The Role of SDRs in Building a Strong Sales Team

You’ve got a dynamite sales team that helps your business grow with strong closing techniques. Building relationships and attending to the needs of your customers before the sale and after closing can be another challenge altogether, though.

Sales teams and individual sales team members often focus on closing deals and then transferring new clients to operations. When inbound marketing campaigns fill your sales pipeline, your sales department may not be equipped with the skills and training needed to qualify leads, build relationships, and nurture leads. The sales development representative SDR possesses these exact qualities to benefit the entire sales process.

Both on internal teams and outsourced SDRs, the role of SDRs is to greet potential leads, educate prospects, convert them into a qualified lead, and transfer to sales professionals to close deals. These specialized positions ease the burden of your sales team and helps your business flourish.

Valve+Meter Performance Marketing helps businesses learn how and when hiring sales development representatives increases customer acquisition levels. We also consult with you to understand your marketing pain points and how outsourcing SDRs can convert new customers and improve the sales experience for your brand.

A Sales development representative (SDR) is a position on a sales team that is dedicated to prospecting and cold calling. They look to find qualified leads for your business and push them through the sales pipeline. Sales development reps are your company’s first impression on potential customers and they need to be charismatic, articulate, and confident.

These sales reps may get a lot of people who turn them down, hang up on them, or never respond. A sales development representative must not get discouraged easily and should be able to be persistent in order to find qualified leads.

SDRs usually do a lot of the heavy lifting of finding new clients for a sales team. They will contact potential customers in a number of ways like phone calls, social media messages, emails, and text messages. If the potential customers engage with them, then they can proceed further.

Sales development representatives are trained to know your products and services to be able to help solve specific problems customers are having. Many people find that having a sales development representative team not only increases the number of leads in your business, but also results in a higher customer spend, or ROI.

There are many roles in a sales team and figuring out how a sales development representative fits on your team is important for the flow of leads through the sales pipeline.

• Account Executives: An account executive is a more senior member of a sales team that is responsible for managing and nurturing relationships with existing clients or high-value prospects. Their goal is often to close deals or create new deals by selling additional products and services to existing customers or securing new business from referrals from current clients.
• Sales Development Representatives: This person finds new potential customers for the business through cold calls, emails, relationship-building, or social media. They work to not only provide qualified leads but vet out people that are unlikely to convert.
• Sales Specialists/Sales Consultants: A sales specialist works to percent demos and presentations of relevance to the client. They do not partake in the closing of deals
• Customer Success Representatives: Once a deal has been made, the customer success representative will keep the conversation going with prospects so they continue to work with the company.
• Sales Managers: Sales managers are the leaders of the sales team. They provide direction for the sales team members and help to solve problems.

As you can see the sales development representative job is an important part of the sales cycle. Without investing in someone to find new prospects, there isn’t a role dedicated to finding new business. Sure, your sales executives work to get new business out of current clients, but current clients can only invest so much into your business.

Not sure if investing in sales development representatives is a good idea? Here are some signs that it’s time to dedicate a sales development representative team to improve your sales process.

A sales development representative job is often an entry-level position. People that are looking to get into a sales career who have excellent communication skills and who are looking to gain experience to one dale become a sales professional themselves.

SDR skills are very important in bringing in qualifying leads to a business. The job description for an SDR position must include time management skills, active listening, organizational skills, experience in CRM and data software, and being involved in the learning process to become a sales professional.

A sales development rep can bring outbound sales to your business by reaching out to customers who have not yet shown interest in your services or products, but who fit the company’s ideal customer profile. They will perform customer research, and then reach out to the potential customer through emails, cold calling, social media outreach efforts, and more to start moving them through the sales pipeline. Sales development representatives can also handle incoming leads that are generated through marketing efforts like website content forms, content downloads, or event registration.

High-quality leads will need to be nurtured to move the customer through the sales funnel. The sales development rep will follow up with them multiple times. They may send personalized emails and provide answers to their questions. Once the SDR is aware of all the customer’s pain points and has told them how your product can solve the prospects’ challenges, the SDR will set up phone calls for the client to speak to a sales professional who will close the deal. With the information provided by the SDR, these leads will be more qualified and likely to convert.

A sales development representative role can be challenging to hire. For small to medium sized business this job is often an entry-level position. This limits the type of candidates you will attract. You will also need to know what type of qualities and training you will need in an SDR. The personality traits of a sales development representative may be different than conventional sales reps.

For instance, while a sales development representative is involved in the sales process, the key goal is to identify whether prospects are ideal potential customers for your brand. Instead of focusing on converting a lead to a customer, the SDR role is essentially interviewing prospects. They must have listening skills paired with acumen to recognize the best business opportunities for your business.

Even though this role involves soft people skills including enthusiasm and charm, an SDR position must include time management skills, active listening, organizational skills, experience in CRM and data software, and being involved in the same learning process to become a sales professional. They must understand all the sales team members roles and your entire operations process. This means they must be of above average intelligence.

You will also need to hire people with the capacity to stay in tune and anticipate market trends. The role of SDR meets potential customer through multimedia including emails, social media, and other platforms. Sales development representatives can also handle incoming leads that are generated through marketing efforts like website content forms, content downloads, or event registration. You will need to hire for a team that understands all mediums and can intelligently and effectively guide leads through the funnel.

You will need to build a team of SDRs that has empathy and emotional maturity. Prospecting, qualifying, and nurturing leads requires patience and tact. Many sales teams struggle because leads are lost to poor stewardship. High-quality leads will need to be nurtured and move at their own pace. This is especially important in B2B lead qualifying where decision makers must account for many variables and may take months or more than a year before they are ready to set a sales appointment.

Finally, once you find the right team of candidates, you will need to invest in all of the technology and ongoing improvements for your team to of SDRs to succeed. This process can take time but can be immensely rewarding to increasing revenues.

When you’re considering hiring SDRs, you may realize that this could be a very expensive endeavor to have a new team built in-house. However, by outsourcing your sales outreach efforts to an experienced marketing company, you can easily save yourself time and money.

Companies that offer sales development representative services have a team of people ready to help your sales efforts. These people are already trained in CRM software, data interpretation, and organization skills. The SDR team doesn’t work for just your company, but for others as well, and as such their time can be leveraged so their efforts for your business can easily be scaled up or down.

Valve+Meter Performance Marketing is an experienced marketing company that offers SDR services and marketing efforts. Our team is driven by data to know what sales tactics work and which do not. With CRM data and advanced marketing tools, we can make sure that your message is fluid throughout, and finding quality inbound and outbound leads is a snap.

If you’re ready to strengthen your current sales team, then it’s time to add sales development representatives. We have a strong sales development rep team that can move your sales process faster, meaning more leads to your business and more conversions.

Your account executives will appreciate the help by taking lead prospecting tasks off their backs while still having many sales opportunities available for them to close on. Talk to Valve + Meter to see how we can unite your marketing and sales efforts to create a sales team to help your business grow.