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Let's be honest: the SDR life is a grind. The metrics or activities you measure must create purpose and correlate to success. These 4 SDR metrics will inspire and align your team.
We’ve seen an incredible response since publishing our first annual Salesforce Inside Sales KPI Report this month. Thousands of downloads have confirmed we’re really tapping into a crucial vein in Sales orgs. (breathes huge sigh of relief… btw grab the KPI report from here if you haven't yet)
Surprisingly, a lot of people have asked us: “What are the metrics I need to be tracking for an SDR team?"
FIRST: What are we trying to understand with the metrics?
1. Alignment on The Goals (What are we trying to accomplish)
2. Identify Areas for Improvement (Effectiveness is critical)
3. Accountability to The Plan (Baseline productivity)
Let’s not do metrics for the sake of metrics... amiright?
While “Sales Development” seems commonplace for most Silicon Valley companies, the role is still new for most mature / established orgs. Plus, in both startup or established co's, the title can straddle the border between traditional contact center, classic ISR, to the proverbial “Inside-Sales-rep-in-waiting” role.
Enough hand wringing: 4 Must-Have Metrics for your SDR Team
FREE BONUS KPI: Call Activity.
Duh.
For reps that sit in seat and generate demand and qualified conversations for your sellers, Call Activity is crucial. There are two realities facing SDRs: 1. It's never been easier to email a bunch of prospects, but email response rates are dropping fast. 2. Calling may not be the most fun part of their day, but it's damn effective.
So track Call output. You may not love it, but you've got to.
Good news is Ambition’s sales management platform makes it dead simple by automagically providing real-time Call activity stats in Salesforce, on TV displays, or with alerts.
Whether we track Call Task-types in Salesforce or with the specific Call objects generated by Sales Acceleration tools like Velocify, Outreach, SalesLoft or PowerDialer - visibility and accountability is key. At the enterprise level, we also have dozens of clients using Cisco or Avaya phones that route call volume data to our platform as well.
Sales development is a numbers game (think Moneyball: its not about hits, its about runs) - not just the quantity, but also the conversion rates. To get conversion for SDR, tracking calls is a must.
1. Positive Outcomes: (Call Disposition #s)
SDR is a grind folks - you have to celebrate the small wins.
Depending on the tools in place, this can be tracked a variety of ways - less important - what is important is your SDRs have visibility to Disposition #'s either on aggregate or by Percentage-of-Conversations-Had basis. By providing that visibility through personal dashboards in Salesforce or public TV Leaderboards, your reps can start honing behavior and your managers can recognize strong performers.
As mentioned in the full KPI report, 75% of sales orgs tracked the actual number of Conversations had in addition to total Calls.
2. Meetings Completed Ratio / Monthly: (Meetings Task Completed / Meetings Set)
Broadly speaking, when we use the term Sales Development Rep, we find most of those roles focus on connecting with prospects, qualifying a strong customer fit, educating to create some intent, and then scheduling next steps in the sales process - which we’ll simply refer to here as a Meeting. Meeting could actually be a Demo, On-site visit, another Call with an AE, whatever.
What we want to create with this metric is a sense of the quality of the prospects your SDRs are scheduling next steps with. If the prospect doesn’t show, never has the meeting… well as a manager that’s an area to explore further. There is probably a quality issue.
3 and 4. Opportunities Generated: (Total Number of Opps and Total $ Amount)
Why even have SDRs unless they are generating Demand (opportunities) and ultimately Pipeline Dollars that your sales team can convert?
Actually there are more nuanced reasons to build an SDR program, but you absolutely should be using either Opportunities Created by SDR or Pipeline Generated by SDR to coach your people on their effectiveness.
Ambition handles this by making it simple to hook in the Opp type/ filters necessary and accrue “credit” for the Opportunity generation by the Created ID (rather than the Owner, who is oftentimes the AE).
As the Coach for your SDRs you need to be able to clearly track progress against the Goals and Targets the reps are working towards. As mentioned earlier, it can’t just be a “quantity” game - you need these people generating quality opportunity dollars for closers.
Download the Salesforce Inside Sales KPI Report
Download the full Salesforce KPI Report and register for our special upcoming webinar with Jason Jordan: How to Use Salesforce KPIs to Manage Your Team.
Modern sales leaders use Ambition to enhance sales performance insights and run supercharged sales reports, scorecards, contests, and TVs. Contact us to get started.
