Sales Enablement—Why You Need to Build an SDR Team

Sales enablement is a hot topic right now. Sales leaders everywhere are soaking up all the information they can about it and finding new ways to help their teams sell more effectively. While it’s a hot topic, it’s also a relatively new concept for a lot of people. So, what exactly is sales enablement and why are SDR teams your secret weapon? You’re about to find out.

Sales enablement refers to the tools, salespeople, and content that enable account executives (AEs) to sell more. Traditionally, account executives would prospect, cold call, and manage a pipeline themselves. Now, sales development representatives (SDRs) do this activity for them, thus enabling AEs to spend more time selling and closing deals. Sales enablement can also include marketing professionals who write website copy, emails, and other forms of sales enablement content that generate leads.

Let’s cover a few more fundamentals about sales enablement and SDRs that are important to know.

As you may have already gathered from the above definition, the goal of sales enablement is to help AEs sell more. Furthermore, it involves providing all the resources AEs need to sell more effectively. Salespeople can still prospect, cold call, and email people in their own pipeline, but with the efforts of SDRs, they spend more time on sales pitches and closing deals. In addition to scheduling pitches, sales enablement teams can also provide the content that your AEs need to enhance their sales efforts and close more deals. This might include things like professionally written emails or content for AEs to send to prospects like marketing collateral and blogs.

Sales enablement isn’t so much about selling, it’s more about the buyer. The role of an SDR is to move potential buyers through the pipeline and make it easier for AEs to engage with key targets. If an SDR can build a relationship with a prospect and provide tons of information on your business before they even get to an AE, it makes the sale that much easier.

Before building a sales enablement department, there are a few things to think about. Make sure you define what exactly it is that sales enablement is providing for your salespeople. Here are a few examples:

• Qualified appointments. The first thing sales enablement teams can provide to make AEs lives easier? Qualified appointments. When SDRs are doing the leg work (calling, emailing, and qualifying target prospects), the AEs spend most of their time on scheduled pitches.
• Content to send to prospects. The second thing that a lot of sales enablement teams will provide for their salespeople is content. This content can be sent to potential buyers in a follow-up email, pulled up on a virtual sales pitch while screen sharing, and so on. Content can include sell sheets, case studies, pitch decks, blogs, or email content.
• Internal knowledge. Lastly, sales enablement teams can also dedicate themselves to providing things like best practices, research, and tools that will help the internal sales team sell more effectively.

How you decide to structure your sales enablement team is entirely up to you, but make sure you have a solid plan in place before getting started.

Providing more resources for the sales team is great, but only if they know how to use them. That’s why a great sales enablement department defines how salespeople should use what they give them. Training and development are major components in any sales program, and a sales enablement department can take charge in leading this.

When an appointment is scheduled for an AE, how does it sync to their calendar? When you write a new sell sheet, do the AEs know who to send it to and when? Do you want to align each SDR with their own AE to schedule appointments for? Or would you rather SDRs set appointments for any AE who is available? Knowing answers to questions like these and providing ongoing training will make your teams more cohesive. Together, you can achieve more.

The more you learn about sales enablement, the more you’ll understand why SDR teams are your secret weapon when it comes to sales success. While sales enablement content is great to have, it’s definitely not the only thing you should be concerned about. In fact, building an SDR team should be your top priority.

Building out your SDR team should be your first priority because a human connection is powerful in B2B sales. Without it, you can’t build relationships, move people along in the pipeline, or provide relevant information and insightful answers to prospects’ questions. Once you have a fully developed SDR team, you’ll start to see why calling and talking to prospects frequently is the best way to get on the fast track to B2B sales success.

When SDRs work in tandem with marketing professionals, you’ll be unstoppable as a sales organization. While SDRs schedule appointments via cold calling and emailing, content writers generate inbound leads via website writing and social media marketing. Additionally, when you hire content strategists for your sales enablement team, they’re not just creating materials for AEs—they can also create content that helps SDRs schedule more appointments.

Hear from our Vice President of Sales Enablement why SDR teams are your #1 sales enablement resource:

Does building out your own sales enablement team sound like too much of a hassle right now? We get it! You’re trying to wrap up a wild year and are probably still overcoming many of the obstacles your business faced due to COVID-19. Fortunately, we know a solution that will help you gain more market share starting now. At Abstrakt, we have our own sales enablement team because we practice what we preach. Our B2B appointment setting services provide a sustainable sales pipeline, more sales appointments, and continuous business growth (in other words, exactly what we do for ourselves to grow our own business) for our clients.

We aren’t an outsourced call center—we’re an extension of your business. Are you ready to hire your own SDR team? Let’s lock down your market → schedule a meeting today.