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The Definitive Guide to Building An SDR Team

The Definitive Guide to Building an SDR Team

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Contents

Introduction

The Core of the SDR Always Be Prospecting Increase Meaningful Conversations But, What About Inbound? Building an SDR Profile

The SDR at Work From Good to Great Managers Prospecting 101 The Motivation Metric The Career Growth of an SDR

Outreach Strategies for SDRs Sales Reps as Mini-Marketers The Right Messaging Never Send a Blind Email

In Conclusion

The 5 Item SDR Checklist

ToutApp: SDR Edition

About ToutApp

References

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Introduction

Most sales organizations are structured in a way that a salesperson handles the entire sales cycle. From prospecting, leaving voicemails and running product demos to closing deals—the whole cycle runs through one salesperson.

That was sales yesterday. Today, the sales world is changing.

This isn’t the first time you’ve read about the changing world of sales. There are hundreds of articles about this. But, we’re going to go deeper than that.

We’ll be exploring how you can increase the productivity of your sales team by segmenting the role of a salesperson between prospecting and closing; we’re talking about building a Sales Development team.

The three chapters in this book present a look into the future of sales development teams and their cutting-edge strategies. The strategy is simple: segment and spe-cialize your sales team. As an increasingly large number of younger sales teams are growing fast, many large companies are taking notice and adopting the sales development methodology.

If you want to keep up and drive serious sales for your business, you need to build a Sales Development team.

Here’s some insight on how a few experts did that.

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The Core of the SDR

Prospects are your company’s biggest asset. But, prospecting can be difficult. Today, prospects have so much more information available to them. In The Challenger Sale, authors Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson state that “57% of the purchase decision is complete before a customer even calls a supplier.”

That’s why you need a team of reps to capture the interests of your prospects.

Enter the SDR.

SDR stands for Sales Development Representative. Elsewhere, this role might be called a Business Development Representative or Lead Qualification Representative, but for simplicity, we’ll call them SDRs.

No matter their title, SDRs are specialized to do one thing insanely well: outbound prospecting.

“SDRs learn how to craft a proper email and how to break down that ‘No, I don’t want to talk to you’ road block. They get larger prospects with bigger logos and larger prices. That’s the trajectory that you have to hit to be a sustainable company.”

Always Be Prospecting In 2011, Ross and Tyler, the co-authors of Predictable Revenue, advocated for a segmentation of roles within the different stages of the sales cycle. Ross then applied this segmentation at Salesforce and it changed the sales industry.

An SDR often is the first point of contact someone has with your company. They’re the ones making the first impression and educating prospects. Prospects have limited time and may not want the whole sales song and dance. However, SDRs are there to get your company name in front of them and open the door for further conversations.

Offices

Neal Donahue

Company Size

SDR Team

KISSMetrics provides web analytics solutions to assist companies in customer acquisition and decision making.

Director of Sales Development

San Francisco, CA

51 - 200 employees

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“Businesses are so specific in terms of their needs that SDRs need to spend extra time learning about their needs before even beginning to nurture those prospects and educate them about your company’s product.”

Sales is moving away from the one-person-does-all model to more specialized and segmented teams. An SDR is there to generate interest, get your company’s foot in the door and get meetings booked for Account Executives (AEs).

And with that, SDRs are changing the way sales gets done.

Increase Meaningful Conversations SDRs open deals. They prospect into targeted companies and book meetings for Account Executives. But of the many invaluable assets that an SDR brings to the table, the most important one is their tenacity. SDRs are the reps that are proactively talking to your prospects.

SDRs want to feel well established with their account territory and prospects. Since not every prospect thinks in the same way, it’s important to allow SDRs to have the autonomy to prospect as resourcefully as they see fit in order to book more meetings.

Tune builds products to help marketers drive better results with technology for growing businesses. Offices

Chris Calkin

Company Size

Sales Team

Business Development Manager West Coast, Brands & Agencies

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201 - 500 employees

Seattle, WA (HQ), San Francisco, CA

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But, What About Inbound? Inbound Sales Representatives are responsible for the leads that are delivered right into your sales funnel, generally from marketing efforts, referrals or organic means.

An inbound lead requires no prospecting. These leads flow in and can be highly engaged with your company’s product. But, they also can be unpredictable and hard to target.

On the other hand, outbound prospecting is targetable and manageable. You can structure your team so that you have SDRs going after prospects in specific industries or specific company sizes. There’s no ceiling to outbound prospecting.

But, let’s get back to SDRs.

“We have named territory accounts. With an SDR, we have an opportunity to go after them and generate significant revenue by targeting those accounts.”

“We look for curiosity and coachability, which is really important to the SDR function where that rep needs to be open

Director of Sales &Market Development

San Francisco, CA (HQ) & New York, NY

201 - 500 employees

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Optimizely is a website optimization platform enabling A/B and multivariate testing for companies and individual users to enhance their website content and traffic.

Offices

Ash Alhashim

Company Size

SDR Team

Offices

Michael Gultz

Company Size

SALEs Team

Informatica is the leading provider of data integration software for over 5,000 enterprise organizations to fully leverage their information assets ffrom mobile, social and big-data.

Redwood City, CA (HQ), Austin, TX, Boston, MA & Dublin, Ireland

1001 - 5000 employees

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Lead of Inside Sales andDirect Response (Cloud Sales)

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“I look for someone who carries themselves well. Someone who can stare me in the eye. Someone who isn’t shaken by tough questions, such as, ‘Why didn’t you hit your revenue quota?’”

Nexmo provides innovative cloud commu-nication APIs that enable applications and enterprises to connect with their customers through phone and SMS.

San Francisco, CA (HQ), London, UK, Madrid, Spain & Hong Kong

51-200 employees

30 worldwide

Offices

Charles Rummelein

Company Size

Sales Team

Team Lead of US Sales

Bachelor’s Degree or Equivalent

Resume6 -12 months of phone experience

high energy level, motivation and drive to succeed

proven track record of excellent communication

Versatile enough to be a team player, but effective enough to be an individual contributor

strong passion for selling and ability to communicate a product’s value

knowledge of salesforce (a Plus)

Building an SDR Profile Let’s say you agree - now; let’s talk about how to build the right SDR team for your company.

For many companies, a rubric for hiring is quite useful:

As you think about hiring SDRs, you should ask yourself: Which qualities are foundational and which are coachable?

Having an SDR rubric not only simplifies the hiring process for managers - but also helps with training and long-term career goals.

Once you have a written description of your SDR role with responsibilities and requirements, it’s time to assemble your team.

“I like to build diversity. There’s no cookie cutter candidate. What I’m looking for is someone who is organized and is driven to succeed. I want someone who has the ability to dig and find the unseen route to getting a prospect on the phone and being savvy,” said Neal Donahue of KISSmetrics.

Beyond wanting a career in sales, SDRs should have an entrepreneurial bent in their DNA. This entrepreneurial streak gives the SDR an opportunity to make an impact through prospecting, and then quickly rise through the sales ranks.

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The SDR at Work

An SDR needs to have the drive to sell today and the aspirations to be a sales leader tomorrow. To get an SDR from point A to B, there’s one person that needs to be present: a great manager.

From Good to Great ManagersWhat sets apart an average manager from a great manager is credibility.

What does credibility look like for your SDR team?

There are three main factors in the credibility assessment:

Front-to-Back Knowledge: Have a detailed understanding of what your SDR team does every day.

A Shared Ambition: An SDR’s goals are your goals. During 1:1 time, talk to them about your ambitions for the team and how they can contribute to those goals.

Ownership: Take ownership of the SDR team you manage - in both successes and failures.

Alongside credibility, it’s important to have a manageable ratio between you and your reps. To the right are manager to rep ratios across different companies.

As companies continue to grow, their ratio will vary as more reps and managers are brought on to meet the demand.

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SDR to manager ratio

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Prospecting 101 One of the best parts of being a manager is working with your SDRs to make them better - whether they’re brand new or seasoned SDRs.

SDRs are able to grow and broaden a company because they’re embedded in conversations with prospects. The amount of time it takes to prospect into a company is a moving variable, but as illustrated, the process remains the same:

A manager can then measure an SDR’s performance. Measuring performance can help you formulate an understanding of the progress of your SDR team. The simplest and most traditional form of measurement is tracking revenue within your pipeline. An example of tracking revenue is figuring out whether a closed deal was sourced by an SDR.

Measuring SDR PErformance

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The Motivation Metric SDRs are a hungry, awesome and hard-working group. They’re eager to win, especially with a fair base salary and the right incentives.

In a 2014 survey of SDR Metrics and Compensation, The Bridge Group found that the annual base salary of an SDR is $46k. Additionally, SDRs are eligible to earn more based on performance, such as number of meetings booked. To motivate their teams, managers can run weekly sales contests, give out gift cards or pay out target-hitting earnings as well.

“The success of the company has been one of the most rewarding parts of being an SDR Manager. The company is doing well, and a big part of that is from the efforts of the Sales Development team. I just think it’s rewarding seeing each member of my team high up on the Leaderboard each month.”

“I motivate my team in various ways. If they come in early, I’ll buy them breakfast. If they stay late, I’ll take them to drinks afterwards. It’s close-knit,” said Charles Rummelein at Nexmo.

Being a well-rounded and close knit team affects the camaraderie of the team as a whole, but it also helps ramp new reps.

The Career Growth of an SDR The SDR role is a foundational one within the larger structure of a sales team. For many SDRs, this role is a stepping stone for upward mobility within their company.

SDRs gain an invaluable skill set that prepares them for long-term success. Every day they craft emails, break down blockers from prospects and are personable educators. This success is only the beginning of an SDR’s career in your sales organization. Many SDRs want to fast-track their sales careers, so let’s get them on that track.

For SDR managers, a success marker of their team is in the promotion of SDRs into closing roles as Account Executives.

Adpative Insights is the global leader in cloud business analytics that integrates BI & CPM suite in the cloud for midsize and enterprisecompanies.

Palo Alto, CA (HQ), Boston, MA & London, UK

201 - 500 employees

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Offices

John Swartz

Company Size

SDR Team

Sales Development Manager

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Steps in a Sales Career

”We bring reps into our inbound role to learn our product and the industry, then we promote from within to an outbound [SDR] role. This progression can be anywhere from three to six months on the inbound role before moving to the outbound role.”

Five9 is a leading provider of cloud contact center software that enables more than three billion customer interactions annually. Offices

Kristina McMillan

Company Size

Sales Team

Director of SalesDevelopment

San Ramon, CA

501 - 1000 employees

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Here’s an example of this career progression: in June 2013, Chris Flores joined Namely as the company’s first SDR. Alongside the Director of Sales, Chris generated sales pipeline, onboarded new reps and championed a need for on outbound sales team for Namely. After seven months of outbound prospecting and building a solid sales funnel for the company, he was promoted to Manager of Inside Sales.

Offices

Chris Flores

Company Size

SDR Team

Manager of Inside Sales

Namely is the leading end-to-end HR and payroll platform for growing companies and is used by some of the world’s most innovative companies in technology, media and commerce.

New York, NY

51 - 200 employees

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Outreach Strategies for SDRs

As you’re building your SDR team, it’s important to establish a solid set of tools that will enable your reps to work smarter and more efficiently.

In a Sales Development study conducted by TOPO, of the 70 polled B2B companies with an aggregate revenue of $11.7B,”The final crucial factor to the most successful Sales Development organizations is technology. We {TOPO] have found a sales-development-specific tech[nology] stack emerge. SDR teams build this stack level by level as their organization matures.”

TOPO suggests that every Level 1 SDR team must put in place a technology stack that consists of a CRM, LinkedIn, a phone system, sales-centric email tools and data tools.

Technology isn’t everything—you will need to develop your sales strategy and tactics supported by outbound best practices.

Email is still as popular as ever. But, canned responses are a thing of the past. Instead, give your SDRs the right practices to do their job. Whether it’s building a support system, peer to peer reviews or internal role plays—find what works for your team.

Sales Reps as Mini-MarketersFor years, Marketing has utilized the power of campaigns. It’s time for sales to get on board. Think of your SDRs as mini-marketers with a specific outreach mission to educate their prospects about your company.

With outbound prospecting, it’s going to take a certain number of touches and conversations to reach a prospect. Some teams do all of this manually. But, there’s a

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better way. Instead, you can use technology to your team’s advantage and automate the process without jeopardizing personalization.

Multiple personal touches at scale is what will amp up your team’s productivity and put you in touch with more prospects faster. With a simple framework, called the 5x5 Method, your SDR team can maintain a consistent cadence of conversation with their prospects.

The prospect is always at the center of your 5x5 Method. Train your SDRs to think about what your prospects care about, and then center your messaging on how your company can add value. Whether each email is spaced fi ve days, weeks or months apart—it builds trust and establishes an ongoing relationship with prospects.

“Sending relevant and spaced out emails over time, so we’re not sending a prospect the same type of email every two days, is extremely important in our follow-up strategy,” said Chris Calkin of Tune.

Setting up your 5x5 campaign on ToutApp is simple. With the Email Automation product feature, SDRs will be able to set up their chain of fi ve connected emails to any group of prospects. Each email within their 5x5 campaign can be tailored based on the interests of their prospects.

The Right MessagingAs ubiquitous as email is, it still holds a lot of mystery. Studies show that 20% - 40% of the 182B+ emails sent out every day are actually opened. Clearly you need to break through the clutter so that your SDRs’ emails are opened. Start with a catchy, short and informative subject line. The body of your email is where you become more personal and add value. Remember, keep it short, because simplicity drives curiosity.

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Never Send a Blind Email Email tracking is a valuable way to instantly increase your team’s productivity. It lets you see when someone opens your email, clicks on a link you sent him or views the sales collateral that you attached.

With the ToutApp Live Feed that offers real-time email and activity tracking, SDRs won’t be going into their prospecting efforts blind.

Once an SDR has crafted the perfect message, designed his 5x5 Method and sent out tracked emails, the next step is prioritizing his leads. With a tool like ToutApp’s Lead Prioritization, the SDR can get a list of his most engaged prospects based on results from email tracking.

A data-driven list of where an SDR should allocate his time is a valuable asset. It tells an SDR if his messaging is engaging, gives him a better understanding of his prospects and how to authentically communicate with them.

“The beauty of our job as sales reps is that it never stops. There’s always more companies to find. Just stay hungry and keep thinking about the long term,” said Chris Flores of Namely.

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Sales Development isn’t a trend. It’s the future of sales and is a key component of kick-ass sales teams.

More and more fast-growing companies have adopted the Sales Development role as a strategic asset for their sales teams. Now, many larger companies are taking notice and adopting their own Sales Development teams.

The SDR isn’t just an entry-level sales role or a junior sales rep. He is a distinct strategic and competitive advantage for any ambitious sales team.

In Conclusion

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The 5 Item SDR Checklist

You’ve read all about SDRs; now it’s time to start assembling your awesome team. Here’s a 5 item SDR checklist to get you started:

2. Develop Account Territories Based on your Ideal Customer Profile, compile a list of account territories for your SDRs/AEs. This ensures that you won’t have multiple reps going after the same target.

3. Write an SDR Playbook Ask your first SDR hires to iterate on the playbook, as they’re the ones doing the role every day.

4. Determine an SDR Compensation Plan On average, the annual SDR base salary is $46k. However, that average fluctuates based on your company, location, experience and performance measurement.

Determine your buyer personas What kinds of titles should your SDRs talk to? What are their specific needs?Use a database (Crunchbase, NASDAQ, NYSE, Fortune 1000) to understand key characteristics of your customers (location, industry and employees)Filter the database with your newfound customer characteristics to arrive at a list of targeted companies Determine the opportunity size of the target company in order to prioritize outreach

Size and distribute the territories across the SDR team so that everyone has an equal piece of the pie

The SDR Playbook should be no more than 3 - 5 pages and is a living docu-ment that should be updated often The playbook should provide an introduction to your CRM, your company’s product, the Ideal Customer Profile and customer testimonials Continue to test and update the playbook as your team grows

Experience: Reps with less than a year’s experience earn less than reps with more experience Location: Base salary changes with varying costs of living in different cities

1. Define an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) This makes your sales strategy tangible and ensures that everyone on the team has the same understanding of the end goal.

5. Start hiring Work with a recruiting agency, or post a job description on your website or on job boards.

Network: Go to recruiting events and promote via social media and your social networksInterview: Phone screen and interview promising candidates

Catch Prospects at the Right Time

Accelerate Your Outreach

Spend More Time Selling

Prospect effi ciently with complete visibility in your outreach

Increase productivity while maintaining a personal touch with your prospects

Streamline your outreach and eliminate administrative tasks

Email website, presentation trackingReal-time Live FeedCustomized templatesLead Prioritization

SDR Edition: Features

Go after the right targets based on who is most engagedKnow exactly when to follow up and take immediate action

Measure and improve messaging using real-time data that tells you what works

Tailor each email to your prospect’s needs

Book meetings faster by auto-inserting calendar times into emails

Build customized lead, contact and account lists seamlessly with two-click sync from Salesforce

Calendar sync and schedulingScheduled emailsEngagement data with CRMPersonalized group emailing

SDR EDITIONIncrease connects and book more meetings by catching prospects at the right time

with the power of email tracking, templates and analytics.

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about ToutApp

ToutApp helps sales teams streamline communications to prospect, book meetings and close more deals. ToutApp’s robust email tracking, templates and analytics help sales teams increase overall engagement throughout the sales process. Founded in 2011, ToutApp has more than 80,000 salespeople using its platform, with enterprise customers including Atlassian, Dropbox, Optimizely, Jive, Namely and more.

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References

Dixon, Matthew, and Brent Adamson. The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011. Print.

Gonzalez, Bryan. TOPO. Sales Development Council #3., Nov 2014. PDF.

The Bridge Group, Inc. Sales Development Rep (SDR) 2014 Metrics & Compensation, 2014. PDF.