What Is Sales Development?
Sales development is a series of repeatable actions that empowers sales teams to get new sales opportunities through the door and, ideally, close business to become customers. Sales development is an additional department that acts as the liaison between sales and marketing, working towards the ultimate goal of securing more revenue for the business.
Sales development often involves a combination of the following:
Market Research
Before you can start selling to someone, you need to know a bit about who they are: What demographics do they belong to? What are the best ways to reach them? How do they think and feel? What makes them likely to buy your product?
Once you know the answers to these questions, you’ll be able to craft better messaging, use more appropriate channels and techniques, and ultimately boost conversion rates.
Prospecting
This component of sales development involves finding the right prospects to fill your sales pipeline: Where can you find the people most likely to become your customers? How do you tap into new markets? How can you filter out people who are unlikely to buy your products and services so you can save money?
Implementing a prospecting strategy is essential for sales development because it ensures that you always have pipeline full of potential sales opportunities. While they may not all be qualified or ready to buy after the first point of contact, sales development representatives (SDRs) can reach out and discover if they are a good fit for your business and vice versa.
Lead Qualification and Scoring
After a few discovery conversations, your representatives in the sales development process will be able to qualify and score leads based on their likelihood of eventually making a purchase.
For example, if a lead currently has a recognizable need, available budget, and genuine interest in your product, they’ll probably score quite high. Sales-qualified leads (SQLs) that meet a certain threshold of scoring can then be passed to your outbound SDRs so they can continue pursuing the prospect’s business.
However, while a prospect may be sales qualified, this doesn’t mean that they’re marketing qualified. For a prospect to become a sales opportunity, they must be both sales and marketing qualified. For a lead to be marketing qualified, they must show genuine interest in purchasing your products or services. Many SQLs aren’t ready to make a purchase after the first point of contact, which is what makes lead nurturing such a crucial component to the sales development process.
Lead Nurturing
After a lead is sales qualified by an SDR, they’re sent to the lead nurturing stage of the sales cycle to continue building the relationship. SDRs nurture leads by routinely making warm phone calls and sending email drip campaigns full of relevant sales and marketing materials.
Appointment Setting
When a prospect is towards the end of their buying cycle, it’s time for an SDR to pitch a sales appointment between them and a member of your internal sales team. Here, SDRs hand off a lead to a sales expert who specializes in closing, maximizing the chances of getting them to sign on the dotted line.
Why Is Sales Development Important?
Sales development is an important part of your everyday business functions because it:
Allows You to Have More Targeted Strategies
With a sales development strategy in place, your SDRs have the opportunity to better target leads based on their interests and demographics. Since sales development helps gather market research, you can use this data to align with different leads based on their industry, company size, employee count, and other qualifications. This sets your sales team up with higher quality sales meetings that are likely to convert into customers.
Increases Conversion Rates
Companies that have a sales development strategy in place often see higher close rates and retain more clients over time. Sales development allows business to focus more on quality over quantity, generating highly relevant leads that are ready to close. Additionally, sales and account executives have more time to focus on their core responsibilities without worrying about things like initial engagement or lead qualification.
Reduces Costs
While it may feel like focusing on sales development can take away from your sales and marketing budget, it can actually reduce long-term costs. Implementing a sales development department makes your lead generation and sales processes more efficient, requiring less time, and less money. Even though your close rates will go up, your costs should stay the same or decline so you can put funds towards more pressing business matters.
Streamlines Sales Processes
Mastering the art of sales development is also a way to streamline your overall sales process. Everything gets easier, more intuitive, and more efficient when you have designated people in specialized roles.
Provides Opportunities for More Data and Analytics
Many marketers and sales executives love sales development because it provides opportunities for generating more data and conducting better analytics to better marketing efforts and more focused sales pitches. Since you’ll be engaging with a broad pool of prospective clients, you can experiment with many different strategies and see which tactics work best for your business.
Additionally, gathering data helps improve current efforts, create new segments, etc. After using data, the job isn’t over. SDR teams can use this data to consistently build on their sales process and achieve a more significant ROI from their business growth efforts.
What Makes SDRs Different From Account Executives?
The difference between an SDR and an account executive boils down to their core responsibilities. SDRs aren’t interested in negotiating or closing deals; they’re exclusively focused on the first few stages of the sales cycle. The role of an SDR is to make the job of an account executive easier by providing them with a steady stream of highly qualified, warm leads. It’s their job to find new prospects, reach out to them, nurture them, and set appointments. On the other hand, account executives don’t often have to handle these initial responsibilities because they prioritize pitching the prospect and closing the deal.
Want to spend less time prospecting and more time closing? Learn how our Outbound SDR solution can help here.
How to Optimize Your Sales Development Process
If you want to master the art of sales development, you’ll need to focus on three key areas. First, hire the right people and train them effectively so they can do their job well. Second, streamline operations and clear up ambiguities so you can follow repeatable, effective strategies. Third, choose the right tools and integrate them effectively so your team can do their best work. We’ll explore each of these areas more specifically in the sections that follow.
Hire and Train the Right People
One of the most important pieces of the sales development puzzle is the team of people you have executing your vision. If you have better SDRs in place, with superior training, you’ll generate much better leads, face fewer costs, and ultimately see a higher ROI.
High-performing SDRs must obtain the follow soft and hard skillsets:
Product Knowledge
Your SDRs may follow a script when interacting with prospects, but even if this is the case, they’re going to perform better if they have in-depth knowledge of the products and services you’re selling. They’ll be more persuasive, better able to answer questions, and more accurately judge whether a lead is sufficiently qualified. This is something that comes with experience, but you can make the process faster by supporting your SDRs with better training.
Customer Knowledge
SDRs also need to know who your customers are and how they operate. You wouldn’t sell a product to a 50-year-old manufacturing plant owner the same way you tell a product to a 20-year-old burgeoning startup entrepreneur. The better you understand your target demographics, the more likely you’ll be to succeed. Using the right sales tools and technologies can help SDRs better understand customers because they can keep track of previous conversations, so they know what to pitch and what kind of content to send them to accelerate their journey down the sales funnel.
Role Knowledge
SDRs also need to be fully aware of the key responsibilities and goals in their role; if they lean too heavily into the marketing side of the equation, or if they start trying to close deals prematurely, the job will be done inefficiently. SDRs have a very specific job, and they need to be able to perform that job reliably.
Active Listening Skills
An SDR’s job is more about gathering information than persuading (though persuading also plays a small role). Accordingly, one of the most important skills for your SDRs to master is active listening. Are they able to listen closely to what prospects are saying? Can they ask thoughtful, valuable questions?
Marketing Experience
It also helps if your SDRs have at least some marketing experience or familiarity. Better understanding what makes a message persuasive or compelling can lead them to much more valuable early conversations with your prospects.
Ability to Handle Objections
Even though your SDRs won’t directly attempt to close deals, they may encounter objections early on, such as not having the budget or not having a need for your product or service. Your entire sales process will be more effective if these representatives can handle objections in stride, providing counterpoints or further information to overcome those sticking points. They must be well-equipped to know what types of objections they may encounter and how to overcome them to secure more sales meetings.
Ability to Handle Rejection
Rejection and failure are common obstacles in any sales role. Strong SDRs aren’t worried about letting go of low-relevance leads, nor do they suffer a crisis of confidence in the wake of a jarring rejection.
Of course, you don’t have to build a sales development team from scratch if you want access to some of the most experienced and talented people in the industry. Instead, you could outsource your sales development needs. Compared to the cost of hiring and managing your own team, the cost of outsourcing is more reasonable, and you’ll get instant access to a full team of experts who know the sales development process inside and out.
The Process: Mastering the Sales Development Approach
Market research may be handled by your marketing team, but your SDRs also need to understand what your target demographics are and how that audience thinks and sees the world. When equipped with this knowledge, your SDRs will be more effective in their messaging strategies, more persuasive, and better capable of qualifying leads.
High-Level Research
If you want to master the art of sales development, you’ll need to focus on three key areas. First, hire the right people and train them effectively so they can do their job well. Second, streamline operations and clear up ambiguities so you can follow repeatable, effective strategies. Third, choose the right tools and integrate them effectively so your team can do their best work. We’ll explore each of these areas more specifically in the sections that follow.
Outreach Efforts
When your SDRs are appropriately trained, they’ll be able to practice their own outreach, sending messages and making calls to new prospects as an initial introduction. You may have scripts or frameworks for your SDRs to follow, or you may allow them to navigate the main talking points as they see fit.
Follow Up
If the initial attempt to make contact fails, you’ll need a strategy to follow up. It can sometimes take several outreach attempts before you can even make contact with a prospect. If you give up after a single attempt, you’ll sabotage yourself.
Discovery and Lead Scoring
Next, you’ll need a way to qualify (and preferably score) the leads you generate. This is arguably the most important function of your SDRs. After a few rounds of discovery, your representatives should be able to objectively estimate the probability of the lead closing.
Lead Handoff
Once a lead is toward the end of their buying cycle, it’s time for SDRs to schedule a sales meeting between the qualified prospect and a member of your internal sale team. When the SDR gets the prospect to agree to the meeting, the SDR must provide the sales team member with all the information regarding what they’re looking for in a B2B product or service provider. This allows the sales or account executive to prepare a sales presentation that fits the needs of their business.
Select the Right Sales Tools
You’ll need a variety of technological tools to aid you in your sales development approach, including those for discovering new prospects, scoring leads, facilitating communication, and streamlining the various components of your sales process. There are thousands of sales tools available, so this decision can be difficult. But it gets much easier if you follow these tips:
Know Your Goals and Needs
Before you start shopping around for sales development tools, make sure you identify your goals and needs. This way, you’ll be more likely to focus only on the features that you need the most.
Focus on Utility and Minimalism
It’s tempting to jump at every sales development tool that promises more efficient processes and better results, but if your team gets overloaded with tools to use, they won’t be able to use them effectively, and you’ll end up wasting money in the process. Instead, focus on utility and minimalism; only buy the tools you truly need.
Review Carefully
Review each tool carefully. In most cases, you’ll be able to sign up for a free trial or otherwise evaluate the tool in full before making a purchase.
What Are Some Sales Development Metrics You Should Track?
If you want to prove the value of your sales development investments, or if you want to optimize your sales development process further, you’ll need to track several objective metrics and analyze them carefully. These are some of the most important key metrics to get you started:
Number of Outreach Attempts
How many outreach attempts are being made by your SDRs? How can you push this number higher? This could be an illustration of the efficiency or productivity of your SDRs or a commentary on the value of the tools you’re using.
On average, our SDRs make approximately 8 to 12 outreach attempts toward a single prospect before they convert from a lead into a sales opportunity. However, it’s also important to consider your own outreach metrics to define the turnaround from a lead into a sales meeting. If your outreach attempts are significantly higher than our average, it may be worth exploring new ways to reduce a prospect’s time spent in the sales cycle.
Open and Response Rates
When you send sales emails to cold prospects, how do they respond? What kind of open rates and response rates do you see? This metric is focused almost exclusively on your approach to messaging.
According to CampaignMonitor, the ideal open rate of sales emails is between 17 to 28%. Ideally, you’d want your open rate to be higher, but they should also align with proper response rates, which should be around (or higher than) 5%. If your open rate is high, but response rates are low, it may be worth reconsidering the content within the sales emails. If a subject line seems clickbaity or doesn’t match the content of the email, it’s important to align the intent of the email so you can get higher response rates, generating higher quality sales opportunities.
Number of SQLs Generated
How many sales-qualified leads has your team generated? Has this number increased or decreased over time? How does this compare to the number of outreach attempts you make? Understanding the number of SQLs generated is essential, so you know if your prospecting list is generating high-quality sales opportunities. If they’re not, it may be worth looking into investing in a different sales prospecting software.
Number of Appointments Set
How many appointments are your SDRs setting? If the number of sales appointments set by SDRs is low, it’s important to review their approach to appointment setting and provide proper training where it’s needed so you can set your account executives up with more sales opportunities.
Deals Closed Rate
How many of these appointments set by SDRs eventually lead to a sale? While you may want your SDRs to set your account executives up with as many sales as possible, it’s also essential to consider the quality of the sales meeting. If a prospect isn’t ready to make a purchase anytime soon, it’s not worth scheduling the sales meeting yet; therefore, SDRs should follow up when they’re closer to the end of their sales cycle.
Average Deal Size
What is the average deal size associated with a closed transaction?
If you process all these figures together, you should be able to figure out how much money is being generated by your sales team and the specific impact made by your sales development team. From there, you can calculate your overall return on investment (ROI) and focus on weak areas for future improvements.
Tracking and analyzing data is much easier when you’re working with a dedicated sales and marketing firm. You won’t have to track anything on your own, and you can lean on the expertise and guidance of the firm to help you act on your most relevant insights.
Key Takeaways
Sales development is essential for generating new revenue opportunities and consistently growing your business even if customers leave. While customers leaving isn’t an ideal scenario for any business, it’s bound to happen to even the most “perfect” company.
With a sales development strategy in place, you have the opportunity to learn about your target market and explore what they may be looking for regarding your product or service solution. This allows you to get new and higher-quality leads for your sales pipeline and keep ongoing customers satisfied because you’re consistently focusing on growing your business based on their wants, needs, and pain points.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, we’re all about helping companies master their approach to marketing and sales. Whether you’re just dipping your toes into the water of sales development or you’re overhauling your lead generation and sales strategies completely, we’re here for you. Contact us today to get started!
