As a business owner or sales leader, tracking the productivity of your staff can be tedious, time-consuming, and even daunting at times. Nonetheless, it is critical to ensure your employees understand their goals, and that you have insight into the types of activities and output required for them to be successful. After all, the most effective sales teams are those that have clear goals and well-defined systems to reach them.
For many companies, Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) play a crucial role in filling the top of the sales funnel and sparking conversations with your ideal clientele. In fact, organizations typically attribute 30 – 45% of new business revenue to leads generated by their SDR team. To measure the progress of your sales development team and uncover the impact on your bottom line, it’s important to deeply understand your sales funnel, conversion rates, and activity metrics. Here are some tips to get started:
Step 1: Know the different types of SDR roles
SDRs usually fall into two different categories: Inbound and Outbound SDRs.
Inbound SDRs typically follow up with marketing-generated leads that need further qualification and research to assess the business fit. These are folks who have raised their hand and have an interest in speaking about your product or service. The goal of the SDR is to determine if they are a potential buyer and if they belong to your company’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) before having a more in-depth conversation with an Account Executive or closer.
On the other hand, Outbound SDRs engage with new “cold” target accounts that have no previous exposure to your business. These are prospects who have never heard your company’s name, and they may not even be aware that a product or service like yours exists. An Outbound SDR can be provided a list of accounts to contact or a list of industries or verticals to break into, and from there, they build their own prospect lists with databases like ZoomInfo, Apollo, or LinkedIn Sales Navigator and create a personalized outreach cadence utilizing phone calls, email, and/or social media.
Depending on your company’s existing sales funnel and marketing efforts, you can determine which structure works best for your organization, or a combination of both. Younger, fast-paced startups typically focus more heavily on outbound sales activities, while more established and well-known brands tend to have a larger focus on making their inbound processes more efficient.
Step 2: Understand your audience to determine your most valuable KPIs
Key Performance Indicators are metrics that help you measure your team’s performance in comparison to company or industry benchmarks. The most common categories to track SDR activity are number of calls, emails, talk time, and social media connections.
To better understand which metrics you should focus on, it’s important to consider your prospects’ daily life and where they spend their time. For example, if you are selling a Saas solution for businesses in the Logistics & Freight industry, your team will need to pick up the phone and call these leads, as this is how they are accustomed to doing business. The number of calls and talk time (the amount of time actually spent in conversation) will be of critical importance. For example, a sales leader may require that their team reaches a minimum of 2 hours of talk time and 50 dials each day. Most softphones, or VoIP providers, will have a feature to measure and report this information.
On the flip side, if you are providing a solution for Doctors, your team may find it very difficult to get them on the phone with their demanding schedules. A combination of calls to their front office staff and digital outreach via email will likely be more effective.
Step 3: Work Backwards to Determine Your Goals
Now that you know what metrics to track and the expectations of your SDRs, you’ll need to identify the goals for your team. The best way to do this is by flipping the sales funnel and reviewing your conversion rates from one stage to another.
For example, if your organization has a new business revenue target of $1 million for the upcoming quarter, and your average deal size is $50,000, then you will need to firm up 20 new deals to achieve your objectives.
Let’s assume that you have a 20% conversion rate from qualified opportunity to closed deal. From there, we can calculate that your team needs to generate $5 million in the pipeline, or 100 qualified opportunities, to meet your $1 million revenue target. Now your team has a concrete goal to hit. So how do we get there?
If you know that it takes 50 phone calls to generate 1 qualified opportunity, then your team will need to make 5,000 collective dials over the quarter. That’s about 83 dials for each business day.
By breaking down your organization’s strategic goals into daily, bite-sized efforts that are simple to track, you help your team understand their role in the greater company vision. Not only do you now have the tools to measure their progress and correct as needed, but by providing a concrete, data-backed strategy to your team, they can leave work each day with a firm sense of satisfaction knowing that they are on track to succeed.
Step 4: Hire trained and experienced SDRs
Now that you know what is required of your SDRs, it’s time to recruit your inbound/outbound sales team! Hiring a high-performing sales development team is a fundamental part of a well-functioning revenue engine.
At Hyyer, we’ve taken out all the guesswork, expense, and added stress of the headhunting process. We’ve carefully curated a talent pool of highly experienced and trained SDRs ready to start executing for your organization in a matter of days!
We focus largely on recruiting women from underrepresented, underserved, and non-traditional backgrounds, and in turn, provide enterprises like yours access to Silicon Valley-level talent you can count on.
