When an SDR makes calls, they often freeze when someone answers, especially if they are new to the role. Much of the fear stems from the lack of training and tools that they need to feel confident having conversations with senior executives.
Another reason SDRs freeze is because they believe that they can’t relate to the person at the other end of the call, such as C-Level executives who are established decision makers and sales prospects. A fun way to dispel this belief is to make these Persona’s real to the SDR through content that will streamline their sales process (SOMAmetrics Prospect Personas Identification Handout).
SOMAmetrics Prospect Personas Handout
Making the people on the other end of the call real is as simple as having the SDRs work through the different Prospect Personas that are your target audience and ideal customer. On the SOMAmetrics Persona Build Handout, you will find questions that help the team create prospect and buyer personas.
A few examples are:
- Personal information: How old is the VP of X?
- How many kids do they have?
- What are their personal and professional goals?
- Do they have any pain points?
- Is there anything that keeps them up at night?
These are great questions to discuss, as these insights may help SDRs to connect the dots between your solutions and the prospects issues.
During the Exercise
- You may want to ask a Sales or Product Marketing team member to attend the session in order to help the sales team, and provide customer case studies.
- Give the Persona a name and find a picture to add to the sheet
- Have fun thinking about Marsha, VP of Sales, for example. She:
- Is 47
- Has 3 kids, who are now on their own
- She reads the NY Times and (provide a few names of trade journals that she reads)
- Her professional goal is to become a CEO at a Tech company in a few years
- Stays up at night thinking about how they are going to hit their Quarterly Objectives, how to achieve sales transformation, and how she can get the new product out faster (to help boost sales and overall business).
- Have fun thinking about Marsha, VP of Sales, for example. She:
You may want to select 2 Prospect Personas each week. The exercise, when done right, can take about an hour. If it works better, divide the team and have these teams focus on a few different personas until all are covered. Then bring the divided teams back into one group, and share these Prospect Persona updates with the whole team.
The Effect of Prospect Personas
Some of your SDRs may get subscriptions to the trade journals that your prospects read, which will provide them further insights into the people and industries that your company serves. They may begin to empathize with your prospects and the challenges that they face. Overtime, your team will feel empowered to discuss how your solution can help these prospects hit their goals. When your team feels comfortable speaking with your valued prospects, their conversations will become natural. SDRs will now have something of value to say to your prospects, which will help to engage them to want to know more about your solutions.
This is a fun and rewarding exercise. The team will get a laugh out of it and they will see that yes, our prospects are real people too.
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.