Becoming a Successful SDR

As an SDR, your main focus is driving in clients, booking meetings for AEs and being one of the first points of contact for future prospects. It's an important role within the sales cycle, and being successful in this role drives not only your success but that of the team around you and the company! It's tough, but having the right tools and methodologies at hand means you can make your life easier, and make your outbound outreach more effective.

Linkedin Personal Branding

People buy from people. LinkedIn would be one of my recommendations for success, posting at least once a week and ideally up to three, ensures consistency on the platform, but also one where prospects can see you are active and knowledgable in your given area. Often SDRs or salespeople in general are concerned on what to post, so here are some suggestions; post about your role and its challenges, the market you work in, recent statistics that could help your prospects, equally share your personal triumphs which adds a further level where your connections can learn more about you as a person, hence seeing you as relatable. At the minute, posting can bring in an additional 20% of meetings, so what is not to love about it?

Processes (A/B Testing, multiple touch points across multiple channels)

Processes are a known factor for ensuring as an SDR you can create a scalable and repeatable process to drive prospects to meetings. Honing your outbound outreach is essential. One of the ways I would recommend doing this is through A/B testing so you can see which emails are performing best and getting positive responses, remember to always just make small changes so we can see the impact (e.g. changing a subject line, adding a postscript at the end of the message, or adding relevant case studies etc). For each campaign make sure you are using different channels across LinkedIn, email, phone, whatever channels work, but ensure you are moving between them regularly. Try them for 100 prospects across a month before reviewing what is working and what isn’t so you can make incremental progress!

Phone

Being on the phone is what many SDRr’s find daunting and at times it can be hard if you are overthinking the outcomes that you need to achieve. My recommendation would be to detach from the outcome, all you need is some information from the prospect that can help move the business forward; this could be finding out when they are next free for a call when their current tech stack is finishing contract/ what are they already using, or what challenges are they currently facing? Something I used to worry about was not coming away from a call with a meeting, whilst I have a high conversion rate, it's worth remembering that even experienced salespeople make mistakes and there will always be new challenges to address even as a Senior!

Key Takeaways

To summarise; people buy from people, just post on LinkedIn, the first posts will always be questionable but it will make your life easier, you’ll be wondering why you weren’t doing it in the first place! A/B testing will drive your processes forward and ensure you are improving your marginal gains, to be the best in your team and against your competitors. Finally, being on the phone is key in driving relationships with your future prospects, just ensure that for each connected call, you are able to come away with something that can be used to get the client in the future!