Meeting Attendance Rates: SDR Best Practice 3

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.