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Robert Gonye
I think now more than ever it’s apparent that any manager of a sales team, sales development has become increasingly clear.
The standard process for sales development or lead qualifiers or business development officers who are normally in the business of sending out system generated emails, calling, leaving voicemails — It no longer works well.
Sales representative vs sale development agent
While a sales rep is focused on closing deals to meet or exceed their quota for a given time period, and their performance is measured by their ability to meet targets, in a sales development role, agents are focused on moving leads through the sales pipeline emphasising quality lead generation over closing individual deals.
Effectiveness of a sales development agent is based on performance measured by how effective they are at moving leads through the sales pipeline. With this team structure, sales developers often receive lead information from their marketing team, and are responsible for qualifying and nurturing leads before introducing them to account managers or sales reps to land the sale. For the success of this, the following are key skills they need to master and drive.
Active listening and adaptability
How SDRs continue to add value to a sales process that’s increasingly run by automation — especially in the prospecting stages is through a combination of good questioning skills and active listening. We can automate a business, however, nothing beats a human listening capability for business. It’s the conversation that allows a prospect to be qualified.
No matter what your business sells, you must be highly attuned to phrases that indicate a prospect could be a good fit for your product. It’s more important to focus the conversation on gathering valuable information than to check qualification boxes.
Practicing active listening means being adaptable — turning away from a prepared checklist and recognising when an opportunity to dig deeper presents itself. Hence a must-have skill for sales development representatives to learn to be present and have a real conversation.
Good voicemails
While it’s not an offering to many smartphone users, it’s ideal to get a prospect live on the phone, but sometimes you have to leave a voicemail.
If you leave 25 quality voicemails, you at least have a chance to receive a call-back. But if you leave no voicemails, your probability of getting a call back diminishes significantly.
It’s harder to leave a good voicemail than it sounds. You have to, in a reasonably short amount of time, entice a prospect you have never spoken with to call you back. Some people like to be concise.
A good example, have the SDRs to leave a voicemail for seasoned sales reps every afternoon at 3pm during their first month. The rep then sends back a quick email with feedback and a probability that they would call back. Leaving a good voicemail is an indispensable skill and thus requires practice, be committed to quality touch points across all activities.
Resilience
There’s no doubt that sales lead qualification is a tough job. Unlike closing, sales personnel, don’t get much glory. They’re also usually spending all day sending emails and making calls. It can be exhausting.
In addition to these hard skills, it is important to learn to keep your energy up and stay positive. If you are flat or discouraged, it will translate over the phone and your prospect will pick up on your low energy.
It’s also critical to learn to bounce back quickly from a bad call. Whether a prospect was rude or you made a mistake, it doesn’t do any good to allow emotion to prevent you from picking up the phone for the rest of the day or negatively impact your next 15 calls. Resilience is crucial to keeping your head in the game. Developing this ability will also be invaluable down the road when you have to recover from losing a big deal without skipping a beat.
Coachability
One of the most important skill-sets, when hiring is to evaluate candidates, coach-ability. Confidence is important, the best SDRs pro-actively seek out coaching from high-performing peers and crave honest feedback from their managers. Getting real-time feedback is best, however, you can also build out a list of all the questions or challenges you faced in a given week and debrief with your manager during a scheduled one-on-one.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness plays into resilience and coach-ability. SDRs need to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses. This will help them create strategies for dealing with a bad call or rejection. And they will be able to analyse their performance, both the wins and setbacks and reflect on what went well and what didn’t.
Self-aware SDRs will ask for feedback from managers and colleagues. Rather than taking negative or constructive feedback personally, they’ll have a deeper understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for growth.
Curious learner
Successful SDRs are curious and eager to learn. Not only will new product, industry, or organisational knowledge help them in their current role, but it will also help them as they grow in their career.
They need to know their product or service inside and out, and have a clear understanding of their customer profile, and challenges prospects face. SDRs can gather new information through internal resources, online research, training sessions, industry events, and meeting with their colleagues. Learning is a continual process and it will set the SDR up for success in the short-term and long-term.
Relationship-building
As an SDR, your job is to prime prospects for the sale before turning them over to your account managers to close. Effective SDRs are able to build genuine relationships with prospects to foster trust. To be a successful relationship-builder, you must be able to communicate with a wide variety of people across multiple channels. Whether you are connecting with a contact over email, presenting to a prospect in a meeting, or tagging up face-to-face, you must be able to clearly communicate your points and ideas to connect with prospects to keep them engaged.
The views given herein are solely for information purposes; they are guidelines and suggestions and are not guaranteed to work in any particular way.
Robert Gonye is a business growth expert and influencer. He writes in his personal capacity. Comments and views: [email protected]
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