What roles make an optimised sales
development
team?
What roles make an optimised sales
development
team?
Building a successful sales development team is a prerequisite to delivering optimised outbound sales campaigns.
It can take months, perhaps even years, to recruit, develop and mold the right personnel into the roles that will form a high-performing team.
And it is worth getting right. Not only is hiring an expensive process (the average UK hire costing organisations £3,000 to recruit and onboard), having to repeatedly shuffle the pack will cause disruption and could impact results.
Knowing exactly what you need from the outset, therefore, can pay dividends.
Establishing a successful sales development team is not simply a case of hiring a handful of gifted sales people – although this is, of course, important. Effective campaigns rely on specialist input at various stages, and different people with different skill sets are key to nailing each and every one of them.
To ensure consistent sales, a steady pipeline of high-quality leads is key, and the more attention sales development representatives (SDRs) can give each lead, the more likely they are to profit from a higher conversion rate. It is thus not advisable to multi-task roles within your sales team, especially if there are more qualified people out there who can take on some of the other components required to execute a successful outbound sales campaign.
Our white paper, How to Optimise your Outbound Strategy for Success, details four essential components that should make up a high-performing sales team.
Our white paper, How to Optimise your Outbound Strategy for Success, details four essential components that should make up a high-performing sales team.
Copywriters
Compelling, clean and easy-to-grasp written content will greatly increase your chances of clinching a sale.
Audience attention spans have dropped by a third – in 2000, the average web user navigated away from what they were reading after 12 seconds, a figure which now stands at just eight seconds. On social media, average attention span falls to 2.5 seconds.
Keeping the audience engaged in what you are trying to present them has become something of a fine art, and the production of outstanding written copy may be asking too much of a sales rep who was not employed with this purpose in mind.
Copywriting requires time and skill to execute professionally, and therefore warrants the recruitment of specialist copywriters into your team.
Copywriters
Compelling, clean and easy-to-grasp written content will greatly increase your chances of clinching a sale.
Audience attention spans have dropped by a third – in 2000, the average web user navigated away from what they were reading after 12 seconds, a figure which now stands at just eight seconds. On social media, average attention span falls to 2.5 seconds.
Keeping the audience engaged in what you are trying to present them has become something of a fine art, and the production of outstanding written copy may be asking too much of a sales rep who was not employed with this purpose in mind.
Copywriting requires time and skill to execute professionally, and therefore warrants the recruitment of specialist copywriters into your team.
Campaign strategists
We have already explored the importance of mastering cadence in a previous blog, Optimum cadences within your outbound strategy.
Being able to detect when and how leads are most likely to grant you a positive response is an essential part of planning an outbound sales campaign, and this is why investing in a campaign strategist is likely to pay dividends.
Campaign strategists are experts in the processes and techniques of outbound cadence. They will know how many touch points a particular campaign should adopt and, crucially, what touch points these should be – LinkedIn, email, phone and/or video.
By having a dedicated person or persons designing your multichannel campaigns, your sales reps can concentrate on what they are best qualified to do – sell.
Data researcher
A helping hand with targeting, deciphering and curating data is another tremendous way to support your outbound sales staff.
The world is, quite literally, full of data, so much so it is commonly dubbed the new oil. Such has been the exponential growth of data created over the years, the storage of this information today (in data centers) accounts for more than one percent of the world’s energy consumption.
In a sales team context, data researchers are able to cut through the noise and deliver a steady pipeline of accurate, relevant data, based on a pre-determined ideal customer profile (ICP).
By channeling data through this ICP filter, data researchers can also help to determine which channels should be leveraged to target t