This is a guest post by Salesroads, North America’s leading B2B Appointment Setting and SDR Outsourcing firm. With nearly 12 years of demand generation experience, SalesRoads has built more than 425 Outsourced SDR Teams setting more than 50,000 appointments in the process.
As the sales process has become increasingly fragmented, the need for an individual to perform proactive cold outreach has increased. Commonly known as a Sales Development Representative (SDR), this sales rep performs outbound calling to quickly qualify prospects before setting a meeting for an Account Executive who aims to close the deal. As this role has become more important and more complicated, the number of tools needed to support these front-line sales reps has increased.
If your business has an SDR team, then you understand that building and maintaining a high-performing SDR team is tough work. With more than 400 high performing SDR teams built and more than 50,000 appointments set in the process, we’ve learned to never skip out on the vital resources your SDR needs to succeed. With that in mind, here are 5 resources that every SDR team needs.
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A Tool for Finding New Leads
(assumptions: average call rate of 12 dials/hour, over 8 calling hours)
As you can see, even at 90% data accuracy there are 48 wasted minutes over an 8-hour calling period. With most organizations compensating their SDRs by the hour (at least partially), small inaccuracies can result in losses to the tune of tens of thousands a year when accounting for an entire team.
When you couple this with the fact that data accuracy decays at a rate of roughly 2% per month, or just under 22% a year, you can quickly see how a cut-rate tool for finding new leads will cost your company big.
Needless to say, we’re big fans of Automata and their proprietary methodology for keeping your data fresh and accurate.
Leads are the lifeblood of an SDR team, and the quality of your lead list directly correlates with the success of your campaign. Think about it this way, for every call your SDRs make to a prospect who is no longer with the company, it costs your business money.
Even small inaccuracies can result in huge losses for your organization. Look at the graph below to quantify the cost of bad data.
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A Tool to Protect Your Email Outreach
We all know it isn’t enough to just call your prospect anymore, so a multi-channel approach is key to the success of anyone in an SDR role. In particular, email has become a cornerstone of SDR outreach and sales prospecting. Assuming your SDRs send emails in a 1-1 ratio with phone calls, they’re likely sending close to 500 emails a week.
Just like bad phone numbers can quickly put your SDR campaign in the red, so will bad emails. You are likely familiar with terms such as “email deliverability” and “bounce rate,” which are different metrics for measuring how many of your emails actually reach their intended destination. If too many of your emails fail to properly send, your email server may get blacklisted and your future emails will be flagged as spam.
If your server gets blacklisted, you can kiss your emailing campaign goodbye as well as any returns you were hoping to gain. With this in mind, you want to protect your emailing efforts upfront by verifying the validity of your emails with a tool like ZeroBounce. ZeroBounce ensures the emails are active and alerts you when you shouldn’t send to an email because of the high likelihood your outreach will be flagged as spam.
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A Tool to Manage Your Leads
Yes, every organization in today’s marketplace has a CRM, and for good reason. But just because your organization has a CRM does not mean your organization has a good tool for managing an SDR campaign.
Although features like click-to-dial are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, there are a litany of other features you may not be considering that can boost your SDR team’s efficiency.
Features such as dynamic email templates, queue based routing, and standardized result codes can all be huge boons for your team’s success. Don’t hesitate to do some comparison shopping and invest the time to find a tool that is designed for an inside sales team.
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A tool to Organize Your Workflow
Especially important for executives who are leading an SDR team, as keeping everyone on the same page can be a daunting task. Coordinating things such as lead research, copywriting, reporting, and CRM maintenance can quickly become messy if you don’t have a centralized system for keeping your team organized.
Investing in a service like WorkBoard or Trello may seem like an easy place to cut costs, but doing so may cost you more money in the long run, not to mention your sanity!
Nothing will derail your campaign faster than having your SDRs in the office with no leads to call because your data team missed the memo. Talk about a costly corner to cut!
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A Tool for Digging Deeper
If you’ve been running SDR campaigns for long enough, you’ve almost certainly run into a scenario where the traditional methods for finding new leads is no longer working. Although tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator are great for quick and easy research findings, they simply don’t cut it for more advanced queries.
When you inevitably run into this problem, you’ll need a service like Automata to save the day.
To paint you a picture, we once worked with a client who provided heating and cooling solutions. As such, they wanted to reach out exclusively to prospects who worked in buildings with a certain square footage within 30 miles of their central location. Faced with this beast of a research request, we turned to Automata and were able to deliver not only a stellar lead list for our client, but incredible results in terms of ROI and appointments as well. At the end of the day, this simply would not have been possible without the data to back our calling efforts.
When all is said and done, building a high-performing SDR team isn’t that different from building a high-end sports car. There are a lot of moving pieces and one broken component can bring the whole thing to a screeching halt. So, don’t fuel your team with sub-par tools and avoid the crash and burn that plagues so many organizations!
