Sales Reps and Agents

How to Build a Sales Development Team & What Mistakes to Avoid

In this pandemic economy, more businesses are now left asking how to build an SDR team that performs optimally for consistent sales team success. So, how do you do it?

The business world has proven to be volatile and disruptive. Looking back just a few years ago, who could have imagined that remote work would become this popular? 

Fortunately, many businesses have proven to be ferociously adaptive and accommodating to the ongoing changes in the present economy.

In the same context, the structure and processes of the modern-day sales department or SDR teams are drastically different than those of the past, which isn’t at all surprising given that the average customer journey has become more complex than ever. 

Although there is no one best sales team structure, the two crucial engines usually present are:

  • SDRs – Sales Development Representatives
  • AEs – Account Executives 

The two work closely together yet have completely different roles and responsibilities. We will focus on the SDRs by discussing what makes them a vital part of an organization – and, more importantly, how to build a top-performing SDR team.

Why Do You Need to Build an SDR Team?

An SDR team is vital for the growth of any business. They generate new leads and opportunities, expand the customer base and help companies create more revenue.

They are also the first point of contact with prospects. By building and nurturing client relationships over time, the best sales teams feed the account managers with a steady flow of leads.

A high-performing SDR team can be a powerful asset for any company. Equipped with the right tools and training, they can give you a high-quality sales pipeline.

The Role of an SDR

SDRs or Sales Development Representatives are inside sales representatives who only focus on sales prospecting. They use various channels, like email, cold calls, social media, etc., to connect with prospects and warm them up to your product and services.

Did you know that your sales team has a 56% greater chance to attain quota if you engage buyers before they contact a seller?

SDRs reach out to new leads, qualify them and push them further down the sales funnel. With them at the helm, the sales team won’t waste their time and effort on indifferent prospects.

Since SDRs are at the forefront of the customer journey, they should be equipped with well-researched data about the prospect and company before getting in touch. A deep understanding of the industry, sales process, and competition is a must for making meaningful conversations.

Relying solely on the marketing team for leads might slow down your sales. SDR teams work as the bridge between marketing and sales to expedite the process of lead conversions.

The Benefits of Having an In-House SDR Team

In-house SDR teams offer greater visibility. You can handpick your staff and structure them to suit your organization’s needs. They will also work more fluidly with your sales and marketing team to drive better results.

Although outsourcing an SDR team may result in some cost savings, businesses that deal in technical products and services may fare better with an In-House SDR team because of the following reasons:

  • In-house SDR will know your product better and make a better pitch.
  • In-house SDR provide more transparency and trust in their work.
  • In-house reps integrate better with other departments.

9 Essential Steps for Building a High-Performing SDR Team

Here’s how to build a sales team that generates quality leads to support sales pipeline and revenue growth.

Understand the Team Dynamics

The first step towards building a high-performing is understanding who your teammates are. The step is especially crucial if you’ve taken over a team that is new to you.

As the team leader, engage with your members. Discuss with them what they like about the job and their future expectations.

Is there any problem that they want to be addressed? Observe the way they interact with each other and ask them what their expectation from you is.

Once you understand the team dynamic, you can plan improvements and work towards maximizing each member’s performance.

Define Your Sales Development Process

Spelling out the sales development process will help your team understand what information they need to get leads and make contact with them. While the process may vary from business to business, you can break them down into three general steps:

  • Identify Your Target: Have an ideal customer profile. Include the industry, location, company size, revenue, job title, etc.
  • Lay Out the Engagement Strategy: Plan the contact channel, messaging, frequency, and time between contacts.
  • Describe the Lead Qualifying Process: Create the questions your team will use to qualify leads. They could be based on the prospect’s business goals, budget, pain points, authority, priority, etc.

Set Clear Expectations

When employees know what is expected from them, they are motivated to meet the standard. So set clear expectations for your team based on your overall sales goals.

Make sure each member knows what their priorities are. One way to ensure this is by providing a frame of reference for quality work. It will help them understand what sales team success looks like.

For instance, you may have had previous successful sales calls. Let them be examples employees can learn from and try to replicate.

Maximize Productivity with Tech Tools

With tech tools to handle the administrative side of the SDR job, your team will have more time to find, qualify and nurture leads.

Automated sales intelligence is a must-have tool to find quality leads and identify sales triggers. Match it with a user-friendly CRM tool and have all the information about your prospects at your fingertips while dealing with them.

Sequencing tools and assisted dialers are other tools to streamline the process. While choosing a new technology, consider the challenges of the current tools.

Also, keep an eye on what your competitors are using. Perhaps they use tools that make them highly efficient.

Improve SDR Onboarding and Training Plan

You’re likely to hire new members to the team during your leadership journey. While hard skills are essential in new hires, you should also ensure they have the right attitude and soft skills. Help them get off to a good start with a well-designed onboarding and training plan.

You should also see that your current team members are learning and growing. With the sales industry constantly changing, you must prepare them to take on new challenges with frequent training and skill-development programs.

Monitor Critical Sales Metrics

Every great SDR team must keep an eye on the key metric to monitor their progress and analyze the data to optimize their outreach.

The metrics must be simple, visible, measurable, and aligned with your yearly revenue goal. Having a clear metric will increase accountability and keep the team on track. It will also ensure your pipeline doesn’t get clogged with unqualified prospects.

For instance, key input metrics to track would be the total number of calls made, emails sent, scheduled meetings, and the outcome of these efforts.

Similarly, you should also look at output metrics such as the number of sales accepted opportunities and revenue driven by each rep. If the figures are not up to the mark, identify the weakness and motivate your staff to perform better.

Motivate SDRs with Performance Incentives

If you want your employees to take the grind to land you qualified leads, you must reward them with a suitable compensation package. An ideal compensation package would be a combination of annual salary, commission, and performance-related pay.

Nothing motivates your employees more than a performance incentive. However, do not always tie the incentives to closed/won deals since it is not always in their hands. Instead, you can reward them for the number of meetings booked, pipeline created, or sales accepted opportunities.

You can also introduce creative ways to reward your team, like bonuses or time off, to encourage them to stick with the company.

Provide Consistent Feedback

For your team to grow and succeed, you have to give them consistent feedback.

A few leaders take time to review their employees’ performance and give them constructive feedback. However, it can make a world of difference in improving their sales performance.

Often, sales reps do not know what they’re doing right or wrong. A periodic feedback system will help them understand what behavior is worth continuing and what needs improvement.

Letting your SDR see how they can improve, do better and reach their career aspiration will make them feel valued, significantly contributing to job satisfaction.

Look Out for Employee Burnout

Burnout is expected in the sales industry. Almost 90% of sellers fell burned out from work. They experience drag which leads to lower quota attainment. Many among them may also express their intent to leave.

As a leader, you must address the issue and reduce the risk of losing your high-performers. Here are a few steps you can take:

  • Ensure that you have adequate staff and a manageable workload
  • Build a culture that supports team engagement, empathy, and camaraderie
  • Set goals that are realistic and not over-optimistic
  • Support employees when they take time off to relax and recuperate

Check out this video to get an insight into the ‘behind the scenes’ of building and executing a high-performing SDR team. 

Introducing the SDR Processes

Top-performing SDR teams have embedded processes created by their team leads that they can always lean on. 

Teaching the theory is one thing, but for your SDRs to be of utmost efficiency and productivity, there have to be detailed playbooks, tips, and guides for all their recurring tasks to ensure they know the exact step-by-step framework needed to excel. 

These standardized processes could be anything, from lead management and objections handling to collaborating with other sales team members and departments. 

Prospecting playbooks should be your top priority as they focus on referral sequences, inbound trial requests, outbound leads, cold calling, and other SDR-specific duties. 

Creativity and improvisation should always be welcomed in modern-day sales, but without structured processes, there will be less consistency and accountability. 

Introducing the SDR Tech Stack

It goes without saying that providing your SDR talents with the necessary tools is fundamental to creating a top-performing team. 

Numerous sales processes have to be automated for SDRs to stay ahead of the competition. 

Providing the sales tools and necessary training to use them effectively is part of the broader sales enablement process, which has seen a drastic increase in popularity of more than 300% over the last couple of years. 

An effective tech stack will be your SDRs’ magic wand and personal assistant, ensuring maximum efficiency. 

The main goal of a well-assembled tech stack is enabling your SDRs to work smarter, not harder. Unfortunately, with thousands of different SDR tools available at our disposal, it may be overwhelming to find the ones that best suit our firm’s needs. 

Essential SDR Tools 

Once again, although the list of essential SDR tools may differ from one company to another, some have become a necessity to build an SDR team that performs at its peak: 

  1. CRM – Every reputable business will adopt a fully-functional CRM software to link their departments, streamline communication and collaboration, automate marketing, sales, and customer service, store and manage sensitive data, and create a virtual office.
  2. Prospecting – These tools hit the spot with SDRs as they create an automated framework for identifying, reaching out, qualifying, and eventually (fingers crossed) converting leads. 
  3. Sales engagement – Automating, sequencing, and scaling engagement with prospects through various channels is vital. According to research, over 75% of businesses that adopted sales engagement tools saw a substantial increase in sales after just one year. 

One thing all these great sales tools have in common – they focus on automating tasks and processes to maximize SDR productivity. 

Check out the Guide for Sales Automation Software to see all the different types of tools out there. Automation and AI are the future of all business activities, so it’s best to get on board early on. 

Mistakes to Avoid

Building a sales team from scratch is a challenging task. However, you can save time and effort by following SDR best practices and avoiding these five common mistakes.

 Setting New SDRs to Task without Training

Telling your new joiners to do what they need to do to get meetings can result in disaster. You will need to give them some directions and training initially.

Have them practice mock calls and objection handling using a detailed template. You can also pair them with experienced reps so they can learn from them.

Not Investing in Quality Tools

Trying to captivate prospects without intelligent tools is like shooting in the dark. You will end up losing quality leads to competitors.

Not having efficient automation and streamlining tools will also frustrate your rep. So, consider more than the budget while choosing tools for your team.

Not Compensating Your Staff Well

The job of an SDR is hard work which can be exhausting at times. If you want your team members to stay motivated and stick with your goals, you must compensate them well.

Besides monetary compensation, you must also provide them with a comfortable workplace and environment that allows them to meet their daily goals.

Choosing Quantity Over Quality

Making hundreds of cold calls and emails in a day doesn’t ensure your team will qualify more leads. Instead, focus on adding quality to your approach.

Filter out prospects before booking meetings and use customer data to tailor each pitch to grab their interest. It will ensure you get more quality leads instead of wasting time on unsuitable candidates.

Only Sticking to the Template

While templates are great as a reference for outreach, sticking only to them makes your pitch clinical and forgettable. It’s better to write down bullet points to cover during research based on customer research.

Encourage your team to bring out their personality while dealing with clients to stand out. 

Creating Sales Objectives 

To transform your SDRs into top-performing reps, they need to have goals they can work towards both individually and as members of the team. 

This will ensure peak team productivity, where everyone will be feeding off each other, following the same direction, and working together to crush the set objectives. 

SMART SDR Objectives

  1. Specific – In as much detail as possible, what exactly are you looking for your reps to achieve? Clear objectives produce clear results.
  2. Measurable – Whether it’s quantity or quality that you are after, your SDRs performance and goals have to be measurable to track performance. Otherwise, how will you know whether they’re succeeding or not? 
  3. Attainable – The objectives have to be realistic. Reps have to know that they can achieve their goals through hard work and perseverance. When objectives are unattainable, they’re known to be some of the strongest demotivators in existence. 
  4. Relevant – Even though we mentioned the importance of explaining the general, company-wide goals to the reps (especially the newcomers) when setting personal/team goals, they have to be bullseye direct at their specific duties.
  5. Time-bound – To help your reps stay accountable and on track with their responsibilities, quotas, and deadlines, you should put a clock on the set objectives. 

Motivation and Retainment 

Great SDRs are not easy to come by. It takes a special mix of skills, character, and training. 

Therefore, motivating and retaining your top performers is as important as attracting them in the first place. 

A mere 8% of SDRs stay in the same role within the same company for more than 3 years. Some of the most common reasons are the absence of a clearly mapped-out career path within the organization, inadequate training and communication, and unrealistic goals. 

If you follow the steps of adequate onboarding, mentoring, and investing in your SDRs – chances are you’ve ticked off the motivation part. Provide them with the necessary tools, objectives, development, and incentives, and you’re one step closer to keeping your top performers for the long run. 

Now build an SDR team that excels in every aspect. All the best! 

Sandy leads the US Sales team at JustCall and he has been integral in growing JustCall’s ARR by 5X while bootstrapped. He is a big believer in using tech to enable sales and is the first person to try out every new feature in the JustCall stack. While he’s not writing high performance email cadences for his team, he dabbles in blogging about Sales Strategy, Sales Tech and Sales Training.

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