What is SDR - Sales Development Representative

What is an SDR?

SDR stands for Sales Development Representative. These are the folks in modern sales teams who specialize in sales prospecting. Broadly SDRs reach out to leads, qualify the leads and then pass on the qualified lead to quota-carrying sales executives who further engage with the prospect to close a deal.


What do SDRs do?

SDRs try to reach out to leads via both inbound ways as well as outbound ways. In the case of inbound, they receive Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) from the marketing team who in turn would have got it from their marketing campaigns. Then SDRs reach out to these leads to engage them in a meaningful conversation to explore their needs and try to assess if they are qualified to be pursued further. 

Similarly, in the case of the outbound way, they try to reach leads by researching potential leads and reaching out to them via cold outreach. SDRs use their industry domain knowledge to understand the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of the company’s products & services. This further helps them to filter out and prioritize the leads matching their ICP. 

SDRs try to reach out to prospects via multiple channels such as emails or phones. They become the face of the organization and try to introduce the organization to the prospect during their initial conversation. During their conversation, they try to build a relationship with the prospect and also try to understand their long-term and short-term needs to identify if they are the right fit to pursue them further or not.

If the prospect’s requirements fit the organization’s offerings then SDRs try to suggest suitable products and services which can fulfill their requirements. They try to build a long-term relationship with the prospect so that it will provide a base for the SDRs to reach out to them for future opportunities as well. Once the prospect is interested in the products and services of the organization and would like to engage in further discussions, then the prospect is passed on to the quota-carrying sales executives who take it further for deal closure. 




How does an SDR help the Organization?

  • Having dedicated SDRs helps to standardize the sales process of the organization. This way a dedicated amount of effort is spent every day on sales prospecting activities. This keeps the sales pipeline steady by maintaining the ratio of leads in various stages of the sales funnel. 
  • In many conventional organizations, sales team members are given twin responsibilities of prospecting as well as closing. But in this approach, sometimes sales executives tend to focus more on closing the existing active deal in hand instead of spending more time on nurturing the leads who are at the top of the sales funnel. This may lead to many leads dropping off from the top of the funnel since they were not given appropriate attention during their initial purchase journey. 
  • Having SDRs on the sales team gives a clear predictable insights on the future sales expected since sales leaders can get clear visibility of the sales expected in future months based on the steady pipeline and conversion metrics data.
  • SDRs tend to specialize in the task of doing research about their leads and following up with them. This helps to improve the quality of leads flowing down the sales funnels thereby increasing the chance of deal closure for the sales executives. This in turn helps in faster revenue growth and also leads to higher productivity of sales executives who can focus more on closing deals faster. 


CRM forms an integral part of the work of SDRs and Sales Executives during this process. With the help of CRM, SDRs can keep track of all the leads, maintain track of their conversation history as well as add important notes. This in turn helps the sales executives close deals faster so that they don’t redo discovery calls with the clients again and can close deals more efficiently. 

If you wanna try out Sales CRM for your team, then do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM today.


 How to generate B2B Leads organically?

If you are into a business involving B2B clients, then you have landed at the right post. In this article, we will explore how you can generate B2B leads for your business via organic approaches.

Here is what you can do to get organic B2B leads…

    


 

1. Linkedin Outreach

Join Linkedin groups in your similar domain or groups having people with similar profiles as your ideal customer profile. Next, send them a connection request to add to your network. After a few days of the connection, you may send them a cold message for a short discovery call. You may be required to warm up your connection a bit for a few days with your LinkedIn posts to avoid getting ignored when you send a cold message.


2. Business Marketplace/Forums

If you sell a known B2B product that is not too complex to understand and doesn’t require an elevator pitch, then you may try this. Look out for joining various online marketplaces and forums dealing with B2B businesses. You will find B2B buyers and sellers in these marketplaces who are genuinely looking for both buy and sell business opportunities.


3. Join professional networking platforms

If you are a startup or building any B2B products for startups, then you may join professional networking platforms such as angel.co or other startup networking platforms. Try to network with various startup founders and executives to create a connection and get business opportunities.


4. In-person Business conferences

You may look out for various offline/In-person business conferences being organized in your Industry domain by various media houses, industry bodies, trade unions, government, etc. These conferences are attended by the leaders and executives of various companies with the sole motive of networking with fellow business leaders for business opportunities.


5. Cold Outreach like Cold Emails, Cold Calling

You may reach out to various businesses via Cold emails and Cold calls. If you are dealing with small and medium businesses, then you may get their contacts from various online business directories as well as their websites. If you are dealing with a large organization, then you may have to work a bit more to get the contact details of their stakeholders. 


6. Inbound Marketing/Content Marketing

Create the content on the topics around your business. This will attract readers who might be interested in your business. You may create content on Blogs, Social Media, Youtube, write Industry research papers, Whitepapers, Case studies, ebooks, etc. Ensure to write content that is useful to the readers having your ideal customer persona. 

Also, an important element of content marketing is to build distribution. If you do not plan out distribution well, then you may create high-quality content, but there won’t be anybody to read those contents immediately. This creates a longer feedback loop. So, whenever you create content, try to distribute it at more and more channels in order to reach more readers instantly.


7. Short Video Marketing 

In recent years, usage of short video apps such as Tiktok, Reels, Youtube shorts has skyrocketed making them yet another largest marketing channel. Short video platforms were initially apt for B2C products, however, in the recent past, it is becoming equally good for B2B business opportunities. You can make short video clips about your products to attract more B2B leads.

Also, read- Instagram Reels Ideas for Small Businesses


8. Tender Marketplaces/Portals/Blogs

There are some marketplaces that regularly publish tenders of government as well as public companies. This brings you a good opportunity to directly go ahead and bid on existing business opportunities without going through the hassles of business development efforts. 

Also read one of our case studies on How to get Organic leads using Social Media


I hope you liked reading this post. If you are interested in trying out CRM software for your business to track your leads, do check out ToolsonCloud CRM. It comes with a free plan for startups.



4 Sales Qualification questions to ask every lead

In any organized B2B or B2C sales team, Sales Development Representatives (SDR) are assigned the task of generating new pipeline of opportunities by qualifying the leads from their database. But most of the time, SDRs are little unsure on what kind of questions should they ask in order to qualify their leads.


In this post, let me tell you 4 important things you should check while having the first conversation with them in order to check if they are qualified to be pursued further or not.

Remember that your screening or the so called Lead Qualification is critical to the operational output of your quota carrying Sales Executives, because they should work on only the valid leads so that it increases the chances of conversion at the end.

Being in SDR team, you should also measure your KPI by taking into consideration the final conversion of the leads which you qualified earlier. Never measure your metrics only with the mass numbers of leads you qualified if the Sales Executives are not able to convert them later, wasting your organization's productive time and energy.

When you get a Lead from a database, networks, conference or through inbound channels while a customer tried reaching you or subscribed to your newsletter, you should first log them into your CRM as a best practice. It will help you organize your sales effectively.

You may checkout Toolsoncloud CRM if you are looking for a Sales CRM.

Once you add your leads, start reaching out to them via their preferred medium may be Email or Call. It is preferable to have a telephonic discussion so that you understand their context in detail.

While you probe them further for qualifying, focus on the following 4 areas:

1. Fitment of Customer Pain point against your Offering.

In the qualification call, always understand the pain point of client first. Let them speak first about their challenges which they are trying to solve instead of going big bang with a pre-recorded & rehearsed Sales presentation of your product.

Once you understand their problem, try to assess from your own understanding whether your organization is equipped with solving the challenges of the prospect. If the answer to this is "Yes", then go ahead for the next question.



2. Customer Budget

Many a times, you would find that you can solve the customer's problem, but not within the low budget of the Client. To be frank & practical, When you have a lot of leads lined up, It is unproductive for a sales team to spend too much of time and resources to convert a deal where the Customer do not have the required budget to purchase your offerings. You shall simply lose the other potentially qualified leads with budget over the ones who do not have the required funding.

It is good to acquire new customers with some lower budget in the beginning if you are looking for more business from them in future and they do have that much of wallet to give the expected scale of business later.  But the decision of how much of sales executive time should be allocated on those deals, should be taken with the joint decision of your internal sales team leaders.

Do not be hesitant to ask the budget related questions to your Client. Go ahead and explicitly ask details regarding the budget they have planned or allocated for the deal or purchase. If the budget is not worth the effort, then move on or mark the lead on low priority.


3. Timeline for Purchase

Before you pass on a lead to your Sales Executive, he should be apprised on the expected timeline of closing that deal, so that he can align the meetings and follow-up accordingly.

You can ask your lead:

  • What are the processes or steps they need to do internally to complete the purchase?
  • What is lead time for each step of the process? 
  • What kind of challenges might be expected in some stages so that the executive can proactively coordinate to solve them and take it to logical closure.


4. Stakeholders associated with the Deal.

Every purchase whether it is small or big, involves a decision maker and some associated stakeholders like influencer, gatekeepers, actual users, etc. Always ensure you know them in advance so that the Sales Executive can do some homework researching about the stakeholders in order to present a solution which works best for their context. 

When you are asking the lead for the timelines for the purchase process, you may add another question on who shall be the decision maker or stakeholders involved in each stage of the purchase process.


Disclaimer: Funny Images sourced from Multiple Internet sources, No copyright claimed


I hope you liked reading this post, do comment below and let me know your thoughts.

If you are looking for a Sales CRM to manage your sales leads, why don't you check out ToolsonCloud CRM?

Complete Guide to Lead Management
Hey there, Welcome back to our blog.

In this blog, we wanted to share a complete guide to Lead Management for Startups founders and newbies who are new to Sales. Let's get started with some basics:

Who is a Lead?

Lead is a person who you think might be interested in buying your products or would be interested in what you offer such as information related to the products or services you sell. It is also alternatively called Business Enquiries in some organizations.


What is Lead Management?

Lead management refers to the process of capturing sales leads, qualifying them and nurturing them in order to make them sales ready to handover to sales executives to take it forward for deal opportunity closure.

Steps in Lead Management process:

  1. Identify your Lead profile/persona.
  2. Get the list of leads as per your expected lead profile (Marketing Qualified Leads)
  3. Establish Lead assignment rules.
  4. Assign Leads to Sales reps based on assignment rules.
  5. Prioritize Lead follow-up and activities based on Lead scores.
  6. Nurture your leads based on their engagement status as Cold, Warm or Hot.
  7. Update the engagement status periodically based on lead nurturing and follow up discussions.
  8. Track and Analyze sales progress, incorporate feedbacks and iteratively improve process.

Challenges faced by Sales reps while managing Leads


  • With increase in the number of leads, manual or spreadsheet based tracking often leads to missed follow-ups and delayed sales activities leading to lost opportunities.
  • When the sources of capturing leads increases, manual tracking leads to missed lead capture leading to lead leakage and missed opportunity.
  • Many important data points get missed in manual tracking such as contact information or any specific point discussed with the lead around his requirement.
  • Without using a streamlined Lead Management system, sales reps find it difficult to decide which lead to prioritize for improving lead qualification.

What is a Lead Management System?


A Lead Management system is a software application which helps you manage your end to end Lead Management process. It helps you capture leads from multiple sources into the CRM, view and update their stage in your lead funnel, nurture leads with contextual campaigns, educate them to make them sales ready. Once a lead successfully traverses through a lead lifecycle, the next step is to create a deal or opportunity out of the lead, which is taken forward by the Sales Executives.


Benefits of using a Lead Management System in CRM:

  • Consolidated 360 degree view of a Lead to help the reps for better Lead Nurturing.
  • Lead Scoring to help Sales reps to decide the lead priority.
  • Clean and Validated data points in the CRM to avoid unnecessary clutter to help focus better.
  • Sales workflow automation of multiple operational tasks such as scheduling a meeting, follow-up reminders and alerts on planned activities, lead assignment, etc.
  • Complete history of past interaction of Sales rep and the Lead on multiple mediums such as Email, Messages, Chat, Phone calls, Social Media, Digital Document interactions, etc.
  • Consolidated data points in a single CRM platform helps you get meaningful insights on your Lead management data and provides you with recommendations for improvement.
  • Increase in Lead Conversion rate and sales revenue. 
  • Reduction in sales cycle duration.
  • Increased ROI on Marketing investment for capturing leads



Ways to perform Lead Management:

1. Ways to Capture Leads in CRM

  • Manual Entry: If the Lead addition frequency is less, then you can add the Lead’s record manually in the CRM 
  • Import from External List: If there are lot of leads to be added from an external list, Import it into the CRM via Bulk Import function.
  • Lead Capture Forms on Website: If you have a landing page from your digital marketing advertisements or website contact forms, then you can embed the Lead Capture form from the CRM into the Website which will automatically capture your leads into the CRM.
  • Lead Capture Integration with Social Media: If you get leads from Social Media, then there are lot of social media plugins or integrations available in CRM systems to help automatically capture the leads into your CRM.

2. Ways to Manage Leads in CRM

  • Data Validation: Use field Validation rules to capture data uniformly to keep database clean
  • Lead Scoring: Define the criteria for lead scoring in the CRM to automatically give Lead scores in order to prioritize leads.
  • Lead Assignment: Assign the active leads to respective sales reps either manually or through assignment rules.
  • Labelling: Label or categorize the leads correctly based on their engagement level such as Cold, Warm or Hot.


3. Ways to Nurture Leads

  • Personalized Email Marketing: Run contextual and personalized email marketing campaigns for the leads. You may want to run different type of campaigns for leads in different stage of the funnel say Cold, Warm or Hot leads.
  • Free Educational Content: Periodically, try sending free educational contents to the leads without asking them for any favors. Based on the interaction to view or download the content, you may gauge their updated stage in the lead funnel. If you are helping the lead in educating them in their buying journey, surely they may show some interest in your products at a later stage.
  • Webinars: Invite them for online webinars and conferences on some topic of generic interest. This shall help you improve your brand imagery in the minds of the leads. The leads would be more interested in associating themselves with brands which try newer ways of marketing compared to conventional ways. This shows that the Organization is serious about their business and leads.
  • Social Media Groups and Updates: Create a group of interested leads in social media. Regularly answer their day to queries by commenting on their posts. This is one of most effective way get more visibility since social media comments are viral in nature. Keep posting regular updates on your social media fan pages so that your fans know that you are alive.

If you liked reading this post, Do share it with your friends. 

Are you looking for a Lead Management System? Try ToolsOnCloud Sales CRM for free!