Managing a team of sales development reps can be a bit of black hole. Most often managers of SDRs focus on outcomes and driving more appointments. While on the surface this sounds right, the impact is minimal and often creates a sink or swim environment. To manage a top-performing sales development team there has to be a culture of excellence.
Coaching and development is the foundation for a culture of excellence. Having a culture of excellence means getting your current team to do what they need to do. It is also having a strong foundation in place that will attract the new talent needed to scale quickly. Culture comes down to behavior and what people do when no one is watching. Does the team believe in and practice continual development? Are they constantly looking for ways to get better, are they practicing and are they being coached? A sales development culture of excellence answers yes to these questions because the pillars of the culture are development, communication, and team spirit.
Elements of High-Performing Sales Development Teams
There are two primary elements of a high-performing SDR team and these elements should be ingrained in the team from their induction and throughout their lifecycle. Doing these things consistently will enable a team of SDRs to outperform the rest.
Customer Knowledge
For any sales development team to be effective they need customer knowledge. They need to have a deep understanding of how the prospect does their job and what their world looks like. Spend time getting to know the prospective customers to understand these things. Research the company, the prospect, the industry. There is no shortage of people saying cold calling is dead, emailing is dead, social selling is dead. But the reality is that poor and general messaging is dead.
By having a deep understanding of the company and person the SDR is targeting allows them to develop messaging that will stand out from everyone else targeting them. Using these trigger points will open the door for a better conversation. Knowing what the prospects world looks like allows the sales development rep to ask better questions because they will have an understanding of the problems they are trying to solve.
Weekly Coaching Cadences
Coaching unlocks the potential in other people to improve their performance. It raises their awareness and responsibility. Effective coaching helps people to learn rather than teaching or directing them. Coaching happens in the moment as well as structured and scheduled. If coaching isn’t on your calendar, it won’t happen often enough. Spend a few minutes at the start of the week putting coaching time on your calendar and stick with it.
Call Evaluations
Sales development reps should listen to and score their own calls. A minimum of 3 call evaluations per week and 1 of their peers. This helps them identify areas they are doing well, where they need to improve and how their peers are conducting calls. The scoring should be done on the same form the manager would use. There are many tools out there to facilitate this and would give the manager visibility into these calls as well.
SDR One-to-one’s
Once per week the rep and manager carry out a one-to-one where the sales development rep brings their metrics. This allows for a quick review by the manager and also keeps the SDR constantly in touch with how they are performing to goal. The rep comes prepared to talk through what is working, where they are struggling and what they are working to improve. Finally, the rep brings two calls. One call they did well at and what they learned from it and one that didn’t go well and what they can improve upon. These calls are then reviewed together to confirm the SDR’s assessment.
These meetings can last from 15 minutes to an hour. Because of the simple three-part structure: current reality, opportunities to improve and what is being worked on it is easy to execute. And because the sales development rep brings all the answers the manager just needs a few minutes to review, this frees up the rest of the meeting for the “how”. Effective one-to-ones are 10 percent on the past and 90 percent on the future.
Roleplay
In 1993, Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers highlighted the highly touted theory that anyone can achieve mastery of a skill with 10,000 hours of practice. Sales development managers need to establish weekly roleplay with their SDR’s because you don’t get better by doing, you get better by practicing. If it takes 10,000 hours of practice and your sales development team’s average call is 15 minutes, then it would take in excess of 40,000 calls to achieve mastery. And since every call isn’t one where they conduct a conversation, this number is grossly understated. Practice all the time and isolate it just to the focus area they need to improve.
To manage a team of top-performing sales development reps requires a culture of excellence. A culture of excellence is established with continuous direction, repetition, and feedback through coaching and practice. These combined with customer knowledge and targeted, specific messaging create the right environment for a high-performing SDR team.
Last updated on October 31st, 2018 at 04:37 am
