After my post about the fundamentals, one of my sons reminded about how much he learned about basketball from a coach who stressed the fundamentals. So I thought I would take a few posts to go over what I consider to be the fundamentals of sales development.
Before you pick up the phone, before you type an email, even before you head to LinkedIN to research prospects, you must know who your ideal prospect is. Some refer to this as creating a “persona.” Frankly, I don’t care what you call it, just that it is done before you take any further steps. And yes, this applies to inbound and outbound outreach.
As an SDR, you are an “opportunity creator,” and in order to create good business opportunities, you must know your target audience. Your customer is the Account Executive, and in my opinion, the key factor for the Account Executive on any call is who they are speaking with. They can make a great presentation, but if the person on the other end is not a) the correct target market for the product, b) the right address for the product offering, or c) at the right decision making level, the entire process is essentially a waste of time. This is far and away the key qualifying criteria.
If you are working inbound, its possible your marketing team is already targeting certain personas, but this is by no means a given. Nor is it a given they are hitting the target every time. I have worked and managed inbound teams where the marketing was very broad, and we (the SD team) were the filters. And in that case, we needed to know who we wanted to bring forward before picking up the phone to call those leads. Even demo requests need to be qualified to ensure they match the persona you are looking to bring forward.
For outbound outreach, you must have some definition as to who you are targeting, because your first step will be research, and you are wasting your time if you don’t who you are trying to research. You want your CRM and cadences set up with the proper targets, because just like the scenario I described above, if you are talking to the wrong individual, you will either a) get nothing from the conversation or b) bring forward the wrong person or persons.
Finally, if you are not starting from scratch, you still need to evaluate the leads sitting in your CRM to ensure they are the right leads to pursue.
So get the target personas down and THEN get ready to get moving on delivering quality opportunities. Tomorrow, the next step in my series on fundamentals.
NOTE: If you are in a situation where the management say, “Ours is a broad offering and we don’t want to narrow this at this time,” I would be concerned. No doubt theirs might have broad market appeal, but you need to start somewhere and there must be guidance as to where that starting point is.
Scoop on Sales 