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.