Looking to Boost SDR Productivity? Use a Sales Engagement Platform
A sales development rep – or SDR – is a key player in the B2B sales pipeline. These sales professionals turn marketing’s MQLs (market qualified leads) into SQLs (sales qualified leads) by contacting the leads to field questions and assess pain points. If it weren’t for the tireless efforts of SDRs, account executives would be at a grave disadvantage when it came to chasing deals.
But, as it stands, many SDRs aren’t used properly. They are often relied upon to make difficult decisions and left to wade through an un-standardized sales process. The process is often rife with inefficiencies and human error.
Unbeknownst to many sales managers, it’s simple. You might already be using CRM platforms and marketing automation software. However, there is a missing piece of the puzzle that can boost SDR productivity and increase your ROI for leads. It’s called a sales engagement platform, and it’s as easy to deploy as it is effective.
A Day in the Life of an SDR
An SDRs day is full of unnecessary steps. Without the aid of a sales engagement platform, they need to manually choose which leads to contact from their CRM, often chasing the larger leads and leaving behind better, smaller leads. They psych themselves up for the cold call or email, then dial the phone or start writing. They then have to manually enter what happens.
There are three things wrong with this day, three things that can be solved easily by a sales engagement platform. 1) There is too much keyboard activity, too much time spent before and in-between contacting leads. 2) Relying on SDRs to choose leads leaves many potentially lucrative leads to slip through the cracks. 3) SDRs might not get around to contacting a lead for a couple of days, if at all.
Here’s how a sales engagement platform solves those issues:
Cutting Keyboard Activity
A sales engagement platform has built-in workflow automation tools. It chooses the best lead (more on that in a moment,) auto-dials that lead or auto-populates an email and then stores the information. Rather than undertake additional manual steps, all the SDR has to worry about is talking to leads, which greatly boosts productivity.
Working Every Lead
Rather than relying on the SDR to pick leads, a sales engagement platform employs what’s called “queue based lead routing,” which automatically reprioritizes the SDR’s queue to bump the best leads to the top. This means they are always working the best leads at the best times.
Increasing Speed to Lead
Wait 24 hours and your chances of conversion drop drastically. The sweet spot appears to be anywhere from 10 minutes to 60 minutes of a lead entering your system. Without a sales engagement platform to reprioritize the queue, SDRs often wait more than 24 hours and sometimes don’t get around to contacting a lead at all. In a competitive industry, you need to start thinking seriously about speed to lead – luckily, a sales engagement platform can do that thinking for you.
Get the most out of your SDRs. Rather than bogging them down with keyboard activity, relying on them to choose leads and leaving them to wait too long, deploy a sales engagement platform.
