees on her mobile before she opens the email, and nothing so far gives her any reason to open it. So, it won’t get opened.
9. Do not just rely on phone calls and emails, some people just avoid both like the plague.
10. Don’t leave it up to the prospect to figure out how to reach you. 

Better Practices to Follow

List Quality

1. Use only direct numbers or, better yet, mobile numbers. This is one of the most effective ways for improving connect rates.
2. Give each SDR a short list of say, 200 prospects to work with at any given time.
3. Make sure that everyone on that list is highly homogenous—they are from the same industry, work in similar size companies, and have no more than 2-3 different roles.
4. On any given day, have your SDRs use a shorter list that they will call several times during the day. For example, if you expect them to make 80 dials that day, have them work on a short list of 20 that they call four times a day at different intervals.
5. Make sure you return to each list segment every 2-3 days so your voicemails have a cumulative effect and are remembered.

Messaging

6. Brand each call with at least your company name, and if not, with the SDR’s name. Remember you want to distinguish yourself from everyone else calling, and this is the most effective way to do so, especially if you have more memorable voice mails and emails that reinforce your brand.
7. Make sure you leave distinct voicemails once a day to each prospect, that deliver a unique value proposition each time. In other words, arm your SDRs with at least 5-7 unique value prop voicemails that continually deliver exactly what you want the target to know. The whole point is to get the prospect to want to pick up and it starts with consistently delivering useful and branded information that they begin to recognize and at some point want to pick up the phone. 
8. Give your SDRs well-scripted emails and voicemails, preferably written by professionals who know how to write business emails that get opened. They should be highly relevant, have compelling information, and clear call to action so they get opened and responded to.
9. Use different forms of messaging including sending postal cards that link your messaging, company name, and SDR name for the targeted prospect. You should do that at least once every quarter. LinkedIn messaging is also another way people who don’t look at their emails may look at the message from the lInkedIn app itself.
10. Make sure that prospects have multiple ways of responding back to you, including a way to schedule a meeting with the SDR or the sales executive. Each email sent out must have a “Schedule call” or “Schedule a demo” link in it.

The Takeaway

To summarize, the best path for improving connect rates is to do the opposite of what Sellers think from their perspective—get a large list and make SDRs just maximize on the dial side. Instead:

1. Use short, highly segmented lists
2. Invest in direct and mobile numbers
3. Send well researched and carefully crafted emails and voicemails. Don’t expect them to pick up the first time you call (might happen but very rare.)
4. Make repeated attempts to reach people several times a day and several times a week, ideally around 12-14 times before pausing for a few months, and then trying again.

Operationalizing SDR Best Practices

We listed a whole bunch of best practices so far. If you agree these are good principles to follow, your next question is likely: “Well, how do I implement them?”

The first thing to keep in mind is that we are talking about automation that ensures that all your SDRs follow the same steps, say the same things, and take the same actions.

Operationalizing these best practices means you bake them into your SDRs’ daily workflow so they are less likely to skip, or cherry pick what they want to do and not do.

The biggest challenge is the list segmentation, which requires alignment between Sales, Marketing, and Sales Development. All three have to agree on what segments to pursue, which personas to pursue, what the messaging is for each segment-persona combo.

If you get that agreed upon, then the rest builds on that and is mostly grunt work. 

SOMAmetrics Intelligent Prospecting

This is perhaps a good place to let you know that SOMAmetrics has built a cloud-based intelligent prospecting solution. SIP delivers the product value prop, industry, persona, competitor, and campaign data your SDRs need to conduct expert-level calls and book quality meetings and generate a viable sales pipeline.

Unlike generic sales productivity tools, SIP is a sales effectiveness solution that comes fully configured with all the right market information, transforming even your most junior SDRs into elite performers within days.

SIP operationalizes these best practices in a single solution.

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.

The job of Sales Development Reps (SDRs) is becoming increasingly more difficult. But at the same time, their job is more important than ever before. Prospective buyers are becoming more elusive, making the job difficult. They are also more elusive than ever before, and sales executives are struggling to find qualified leads. In fact, connect rates have dropped by roughly 50% since 2014. That’s why SDR best practices are so important.

Why SDR Best Practices are Critical

• COVID has solidified a trend in the change of how people buy—both consumers and organizational buyers. Buyers are asserting more control over the buying process. They want to decide when they need to talk to vendors, do independent research or internally discuss, and when they go back and forth between the two. The so-called sales process has turned into a buying process that is for the most part controlled by the buyer’s preference.
• A tight labor market is forcing companies to hire whoever they can find, which typically means inexperienced SDRs. In many cases, it means SDRs who don’t feel compelled to blow out their numbers.
• But most important of all, Sellers continue to underestimate the intelligence, sophistication, and savvy of Buyers. They try to trick buyers into picking up the phone—like using fake local area phone numbers or opening an email. This could look like inserting the name of the recipient or company name in a meaningless subject line passing for “personalization.” This only makes buyers more determined to block out ALL unsolicited communication.

In this article, we discuss SDR best practices that are based on the fundamental sales and marketing premise of looking at it from the buyer’s perspective—what’s in it for the buyer to want to have a meeting with your sales rep.

We use a powerful framework that shows four inflection points, like sales stages for SDRs, which indicate the key milestones towards building a sales pipeline. We will also demonstrate best practices to improve conversion from one inflection point to the next.

You can also download the infographic that shows you exactly how much you can gain by optimizing each inflection point. This could add up to 100% increase in sales pipeline built by following these SDR best practices.

SDR Best Practices – Knowing the Inflection Points

There are four inflection points in a SDRs workflow from the moment of starting to dial a prospect, to a booked meeting that goes on the sales executive’s pipeline. These include Improving Connect Rates, Improving Conversion Rates, Meeting Attendance Rates, and Meeting Acceptance Rates.

We will discuss each in the following blogposts, linked below.

SOMAmetrics Intelligent Prospecting

This is perhaps a good place to let you know that SOMAmetrics has built a cloud-based intelligent prospecting solution. SIP delivers product value prop, industry, persona, competitor, and campaign data. SDRs need these to conduct expert-level calls and book quality meetings and generate a viable sales pipeline.

Unlike generic sales productivity tools, SIP is a sales effectiveness solution that comes fully configured with all the right market information. It can transform even your most junior SDRs into elite performers within days.

SIP operationalizes these best practices in a single solution.

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.

SDRs are tasked with generating high quality meetings and sales pipeline for your Account Execs. They achieve this through the qualification of leads (MQLs) in which they identify needs, pain, decision process, and timeframe. Most companies want this information formatted in a way that is easy for the Sales Rep to review. However, the best CRM ecosystems set up for Sales Reps isn’t the best setup for SDRs.

SDRs must be highly efficient and effective to achieve qualified meeting quotas. SDRs need their own CRM ecosystem, enabling them to move quickly from one prospect to the next while qualifying MQLs. This way, a SDR manager can promptly gauge whether a SQL/Meeting meets the minimum qualification criteria that a Sales Rep will consider viable for them to work.  

SDR CRM Ecosystems are Different from a Sales Layout

This is why the SDR CRM page layout will differ from the Sales page layout. Sales required fields should map to associated fields the Sales team uses, in order to ensure that Sales will get all of the information they need to pursue the SQL opportunity.

When I retool SDR organizations for different companies, I first look at the internal and external structures of the CRM. In every case, I have seen a CRM for Marketing; Sales; Sales Enablement; and/or Sales Reps, but not for SDRs. This is a big problem that impacts the effectiveness of SDR teams.

Most Important KPIs for Quality Appointments

Consider this: SDRs need to generate a lot of activities in order to get a prospect’s attention. The most important of which are KPIs. Thus, it is essential for SDR Managers to know that their vSDRs are consistently hitting the KPI’s to generate quality appointments. The following are my favorite KPIs for SDR teams:

• Dials: 70-100 per day
• Emails Sent: 50+ per day
• Key Conversations (One of my recommended fields. This is a call where the SDR was able to gather viable information from the prospect): 10-15 per week
• Qualified Meetings Set: 10-12 per month (this is the SDR pipeline, which needs to be large enough to ensure that 80% of the meetings set are approved to achieve the meetings set quota).
• Meetings Approved by Sales Reps: 6-8 per month

Sales Reps don’t have the same KPIs as SDRs; their process involves other steps which the SDR doesn’t need to follow. So why should you use the same screen layout, or “view”, for both SDRs and Sales Reps? Well, you shouldn’t. SDRs need their own layout that meets the requirements of their job (download the CRM Field Mapping Resource here).

Contextualizing Prospects for your CRM Ecosystem

Before you build your SDR team, consider the most important fields you will need to enable them to generate highly qualified leads. You will want to know, for example:

• Situation: The situation that the prospect is in now
• Problem: What problem(s) is the prospect trying to solve that is in alignment with your solution
• Impact: What will happen if the problem isn’t solved
• Compelling Event: What are some of the prospects’ strategic initiatives that your solution can support
• Decision Process: What is the decision process the prospect will utilize to make a decision for this type of solution
• SDR Status: A picklist that provides SDR Managers a view into the progress of MQLs as they go through the qualification journey to become SQLs and meetings. This status differs from a “Lead Status”.  
  • New MQLs flow into the CRM with a SDR Status of “Untouched”.  Once they are touched, other statuses will be selected:
    • Pursuing: A call was made, however, the SDR has not received a response
    • Contacted: The SDR spoke to someone at the company, however, the information didn’t move the qualification process forward
    • Key Conversation: The SDR spoke to someone who helped them to either fully or partially qualify the MQL
    • Meeting Set: The SDR found a person who wants to speak to a Sales Rep
    • SDR Manager Approval: The approval by the Manager and Sales is also included in the SDR Status picklist, along with statuses such as “Requalify” or “Nurture”.

CRM Field Mapping Resource for your Ecosystems

SOMAmetrics’ CRM Field Mapping resource (download our free CRM Field Mapping Resource) identifies the fields that we have implemented for SDR teams. Rather than stuff tons of information into a NOTES field, these individual fields enable a layout where SDRs, SDR Managers, and salespeople can quickly assess if the SQL is valid.

Not all notes are equal. Thus, more structure in the CRM will provide everyone with consistent information as leads are qualified.

Another objective of the SDR CRM ecosystem is to ensure that they are presenting approved leads before they get to Sales. As listed above, one of the SDR statuses will alert the Manager of qualified leads awaiting their approval. This allows the Manager to quickly scan the fields to identify that the required ones have viable data. Afterwards, the SDR Manager can approve the qualified SQL, and a workflow will push the SQL to Sales. 

Once Sales has met with the prospect, they will have an opportunity to approve or reject the SQL. If approved, they will add it to their sales pipeline. If they reject it, a workflow will push the SQL to a SDR Status of “Requalify”, and the SDR can then requalify the lead, or disqualify if it isn’t a true prospect.

KPIs Follow a Well-Built CRM Ecosystem

Once you build the SDR ecosystem into your CRM, your KPIs and Metrics can be easily tracked in dashboards. My favorite dashboards track:

• Total:
  • Dials: Day, Week, Month (dial chart)
  • Emails Sent: Day, Week, Month (dial chart)
  • Key Conversations: Week, Month (dial chart)
  • Meetings Set: Week, Month (listing of accounts where meetings have been set)
• Leads by BDR Status (bar chart)

These distinct fields enable SDR Managers to generate a variety of dashboards that the team can use to stay on top of their game. Manager dashboards are roll-ups of team member activities and statuses, providing a clear view on how the team or individuals are performing.

If you can’t see what is happening, you won’t know what is happening. Set up a SDR eco-system in your CRM and track the required fields so that SDRs can adequately do their job.

Download the CRM Field Mapping Resource here.

Read the book The Radical Pipeline Strategy: How to Grow Pipeline and Revenue by Optimizing Sales Development.  This book outlines tested best practices and implementation strategies that I developed while rebooting and building 65 SDR and Inside Sales organizations.

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.