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This week, sales experts from Zoom, Factor 8 and Ambition shared their pro tips for building (and coaching!) a brilliant SDR team. Our panel featured:
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Lauren Bailey, CEO, Factor8
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Lindsey Liranzo, SDR and BDR Manager, Zoom
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Mark McWatters, VP Sales, Ambition
If you missed the webinar — or you’re just looking for a quick recap — we’ve got you covered. Below are our top 5 takeaways from our live Q&A. (Follow us on LinkedIn to stay in the know about upcoming webinars!)
1. An SDR is more than an entry-level salesperson. Your SDRs are your front line. They're the first people a new lead or prospect will meet from your business. Ignoring them, or choosing not to actively coach and develop them, will only hurt your business.
2. The average SDR tenure is only 1.2 years. That means, as a sales leader, you’d be smart to constantly seek out and engage prospective SDRs. Plant seeds early: start conversations with people who seem like good candidates, even if you don’t have a place for them just yet.
3. Leverage the right tools to manage remote teams. Maybe you’ve given your team the freedom and flexibility to work from home, or maybe your team is distributed in offices across the country. If you’re not all in the same place, it’s that much more important to use the right tools (from internal sharing channels to video conferencing to sales performance software). Transparency and visibility should always be top of mind.
4. Focus SDR development on getting more conversations. Onboarding should really just cover their first month on the phones — and let’s be honest, those aren’t deep product conversations. Help SDRs with the phone skills basics like:
- How do I decide who to call first?
- How do I leave a voicemail they’ll actually return?
- How do I keep a prospect on the phone?
- How do I find the right people when my lead form is wrong?
As managers, our job is to celebrate the early small wins and big failures of our team. Call backs! YEA! Conversations. YEA! Hang-ups! YEA! This is key to building flexibility, fun, openness and authenticity. All things we need!
5. Amazon gift cards are grandma incentives. Now, don’t get us wrong: we love a good, practical cash gift as much as the next guys. (And Jeff Bezos, if you’re listening: we’ll always be Team Amazon Prime.) But a millennial SDR team is young and hungry. What they value most is your time and guidance — and what motivates them more than anything aren’t things at all, but experiences. Remember: you don’t need to spend a lot of money to make a big impact. Case in point: one manager promised his team that if they hit quota, he wouldn’t shower for a week. (Spoiler alert: they hit quota.)
Stay tuned for the full recording of the webinar! Until then: check out our blog for more sales coaching tips and trends.
