When you spend a lot of time in the sales department as a manager or representative, you learn one or two things about the field. Some standards one needs to follow to achieve the goals of a sales development rep. But these standards do not work for all conditions. Sometimes you need skills over these sets of standards.
Some businesses still prefer these standard methods, but a business developer or sales developer needs a set of hard and soft skills for more success. So if you are new to this field, this article will help you learn about skills to help you perform better and better.
What is the Role of a Sales Development Representative?
The skills and abilities to move a lead through the sales pipeline are best for reviewing a sales development representative. From making outbound prospecting to making leads move through the funnel smoothly to qualifying the leads, these are roles of an SDR. SDRs are not the one that closes a deal, but they are the one who determines if a customer is ideal or not.
So in simple terms, SDRs are the ones that nurture leads and focus on bringing quality to sales. While on the other hand, sales representatives are the one that closes these deals and meets the quota.
If you look inside the sales process, it is like this:
The marketing team sends leads information to the SDRs. Now SDRs will make sure that these leads are qualified and nurtured enough for the business. Nurturing will take place until prospects are ready to make a purchase. Once leads reach this stage, sales reps take over the process. Now sales reps will place the right product at the right time to close the deals.
So What Are the Skills That an SDR must-have?
Video Prospecting:
Video Prospecting is a new buzzword that has been introduced to marketing a few months. And it is popular for a good reason. So instead of using calls, SMS, and emails for connecting with customers, SDRs will use a video call as a medium. A short, 2 minutes video format.
This personalized way of outreaching your customers does create great results. A platform like Sarv Wave surely will help you with this skill. SDR can engage with customers using screen share, video broadcasting, recording, whiteboard, and scheduling functions. SDRs do not need to be a master of that tool or video making. Just create a genuine, 2 minutes max video for your customers, and you are good to go.
Customized Outreach:
While prospecting, managing the quality and quantity of leads can be a tricky task. As a sales development rep, you need to build a healthy pipeline for sales reps and connect them with qualified leads.
Balancing quality and quantity in sales prospecting matters a lot. Review the pipeline and allocate how your sales reps spend their time on these leads. Sales rep sometimes spend a lot of their time qualifying leads before initiating a call. Allocating these calls based on lead quality can be time-saving.
SDRs need to practice this call proc’/ess so that it can clear the path for sales reps. You can use third-party tools or customized emails, as per prospect research, to make sure that the pipeline goes as smoothly as possible.
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome:
You may remember this tile from a meme, but in sales, it is an important lesson. You can never add more value to your sales process if it is getting automated every year.
One solution to this is active listening. A chatbot on a website can easily guide a potential customer to the right agent. Leading to qualifying the lead. But did that add more value to your business or brand? No.
Using chatbots is good, but you can not ignore the fact that you actually need to listen to your customers. When you actively listen to your customers, you understand more about their problems which will help you create a customized solution for them. When a customer sees that, they start to trust you moreover others.
Follow Up:
Calls are ideally the best option when it comes to connecting with your customers. But sometimes, an SMS or voicemail can do the trick.
When you call someone, there are possibilities that they might not be available to pick up the call. That means no response back from the customer. But, when a call goes unattended, you can send an SMS or voicemail to that user with brief information.
By doing this, you are creating some opportunities for getting a call back from customers. Leaving a good SMS or voicemail is an indispensable skill of an SDR, which requires practice.
Flexibility:
No doubt that SDRs have a tough job to do. SDRs are like those engineers and scientists who built Apollo that took humans to space. We all know who those 2 were, but no one knows the team that built that rocket.
The same happens with SDRs. They are the ones making calls and emails the whole day to qualify leads. But they never get the glory like sales reps who close the deals.
This hard skill of SDRs is exhausting, and they need to stay positive with their soft skill, flexibility. It can be a bad call, your mistake, or a rude prospect but never let them get the best out of you.
Honest to Self:
An SDR must always be true to self. Accepting all kinds of feedback by putting aside the ego is essential in this field. A true SDR must seek out coaching from high-performing superiors and managers. Real-time feedback is bliss in this case. Make a report of all the challenges and situations that you faced and share it with them to seek the right path. Work on that feedback and implement it on yourself.
Final Verdict:
Well, there are more skills that an SDR needs to work on, but in my opinion, these 6 are the very core ones. Make sure you are actively and consistently being part of your sales team because that way, you will learn a lot of skills beyond these six that will help you improve as an SDR. If you are an SDR, all the best, buddy.
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