New SDRs often wonder what sales development techniques will help them make the most and strongest connections with their prospects. How can they best help their organization scale up and succeed? We’ve identified five important principles and tactics that any SDR can start using.
1: Be an expert on your product, but focus on benefits, not features.
The first order of business is to know what you’re selling. At first glance, this is a no-brainer. Of course, you’re selling a product or a service that does X, Y, and Z, right? Not so fast.
Does every prospect care about the nitty-gritty details of every feature? That’s very, very unlikely. What they care about is what it does for them. How does it solve their problems? How will they feel when they no longer have to worry about those problems? Those are your real selling points. Not the mere features of the product, but rather the benefits that those features bring to the lives of your prospects.
2: The best sales development techniques are useless without a powerful cadence to structure them.
Cold calling can be very hit-and miss. It often takes a lot of tries to reach even the most interested prospects. That can mean dialing the same number eight to ten times, or more. Some SDRs may be tempted to try to blast through that with a series of daily cold calls. The trouble with this is that it’s monotonous and exhausting, and very likely to miss the mark.
One of the most important sales development techniques is the use of a cadence, or a sequence of planned contact attempts. This is one of the key practices that Boom Demand SDRs rely on. Rather than burning up all those contact attempts in a week or less, a good cadence will space them out over three or four weeks. In between call attempts, there’s room for email and social media outreach. It even plans out days where you give a particular lead a rest before resuming attempts to reach them. On those days, you work on new leads, and you avoid annoying the prospects who haven’t had a chance to give you an answer.
What this kind of cadence forces an SDR to do is be both methodical and considerate of everyone’s time. It also helps them get the most out of every lead list. Using a top-notch CRM solution can help you manage such a cadence, but you can also do it with a simple spreadsheet.
3: Get references from within your lead’s company.
Once you do reach your lead, one of the best ways to build rapport and authority is to talk briefly with other relevant players in the same organization. This is especially good if you can reach someone higher up the corporate ladder. They will often refer you down to the most appropriate person for the subject of your call. If that person is the lead you already have, it gives you a huge advantage. Your sales pitch isn’t just coming from you; it’s backed by one of their leaders thinking it was worthwhile for them to discuss with you!
4: Know your enemy!
One of the most frequent objections SDRs will hear from their leads after delivering their pitch is: what makes your product better than anyone else’s? Some agents get tripped up by this because they don’t actually know what their competition can do!
It’s critical that SDRs and all other sales professionals keep tabs on their competitors’ offerings. It’s one thing to be able to explain the benefits of your product. It’s on another whole level to be able to honestly acknowledge and explain the benefits of competing products, and then draw a contrast to show why yours is even better. A simple way to do this is to keep track of everything you know about all the leading products in your industry, including your own, side-by-side on a spreadsheet that you can refer to when needed.
5: Never stop listening.
Of all great sales development techniques, this is the one that makes the biggest difference. Listen to your leads and prospects. Their feedback is always important. Listen to yourself, and listen for ways to make your pitch more natural and more compelling. Above all, listen to the impressions you get about ways to bring more value to your work as an SDR. You do that, and you’ll do great.