The Sales Development Playbook: Build Repeatable Pipeline and Accelerate Growth with Inside Sales

by Trish Bertuzzi

the frontend of the sales process—qualifying inbound leads and/or conducting outbound prospecting—to generate sales pipeline

“Every company that we invest in either has or will have a sales development team.

Tom shared that in eighteen months, Acquia built an outbound team focused on generating qualified opportunities and grew it to thirty reps. Tom described the following results: ● Outbound SDRs have pipeline targets of ~$700K per rep per quarter ● The new business growth rate nearly doubled after adding the outbound component

Our mentality is to put the best leads in front of our best pipeline generators.”

“I have a colleague who uses the term creative avoidance. Noodling on your data inside of CRM is a great way to avoid making calls, as is flipping through people on LinkedIn,” shared Ross. “That’s why we do a hard separation. The people making the calls don’t update the data. They’re not responsible for finding the next lead or finding a better contact.” The strategy is paying off:

can’t emphasize strongly enough that reality on the ground, not the case study available online, should drive

introductory meeting, technology demo, or fully qualified opportunity—your reps’ first hurdle is to arouse curiosity and get prospects to listen.

Let’s assume mission accomplished and the prospect is curious. Now, onto the second hurdle. Your reps have to demonstrate an understanding of their prospects’ industries, priorities, and challenges. They need to shine a spotlight on gaps in the prospects’ current approach and bring them around to your way of thinking. In short, your reps have to evolve curiosity into interest while at the same time qualifying for

SDRs are booking meetings with the right types of companies, the right people within them, and the prospects are at least curious about addressing a potential pain point, then the reps have done their jobs well.

The first focuses on right profile, right person, and right pain. The second is an unreasonably high bar (but a far-from-uncommon request).

four steps: 1. HYPOTHESIZE: Build a hypothesis of which companies need your solution. Develop baseline messaging and identify target prospects. 2. TEST: Schedule as many introductory meetings as possible. SDRs and account executives test messaging before, during, and after meetings. 3. ITERATE: Based on learning,

iterate on both the target profile and the message. 4. REPEAT: Rinse and repeat, learning more and more each time.

“You have to have your ideal prospect and best resonating messages nailed down first. Introductory meetings help you

do that. Once you have both of those, that’s when you should shift focus towards qualified opportunities.” Tom’s point is that degree of qualification and conversion rates are important concerns, but only after your account executives have full pipelines and numerous active opportunities to work. That is the tipping point.

you well know, arousing curiosity, generating interest, and getting prospects to open up about their priorities is about as easy as potty-training a coyote. The days of executives picking up their

The key to success with generating qualified opportunities lies in ensuring that your sales development team and your sales organization are on the same

PAIN: Not every company has a need

AUTHORITY:

You are looking for people who can get an organization to move. That isn’t always reflected in a title.

CONSEQUENCE: Prospects are human—with

You need to dig for the implications of not acting. An organization that isn’t in motion is much harder to move than one that has already realized the consequences

TARGET PROFILE: This one is all about confirming fit and identifying

As with many startups, account executives at this particular company were wearing many hats. They were identifying accounts, reaching out to secure first conversations, conducting discovery calls, working existing opportunities, the works. This created a problem.

“And we can bring in this less experienced talent—that aren’t ready to be full-blown closing reps—but who are hungry and eager to learn. It’s a huge win-win.”

ALIGNMENT: Are senior leadership, sales, and marketing willing to make the investment in time, energy, and money that will be required to make this kind of team successful?

2. MARKET-MESSAGE FIT: Do you know enough about your market to build a solid process and messaging that fledgling reps can use to establish credibility over the phone?

SKILL OF CLOSERS: Does

your sales organization have the attitude and aptitude to take early-stage opportunities and successfully launch the sales process?

If you answered yes to all three, you’re ready.

It has been my experience that many executives view sales development as a sort of chemical reaction: hire a team, add one part

CRM to two parts leads and list, and POOF! Instant revenue. Sadly, it’s not quite that simple.

It’s a big investment to have a sales development team, an investment o...

The key is gathering information from each and every interaction and analyzing it to make the organization as a whole smarter.

worked our way through why to build a team. We discussed qualification criteria, covered where the team should report, and wrapped up the nuances for setting expectations properly. These are the fundamentals of sales development strategy.

COMPANY REVENUE PERCENT MARKETING-SOURCED PIPELINE < $10M 41% $10–50M 43% $50–100M 48% $100–250M 32% $250M+ 29% Figure 5.1 – Marketing-sourced pipeline by company revenue So what does this tell us? To me, it makes the case that even if you’re lucky enough to have fantastic marketing, inbound leads still leave a fair bit of pipeline to be found via other means. Outbound calling should

decided to go allbound. That doesn’t mean calling each and every prospect under the sun. It means identifying the accounts

that are the most profitable and targeting them with outbound activity. You can accomplish this only if you’ve segmented your potential prospect universe and built an ideal customer profile. That’s exactly what we’ll cover in the next chapter.

agreement regarding your ICP is a critical success factor. Otherwise, marketing is off

Now, jot down some common characteristics of each tier of your prospect universe. Here’s how you might begin to categorize your market.

A-LIST.

B: BREAD & BUTTER. This is your sweet spot. These types of accounts—hopefully there

COMPELLING EVENTS. These are accounts that generally

leadership. D: DEAD ENDS. These accounts may want to work with

LIST: These accounts rarely come inbound.

their outbound

BREAD & BUTTER: Here’s where your inbound SDRs will typically spend the bulk of their time. Ideally, these are the types of prospects responding

Use outbound to target only the largest of your Bread &Butter accounts.

The right coverage model, aligned to your strategy, maximizes your chances of turning prospects into customers.” Sales development specialization

To address this issue, I recommend one of two approaches: territory-based (customized quotas) or round robin (uniform quotas).Option #1, territory-based quotas, is for those who enjoy filing tax returns. Do you love math? Is Excel on a Sunday morning your own personal nirvana? If you answered yes to both, then have I got the thing for you! This approach requires you to predict future lead flow per territory. You will then estimate conversion rates and set a unique quota per territory. In this scenario, the reps receive fair, territory-specific quotas, and you gain 20 percent more gray hair.