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

by Trish Bertuzzi

handle about two hundred to three hundred leads a month when fully ramped. There is some variation based on average selling

If your reps have compelling events and key research points at their fingertips, they will have

Exact titles, org charts, email addresses, and direct-dial phone numbers are major productivity boosters.

solid candidate profile. This is the gold standard against which you will measure candidates. In

job descriptions should leave candidates with just one impression: this is the place to advance my career.

LinkedIn + Messenger + Ask 2. Prompting Employee Referrals 3. Setting a Networking

you run a sales development team, hiring is the most important part of your job. If the sales development organization rolls up

recommend a three-step process for your company on Glassdoor: encourage, respond, and address. Step one, encourage

meet, learn, and teach.

alone). Everyone needs to contribute. I guarantee you, the peer learning and coaching from a competitive situation like this one can’t be beat.

The fifth element for accelerating revenue growth with sales development is execution. To my mind, your sales development group’s ability to execute comes down to three things: 1. The speed at which your reps ramp 2. How intelligently reps speak to prospect business challenges 3. Your group’s effectiveness at reaching and engaging prospects

But the great ones (the rainmakers, the A-players, the elite) can speak to the bigger picture of why their company exists, why their founders decided to take a stand and say, “That right there. We’re going to fix that.” These reps are confident

you went to a play and someone appeared on stage

and proceeded to read the play—with no acting—you’d say they missed the point of theater.

Spending time with a senior manager to gain an understanding of why your company does what it does can be very motivating.

Why are we in this business? ● Why are we important to our customers? ● How do we make a difference?

1. PROSPECT-READY (verbal evaluation of a rep’s understanding of key prospects, pains, and with us/without us vision) 2. PROCESS-READY (dry run of tool usage: CRM, content, other technologies) 3. MESSAGE-READY (provide a rep with several dummy leads; ask them to do pre-call planning and leave you customized emails/voicemails) 4. PHONE-READY (a phone-based role play simulating a live connect)

The biggest competitive advantage your reps have is the team behind them. The combined insights, experiences, and wisdom of your entire organization is the single best enablement tool for a sales development group. Yet the vast majority of companies

Pre-call research is really about discovering the why. Why are you calling them, why should they care, and why is what you’re about to tell them truly valuable to their business?”

The difference between a spammy cold call and one that gets a meeting is relevance.”

you’ll find a sample cadence that consists of nine touches over fifteen business days. This example leverages the phone, email, and ghosting (a phone call with no voicemail message left). Social attempts and marketing-driven nurture aren’t shown in this pattern, but they can be built in.

DAY 1- Reps send a personalized email in the morning. Later that day, they’ll reach out via phone and either connect with the prospect or leave a voicemail. DAY 2- It's a phone call with no voicemail. DAY 3- Another call with voicemail in the morning and then one more call in the afternoon without voice mail. So in the first 3 days, we've got 1 email, 2 voicemails, and 2 no-voicemails. DAY 4- It’s another email.

DAY 7- Reps sends a final email and try to be original and human. SalesLoft has found humor to be very effective in this touch.

I can’t remember where I heard it first, but a wise person once said, “The best prospecting emails look like the letter F.” They are two or three paragraphs, open with something relevant and interesting, and end with a clear and short ask. They

how critical it is that you teach your reps about your prospects and market before you teach them about

what information should reps capture, where do they put it for speedy future reference, and how do they use

Teach the team to create and present them in a phone-ready format vs. a case study format (think actionable sound bites).

There is no way around it. Setting quotas is tough work. You can use the meeting setting (21) and qualified opportunity (13) numbers as benchmarks. Adjust up or down based on the four factors I’ve highlighted. Whether or not making quota is an achievable goal sets the tone

Reps are ten times more likely to “contact” a lead if they call within the first hour of its creation. Reps are six times more likely to “qualify” a lead if they call within the first hour of its creation.

IMMEDIATE RESPONSE Inbound sales call “Contact Us” form Demo request New free trial Stopped by booth at tradeshow Attended a webinar Downloaded e-book Registered for webinar Attended a tradeshow Subscribed to blog Followed the company on Twitter

to the discovery call, your SDRs need to hand off the lead/opportunity to the account executive. Effective handoff requires calendaring a meeting, introducing all parties, communicating next steps, and setting an agenda for the discovery call. This is best handled by the SDR.

RESULTS: the outcomes that are incredibly important to the business but outside the control of sales management ● OBJECTIVES: areas that can be influenced by sales managers but still are outside their direct control ● ACTIVITIES: things that are under the direct control of the managers and as a result can be proactively managed by

The Objective metrics you’ll want to measure include the following: ● # of connects/connect rate ● # of quality conversations/rate ● Email response rate ● “Bad data” rate

Callback rates are a terrible annoyance to track. The numbers will invariably be less than staggering and require reps to log all return calls. I prefer to use conversation rate as a proxy. Say you have historically been calling HR directors. Now you’re also calling sales VPs. How do those conversation rates compare?

Figure 36.3– Sample SDR team dashboard I like this dashboard

Much as we discussed in chapter 25, pre-call planning takes good messaging and elevates it to great with one-to-one personalization.

high effectiveness plus high popularity is the definition of a sales acceleration tool.

Spending money on toys, or tools for that matter, is a lot easier than working on strategy, recruitment, retention, or execution. But that hard work must happen first. You have to be rock solid on the other five elements before looking to technology to automate or accelerate.

Today’s SDRs are future account executives. Current first-line managers are future directors. Executives like you are future chief revenue officers and founders/CEOs.