What 3 Top SDR Leaders Are Doing Right Now
Xant Team
WEBINAR // Tales From the Front Line from XANT on Vimeo.
Dave Boyce, CSO for Xant, and Lars Nilsson host this webinar with guests, Nicolette Mullenix, Hunter Hodges, and Becc Holland; Tales from the front line of a crisis – what three top SDR leaders are doing right now during the COVID-19 pandemic. SDR Leaders COVID
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In this article:
SDR Leaders: COVID-19 Pandemic Tips
Meet the Speakers SDR Leaders COVID
Lars Nilsson, Founder & CEO at SalesSource, has over 25 years of sales and operations experience in the technology sector. Lars is a global leader in enterprise software and selling solutions. Prior to SalesSource, Lars was Vice President of Global Inside Sales for Cloudera, the company that transformed enterprise data management.
Nicolette Mullenix has recently made a move from Sr. Director of Global Sales Development to Sales Director (Enterprise) at Snowflake to gain even more closing experience. She was previously Director of Global Sales Development at Dynamic Signal for over two years and had much experience in strategic sales development.
Hunter Hodges is currently a Sales Development Representative at Tray.io. He is “working with product and engineering leaders across the SaaS industry to scale their 3rd party integration offerings, with a focus on accelerating GTM strategy, maximizing in-house engineering resources, cutting down on churn, and enabling sales teams to close more competitive enterprise deals”.
Becc Holland Head of Sales Development at Chorus.ai. She is a “homegrown Texan who innately believes that hiring the right people is just as important as developing them.” Becc previously worked as Regional Vice President of Business Development at G2 and as Senior Manager of Inside Sales at Gong.io.
Tips from: SDR Leaders COVID
Although times are unpredictable, look ahead for the opportunity to optimize. One of the first things Nicolette’s organization did was to look into each segment and work out new conversion rates. Using this information, allocate resources where required to convert at the highest rate.
As an SDR leader, reinforce your message to employees when you can’t be right by them.
Learn from your environment and spend quality time with your teams frequently, for example, via video messaging or on the phone. Find out what matters to employees, provide support, and make a difference.
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Strengthen strategy by focusing on relevance. Get a better understanding of competitors and what the marketplace looks like to boost connections with prospects.
Try various ways to connect with teams; examples include: –
Competitions which can consist of charity donations
9 am stand up meeting hosted by a different SDR each day, which introduces talking points or issues.
Block time out of the diary each day to purely make calls, then share feedback with everyone else on what worked well or what struggles people had.
Have a buddy system to share problems and ideas weekly.
Have a virtual gong when meetings get booked.
When contacting customers and making outbound messages, words, whether written or verbal, are very important. To ensure emails get read, you must be relevant and specific. And as a leader, you need to pivot your team to make meaningful messages.
Spend at least five minutes to do some research on your prospect and tease out a few personal points. Pick out something specific about the buyer, such as a profile line, or something they did or wrote, for example.
Always make sure you’re relevant and know the different buyer personas you’re selling to.
In order to help diagnose your sales, you could find out who brought your product and ask why they did so.
Doing both of the above separately will have only limited success, so you should time both the above tips and connect the personalization and the selling.
Rethink through your value proposition to understand what your buyers’ new reality is and how your product fits into that?
Retrain or coach SDRs about their prospects. You may previously have had around 5% real objections, but now that figure has risen because of the difficulties people are facing, likely to approximately 40%. Your SDRs need to be aware of businesses who have budget cuts and layoffs etc. show empathy and know when to back off.
Use the “push and pull” technique in emails. This looks like a CTA (call to action) in the last line of your email and some form of reprieve line at the end to show empathy and give customers the time they need.
Key Takeaways
Customer profiles have changed, so make sure you are proactively prospecting to add value. Research which industries have had a surge and need prioritizing, such as medical or telecom, and which should be low on your list such as tourism.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help and mentoring, get over fears even if you’re a leader.
We’re all human, and everyone’s skills are being equalized, so there’s an excellent opportunity to connect.
What other tips can you share with us? Please comment in the section below.
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