AMA: Attentive Sr. Director of Inside Sales, Marleyna Mohler on Sales Development

SDR leaders have a plethora of data to work with, but sometimes it is hard to know where to look. A good starting point is to map out your funnel and ensure you have a metric that measures both quantity and quality to determine which steps of the action are below expectations. Take cold calling as an example. In general, the key metric to evaluate the success of your cold calls is the number of cold calls required to book a demo or the percent of calls that result in a demo. Say you are seeing that it takes you 100 calls to book a demo, but you know your industry average is half that. You might be tempted to jump in and do some mock call scenarios, but what if the problem is not your team’s live cold call execution? Your training may not improve your team’s success rate. You must first map out the steps of successfully sourcing a demo from a cold call. 1. Place the call 2. Have the prospect answer 3. Have the prospect agree to a demo 4. Have the demo occur Each of these steps will have its own benchmark that you can compare your rate to. Say you see that you have a very low answer rate, but convert one in three answered calls to a demo. In this case, mock call training won’t effectively raise your demo booked rate. Instead, you may want to train your team on how to mark good numbers and avoid multiple calls to known bad numbers, how to call at effective times, or even look at better lead data options. When looking at any metric, make sure you are gauging both quantity (are you making enough cold calls) and quality (are those calls being answered and are those conversations turning into live deals).

Staying up to date: It’s important to pick a medium that you like for content. Whether it is Linkedin, podcasts, email newsletter, or chat based slack groups, you want to make sure you are setting yourself up for success. If the content goes unread or unlistened to, you won’t build a consistent learning habit. Personally, I find the most value in content forums where you can engage and ask follow up questions, hear multiple opinions on a particular matter, and even reach out the the original writer for a 1-1 chat! Another underutilized source of knowledge for industry trends is content from Sales Development technology vendors. It’s imperative that they stay on the cutting edge, so following a few top vendors on Linkedin will allow you to see what future the tools are preparing for. Avoiding the noise: There can be a great amount of value in public best practices. That said, there is risk in assuming that something that works for someone else will also work for you, or for implementing changes to something when you are already seeing above-average results. For example, if your content is getting a 20% reply rate, you may not want to adopt the “best practice” that moved someone else's team from a 10% to 15% reply rate. Having your own benchmarks and running your own A/B tests can help you determine where you should be altering your SDR motion, and where you should keep yours in place. Then, you can proactively search for interesting ideas to test in areas you are performing below benchmark. 

If an account executive is sharing feedback (positive or negative!), here are a few questions you can ask to decide how to incorporate it. 1. Is the feedback specific? To act on feedback, we have to have enough information to properly diagnose the cause. If an AE shares that an account was unqualified, did they share the name of the account and the particular reasoning? 2. Do we know what led to the feedback? To act on feedback, you have to know what to change. Identify the specific behavior or process that led to the feedback. In this case, perhaps there was a qualification question that wasn’t asked or we had incorrect data in the CRM about the account. Different causes require different solutions and we shouldn’t assume the cause. 3. Is this an individual occurrence or a trend? Ask if they have any additional examples for the feedback or even recent counterexamples. Scoping the occurrence of the feedback will help you figure out if you need to work with single individuals or change an overall process. Don’t treat feedback as global unless you have shown a sufficient sample size. Once you have gotten the above information, you can decide how to implement a change (and if a change is worth implementing). If the feedback seems to be coming from a one-off situation, you may want to approach at the individual level. If the feedback seems to point towards a larger trend, you may want to design an experiment or A/B test to see if the suggested changes work. Lastly, make sure to proactively request feedback from the AE team. Their input is particularly valuable for (1) deciding how to prioritize account books and (2) refining your Ideal Customer Profile and even identify new use cases. 

Be transparent and share the “why”: Each SDR should be able to articulate the purpose of their role, the rationale behind their goals, and the methodology used to calculate key performance indicators (KPIs). While many teams have robust processes to determine these factors, they often fail to provide transparency to their teams. When metrics are perceived as being dictated without explanation or “handed down”, they become less motivating. Encourage individuality- Find areas where SDRs can flex their creativity, contribute to experiments, and express their opinions. When you go overboard with processes on an SDR team, it takes away the joy from the work and lowers the possibility of discovering impactful ideas. Create a team that defaults to collaboration and praises readily- While a slack channel, shout-out specific application, or kudos google form can be well intentioned, they often go underutilized. We know that if our team has downtime, they are probably using it to update Salesforce. Make giving praise part of an essential process that is already done!

SDR teams can work with marketing to optimize web content to generate interest, run ABM campaigns, strategize events, and develop content to accelerate deal cycles. Other internal collaborations might be: * Partnerships- coordinate introductions to accounts through partners. * Product- Identify accounts that could benefit from upcoming product enhancements and create sequences to share relevant information. * Customer Success (CS)- Utilize CS's knowledge base to develop persona-specific playbooks that assist the SDR team in engaging the appropriate individuals with tailored messages. When partnering with other teams, here are a few tips to get you on the right track! 1. Set up success metrics and a way to report on them- define what the goal of the project is and build the reporting necessary to track it. Decide together what metrics are important and what data is the source of truth. 2. Communicate what types of feedback are helpful- be clear with your business partners what is in your team's control and have them do the same for you. For example, if you are running an ad campaign, can they control which titles see the ad? If so, your team should supply feedback in the form of titles you may want to filter out. 3. Have planned points of data review- Decide at the beginning of a partnership or project how long you want it to run (or how many data points you need to have) before you can analyze results. Discuss upfront what you will analyze and what decisions you will make with that data so you can ensure you collect the right data along the way.