Let me start this with a paraphrase of a quote from a famous Strugatsky Brothers novel “Monday starts on Saturday” (which, by the way, extols the virtues of working hard for an idea you believe in):

– Do, you, indeed need a programmer so badly?

– We desperately need a programmer – said the crooked nose – “but we don’t need just a programmer. We need a good one!”

SDRs are the infantry of Sales, your foot soldiers who establish the beachhead for you, and you follow in with your field execs to close the deal. It is a typical first step into the world of Sales for many, and a trial by fire: if you can make it as an SDR, and you still like it, then you know Sales is for you.

But if most people start in Sales Development, why is it, then, that good SDRs are so hard to find? Talk about early stages of lead development with any seasoned field exec or a Sales Manager, and chances are, they will tell you how hard it is to find and retain someone who’s really good at it.

Here for a Good Time

Part of the reason is that good SDRs don’t stay in Sales Development for long. These are usually bright young people, straight out of college, joining their first corporate gig. If they discover a knack for sales, and demonstrate ability to consistently convert cold leads to a warm invitation to the conversation at the table for your account execs, they will soon move into the account manager role themselves.

Your job, as a sales leader, is to create that path for them. You can’t keep anyone ambitious in the SDR division for long: they are in this for a good time, not a long time. Either you offer them a career path within your organization, or they will find a way to move themselves up the corporate ladder in another company.

You could say: “what does it matter, if I’m out of a good SDR either way?” – but that is not true. If you nurture your fresh grads and develop them into account managers, they will bring the energy, the ambition, the hunger for closing – and the knowledge of the product with them into the exec position. Now you effectively gained a trained account exec who is not afraid of getting down and dirty with the account if needed, and is thrilled with new opportunities you gave them by giving them extra responsibilities.

Whereas if you let your SDRs bleed, and continue to hire fresh talent only to keep them below the glass ceiling, you will lose on both ends: the gifted people will abandon you, leaving only mediocrity behind, while you will continue hunting for a seasoned exec, who will not only command a higher pay, but will also arrive with expectations of SDR support, and will take a significant time to ramp up.

Hold the Handrail

One of the common mistakes in managing SDRs that I see, is putting too much of an expectation on them without proper support. Your troops have the energy and don’t fear rejection of cold calling – a rare and unique ability. It is up to you to empower them and give them the tools to make them successful. So, what do SDRs need?

Training on the value proposition and the key talking points.

It takes more than a single product demo and an intro script to successfully engage the customer.

“Hello, sir, my name is Mike, and I am reaching out to you about your extended car warranty” – *Click*.

If the rep does not understand what you are selling, or doesn’t care, because they are outsourced anyway, and next week they will all be calling for another company, then you are just wasting time.

Spend time with your reps, make sure they are dedicated to your product only, invite them to the demos with your execs, so they can watch and learn.

Well developed engagement scripts

You need to arm your SDRs with engagement scripts that play out all possible situations.

• What if the customer says he’s not interested?
• What if they are already using a competitive product?
• What is our unique proposition and when to mention it?

You can’t expect SDRs to know these things or to develop them independently. The answers for these questions and the scripts must come from you. Chances are, that in the process of developing these, you will significantly improve your own pitch and approach at the next-stage engagements when the customer is interested enough to invite you for a demo.

A clear list of targets to call

SDRs need to understand what segment of the market they are calling into, and who they are calling into. Once they have a list of names and accounts to call (compiled by you), they can unleash their massive energy into telephone calls and emails.

Just a list of names and their numbers won’t work, because calling into decision makers without a clear understand of what they do, and who they are is extremely ineffective. Teach your SDRs to use LinkedIn, give them tools that provide intelligence and data before they place the call. Here is a good list of various tools you can use to empower your SDR team. At the very minimum, give them LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It requires a certain flow of lead development built into your sales process, but when you align how you do things with what Navigator does, it is a very powerful tool.

There’s always a question of price for every subscription and lead development tool, and it is up to you to calculate the costs of subscriptions, the time spent by your SDRs on an average call, the conversion rate – and the resulting pipeline. Many tools offer you a trial period, so you can avoid a costly investment if your team can’t leverage the service effectively.

Over to you

Finally, the key factor to managing SDRs effectively – is to assign a designated exec to them. Your field exec and their SDR should be attached at the hip like Siamese twins. The moment the lead is qualified and converted by the SDR, the exec is brought in, briefed on all developments – and is taking over.

If there’s no follow-up because of the breakdown in communication, you just wasted all the effort you and your SDR team put into developing the lead. In return, in this symbiotic relationship, the seasoned exec coaches the SDR on the Sales process, gives them pointers on pitch, on calls, on qualifying the leads – and prepares them for the ultimate transition into the account manager role.

Right after expensive watches, CRM is probably the most favorite subject of conversations for anyone involved in sales. As a hotshot Sales Director, you live and breathe CRM, so when you arrive at Innotech and on your first day you discover there isn’t one, this is the chance of a lifetime to do things right!

So, without further ado, the best CRM is… Nah, not really. Countless engineering and marketing budgets, man-hours press releases and spammy SEO articles are expended to convince you to get just their tool. Every CRM is unique in what it does, and there isn’t an all-around perfect solution, so you need to compile a requirements matrix, look at how each tool meets what you are looking for, whittle it down to two, and then roll the dice.

What goes into compatibility matrix? Let’s review.

How big is your salesforce?

If you are the lonely warrior in your sales department, chances are, you don’t need a CRM at all. You will be spending all your time doing clicks, entering accounts and leads, converting them, adjusting stages – all for the sake of a neat weekly report that you already have in your head. The world’s oldest CRM for a small 1-3 person team is Excel spreadsheet. Better yet, make it Google Docs spreadsheet – we are a 21st century company, after all.

You can easily track the progress of all your opportunities for several people and create fantastic charts for free – courtesy of your company already running on G Suite or Office 365. CRM benefits do not really kick in until you create marketing campaigns, lead generation, deal registration, email integration, and other “*ations”. Let’s take a look at those.

Running lean and mean

CRM market got extremely busy last few years with the advance of integrated cloud offerings for small businesses – namely G Suite and Office 365. Once the integrated platforms became ubiquitous, the CRMs started popping up like mushrooms after a fresh rain. The biggest advantage they carry over established players in the industry (the dominating Salesforce and Sugar), are specializations, rapid deployment, turn-key features and tight integrations with your platform.

What you are looking for are automated provisionings, integration with email, phone system, and marketplace of plugins that also live within the same ecosystem of your cloud. You want your salespeople to spend as little time manually entering the data.

Pipedrive, Insightly, Copper, Zoho – all these CRMs can be deployed within minutes by your IT guy, and be instantly available to the members of your sales team and any new hire. Each CRM comes with a sales process already built, reports preconfigured, and even smart trackers built in: “rotting deals”, deals at risk, absence of activity on leads or accounts. As a result, you don’t need an army of analysts to program workflows, custom fields, dashboards and reports for you: these vendors work hard for your money, and the ease of use and ability to get you running quickly is their key differentiator in the busy segment.

Integrations and Mobility

All the features in the world are useless if they require manual data entry – the bane of CRM systems. You can ride your sales people at every meeting about CRM hygiene, but you can’t beat human nature. If entering data is tedious, slow, if the website is not responsive, if they have to do the same task twice – type an email and then attach it in CRM, make a phone call and then log it in CRM, find a new contact – and then manually enter all the fields – then your people aren’t going to do it, and your forecasting will be as meaningful as Nate Silver’s presidential election predictions.

So, what can you do to ease the burden? The tools are already there: plugins that integrate with Gmail and allow your salespeople to quickly add contacts, prospects and leads. Integrations with website forms and AdWords that will automatically create leads for interested people and generate conversion statistics. Hooks into phone systems such as RingCentral that will track inbound calls to your company and outbound calls to prospects. Mobile apps that allow your people to do the work on the go instead of putting it off until they get back to their desks. If your salesforce is mobile and agile, so should be your CRM.

The Big Guys

“But I’ve heard Salesforce is king!” – sure, may be so, and it is royally priced as well. But Salesforce is an uber-platform, like AWS. The field is wide open, and you can do amazing things with it – from tracking support calls to building knowledge base to tracking your services engagements. This is where the smaller CRMs fall short, because they are oriented towards a simple sales-tracking process and a few auxiliary tools (projects, tasks).

Once you step beyond the bounds of those offerings, you will find you need more robust tools that will generate quotes and invoices, track your PS time and expenses associated with the account. Smaller tools will outsource this function to others via plugins, but bigger players are configurable to handle it all.

Your task is to understand how your model fits into what each of the CRM vendors is offering, and if they are capable of scaling with your business.

Pricing

Finally, there’s the factor of cost. My favorite question when the customers ask me about the cost of the solution I sell is: “what is it worth to you? If you think it’s worth one dollar, I will sell it to you for one dollar.” Ultimately, for all the smaller players who build on top of G Suite, the price hovers around the same level for middle of the road offering. The way these vendors start making money off you is when you need an enriched set of capabilities form them. Advanced reports, custom attributes, premium support – these are the details you need to read and understand where your sales process fits.

In the end, if the automation and features that cost X per user per year are making your people more efficient and that allows you to close Y more deals and save you Z hours – then you are already ahead.

A friend asked me to explain what I do on a day to day basis. My official title is Director of Sales, NALA. Tell this to an average person – and they will probably imagine anything on the range from a sleazy used car salesman to a high-powered jet-setting suit penning power deals. So, what does it really mean to run sales?

The spectrum of the day-to-day activities for any specific job is immense (just check the job requirements for a few), so let’s narrow our situation down to a very specific example. Here’s what we have: a young company Innotech has an idea, a prototype B2B (Business to Business) product that has gained initial traction and a talented team of engineers, but they don’t know how to break out onto the market.

They reached out to investors, and in general, everyone likes the idea, but nobody is willing to put in money until they reach a certain level of sales. They have heard about you, Captain Enterprise Sales, a man who can bootstrap them and launch them into stratosphere. You have all the necessary components: product, talent team, interest from the market. How do you do it?

Aside from the barebones team we mentioned, there isn’t anyone else, so it’s up to you, a superhero Sales Director, to build a well-executing sales machine and hire everyone else to help you on the way.

In your quest you will need three branches helping you out:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Product Management

In a well-running company all three interact in perfect harmony, executing in parallel, but in our example we’ll tackle them one at a time (doing circular references to each other, sometimes).

Step 1. Initial Analysis

First, as a new Sales Director, you need to sit down with the team and understand why their product has gained traction, what makes them unique in the field, what the competition does differently, and why any previous deals worked or failed.

For the successful deals – you need to extract common attributes and amplify them. These will drive your marketing campaign, your case studies, white paper, slide deck for presentation and, most importantly, your sales pitch for your SDRs (Sales Development Reps) and AEs (Account Execs) that you will hire later.

For the failed deals – you need to understand what was the reason for failure. For the product shortcomings – you will need to compile a list of where you fall short of competition, how to mitigate this, and present this list to the head of Product Management. For pricing, this is now a task for marketing to understand the competitive landscape, what the others are charging, what the market will bear, and how you can command the premium. With this data in hand and the average sales cycle length extracted from done deals you can now start forecasting and make sales projections.

At the end of Step 1 you have the following tasks:

• Marketing:
  • Perform landscape analysis
  • What is competition charging for similar solutions
  • Create case studies with existing customers
  • White papers about your solution
• Product Management:
  • Triage feature requests
  • Present product roadmap for these FERs (Feature Enhancement Requests)
• Sales:
  • Create an elevator pitch
  • Create 15 minute slide deck
  • Create 1-hour full engagement slide deck and demo flow

Step 2: Generating Pipeline

Now that you have performed initial analysis of where the company is and assigned the tasks to each team, it is time to start growing your pipeline. A healthy pipeline relies on multiple sources of leads:

• Networking: you and your reps open up rolodex and start calling connections
• Outbound marketing campaigns: AdWords, LinkedIn drip campaigns
• Dial for dollars: you purchase lists and subscriptions of your target audience and start calling
• Inbound lead generation: publishing case studies, white papers, writing a blog will eventually start driving search engine traffic to you
• Partners: you engage large resellers and distributors and their immense salesforce to amplify your direct effort

As a lean and mean company with just a few people at your disposition, you first and foremost attention is to tactical growth as opposed to strategic marketing of your company. You need results fast, and you need them now. Rule of thumb is that you need to have your pipeline at least 3x of what you intend to close. So, let others do the work for you in generating and qualifying the leads while you focus on the execution of first deals and honing the message until you polish your approach and are able to replicate it and scale with other reps.

Unless you have a fully staffed marketing department and not just one person who will be busy with the tasks you assigned to them in Step 1, here’s the approach I recommend:

Website and AdWords: hire an outside consulting company (for example, Core and More Technologies) that will create and maintain your website and the campaigns for you. Run weekly syncs with the team to understand what works and what does not. AdWords come with extremely deep analytics, so you can measure (or, rather, the company you hired) will measure and present to you click rates, and, most importantly, conversions: how many people looking for a product like yours came to your website and interacted with it. From there you can see what drives traffic the most: case studies, white papers, certain aspects of your solution. What you are looking at the end of it all are leads: name, phone number, email, title and the company that got interested enough to leave their details in your contact form.

LinkedIn drip campaign: same idea as with AdWords – unless you have a LinkedIn marketing whiz in the house, find an outside contractor who will set up a drip campaign for you targeting a highly precise segment of people – for example, all Chief Procurement Officers and heads of procurement departments in engineering firms. LinkedIn allows for a variety of methods and actions at every step, you can read more about them here.

Lists of names and phone numbers: dialing for dollars is a true and tried strategy that you can leverage while you are building up your lead flow. No doubt, your inbox soon will be flooded with offers to purchases lists from random companies claiming to be the most accurate and comprehensive, but be wary of internet strangers offering you things. There are several well-known sources you can leverage, such as Discover.org or HIMMS (if you are selling to a medical/healthcare industry).

Now that you have purchased lists or subscriptions, who is going to pick up the phone and start calling? If you have an army of SDRs, throw the list at them, divide and conquer, and watch your campaign progress. But what if you only have several AEs, whose time is too valuable to do cold calling when they should be hunting major enterprise deals? Outsource this function as well. There are many companies out there, like Memory Blue or EIMS who can take on this function. You will need to provide the lists of who to call, train the SDRs on the value proposition of your product and give them a cold-calling pitch.

These agencies will run the campaigns for you qualifying the leads and starting the conversations to the point where skilled AEs from your team can take over. You will need to analyze metrics, such as number of calls placed to leads converted, the feedback from SDRs and the accuracy of your purchased lists to understand the effectiveness of your campaign, pitch, response from your target audience and the overall validation of your go-to-market strategy.

Partners: finally, when you have your SDR to AE to close process working, it is time to think about partners. Partners are a great way to exponentially multiply the number of salespeople working for you – by paying them a percentage of sales.

Partners, however, work best if your product can be sold as SKUs: large organizations, such as CDW, Carahsoft, Longview, and others – have throngs of salespeople who have thousands of products to sell. Your job will be to get the resellers interested and show them initial wins. Salespeople are coin-operated, and unless you can bring them deals that have high potential to close, retire their monthly quota and put bread on the table, they will simply move on to another product, and your solution will be forever buried in the grave of SKUs that nobody sells.

The rewards of having a good reseller, however, are immense: resellers sway influence over their accounts, selling them everything from paper clips to disaster recovery solutions, so customers tend to view them as SMEs (subject matter experts) and tend to buy whatever the reseller recommends. Additionally, many resellers have established “buy off the book” prices set up where the customer can purchase any SKU without having to go through RFP process, multiple vendor selection, contract negotiation or any other red tape. It is well worth your time and effort to set up a healthy relationship with resellers, and more than likely you will need a dedicated channel manager for this position.

So, how do you get them interested? Usually, you set up several levels of rewards for resellers: for example, if they sell a deal on their paper, acting purely as a passthrough (saving you a headache of negotiating the contract), and your AEs do all the work, they get 5%. If they actively participate in the deal (whether it’s an RFP or pitching to their accounts), which you identified, they can get higher percentage. And finally, they get the most reward if they identify the lead themselves, register it with you (through a CRM) and drive the deal – they can get the highest percentage (subject to your negotiation).

Partners also play an important role in generating your pipeline through “Lunch and Learn” initiatives – you split the costs with the partner for an education lunch (or breakfast – I’ve seen amazing attendance in Australia where people come extra early to listen to an interesting conversation, have breakfast – and then head off to work), and you process all the leads from the event through the partner.