Inspiration Comes in All Shapes and Sizes
AJ Alonzo | Director of Marketing @ demandDrive
Becoming a successful SDR isn’t easy. It takes a lot of hard work and plenty of trial and error to become a top-performing rep. Luckily, there’s a myriad of tips and tricks to help you get there.
One of the more unconventional resources we pull from at demandDrive has nothing to do with cold calling, list building, or SDR work in general. Instead, it’s Hubspot’s Content Marketing Academy Course (follow that link for a firsthand breakdown!). The framework to a successful content marketing program has a lot of parallels to sales development, and they help our reps perform higher than average.
Hubspot lists 9 major components to a successful content marketing program. Each one has a parallel within the sales development space, and can be used for a boost to your prospecting efforts:
1. The Power of Storytelling
“Storytelling is all about how you communicate the value and mission of your business across all channels. The Goal is to make a human connection — have your message resonate with prospects that need your help & guidance.”
Holding a conversation is a key skill that every SDR should posses, but more important than that is the ability to tell a compelling story. Being able to convey why you’re reaching out and what value your company brings is what separates the average SDR from a great one.
“The story should help a prospect make a decision — do I trust this company? Would I work with them?”
Content marketers use their content to build trust and help pull potential customers through the buyer’s journey. SDRs are no different. When you come across as not only conversational but knowledgeable about your product, it helps build that trust. Without that, prospects won’t be willing to talk with you or take next steps.
Tip: Use the Golden Circle when asked, “what does your company do?” It helps you communicate with feelings instead of analytics, and that helps you start to build a relationship with your prospects.
2. Generating Content Ideas
Help turn your thoughts and ideas into actionable initiatives.
More on the email side versus the conversation side, generating compelling emails and subject lines is an integral part of being an SDR. Email communication is equally important to speaking with someone live over the phone. It’s often a less intrusive and more efficient way to explain the value your product/company can provide.
Something SDRs learn right out the gate is that emails become stale. They need constant refreshing to keep prospects engaged. Like the processes that content marketers have in place to help generate new content, SDRs too should employ a strategy to keep their emails and subject lines fresh and compelling. Follow that process to keep churning out effective messaging.
Tip: Gather as much raw material as possible (past emails and subject lines that saw success) and file them away. When you need inspiration this will be a great place to pull from.
3. Planning a Long-Term Content Strategy
“Content pulls people from one stage of the inbound methodology to the other. It’s the catalyst to get people from the “awareness” stage to the “decision” stage. If you have a plan and you’re consistent in your approach, then you have the best chance at achieving a higher ROI.”
Road mapping your day-to-day activities is key in maintaining success as an SDR. Blindly cold-calling through a list day after day will not only yield poor results, but it will burn you out at a quicker rate.
“Traditionally, SDRs have been given a list, and told to take the buckshot approach — that is call/email as many prospects as possible and see what sticks.”
Documenting the priority level of your accounts and what outreach cadence to use will not only help you increase your prospecting efficiency, but it ensures that you won’t slip back into that buckshot approach. Now when you get new accounts, you can segment, prioritize and plan your outreach. If anything comes up that might derail your process, look back at your road map to get yourself back on track.
4. Building a Content Creation Framework
Make your creation process repeatable, organized and agile.
You don’t have to re-invent the wheel each time you create new prospecting material — save yourself time and effort by having a customizable framework in place. When content marketers generate ideas, they have past content and structured processes to pull from. SDRs should follow the same strategy — ideas shouldn’t come from nothing, they should stem from existing (and successful) ones.
Having a process in place to generate messaging will help make creation repeatable, it keeps you organized, and it allows you to remain agile. Looking through your existing work gives you a reservoir to pull inspiration from, and understanding what has and hasn’t worked in the past gives you direction.
Tip: Get an internal Wiki for your company to share their templates and subject lines. Having it all in one place allows anyone who’s working on new messaging to pull examples (with varying degrees of success) from everyone. That way you get different styles and ideas to test out.
5. Effective Writing Skills
“At its core, effective content is both relevant and useful to your audience. If your writing isn’t effective, it is neither of those things.”
Effective writing isn’t about becoming a better writer, but it’s about becoming a more efficient and powerful writer. You want to craft messaging that’s relevant and useful for your audience — stand out from the crowd!
Your messaging should slow the prospect down, and be compelling enough to prevent them from navigating away from your content to someone else’s.
You’re not the only SDR reaching out to your prospects on a daily basis — cutting through the noise is something that top SDRs excel at. The easiest way to do that is become more effective in how you convey the value of your product. Make the prospect your #1 priority, show that you understand their point of view, and be as consultative as possible.
6. Extending Value Through Re-Purposing
“Extending the shelf life of your content to make sure you’re getting the most out of it.”
Similar to bringing value through a content creation framework, you can extend the value of your messaging by re-purposing it for various uses. If you have an email that resonates with a specific segment, tweak it a bit and use it for a different segment. Subject lines that generate a lot of opens might be useful content when you connect with prospects on their social channels.
This all ties back to not re-inventing the wheel — being an SDR is already time-consuming and (in a lot of cases) tedious. You want to speed the process up and expand the reach and value of what you’ve already created to lessen your load.
Tip: Categorize your messaging by opens and replies. Popular subject lines can morph into powerful social posts, and messages with high engagement levels can be re-purposed for a new audience.
7. Effective Promotion
“The distribution of your content through a variety of media channels.”
The modern SDR isn’t tied to one channel of communication anymore. Cold Calling might not be dead, but it’s also not the only way you can get in touch with your prospects. Email has been around for a while, and with social prospecting on the rise, there’s a myriad of new channels you can use to get in touch with a prospect.
“There is no magic recipe to promotion, it requires constant experimentation. By analyzing the results you get you can better see trends across multiple channels and eventually further optimize the message, channel, and timing to yield better results.”
Channels require constant testing — there won’t be one that always outperforms others. Just like you have to tailor your message to each individual prospect, you also have to tailor your outreach cadence. Social prospecting might work for one segment of your accounts, but another would prefer the classic cold call. It’s a constant trial and error process, and the great SDRs are the ones who find the sweet spot.
8. Measurement and Analysis
“Analyze results to find out if your efforts are making an impact on production. Discover insights and determine where to go next. Document that progress and report it for future use.”
Anecdotal evidence is great (and plentiful for SDRs), but measuring hard metrics like open and reply rates will give you more clear-cut answers to what messages are resonating with prospects. This seems pretty obvious, but unless you take the initiative as an SDR to see what works and what doesn’t, you’ll always be working off gut feelings.
Tip: Tools like your CRM and Sales Enablement Platform have reporting capabilities built in — use them! Ideally, you want to only promote your top performing messages — it already has above average engagement, so re-purposing that should yield better results. All it takes is a consistent system to measure effectiveness and you’re off to the races.
9. Developing a Growth Marketing Mentality
“The Goal of growth marketing is to identify new opportunities that help build and engage your audience. New channels to promote through pop up all the time and players are becoming more competitive and expensive.”
Sales Development is an ever-changing field, and finding new and innovative ways to prospect will help keep you at the top of your game. A few years back social prospecting was just an idea — now it’s a widely accepted strategy in the SDR playbook.
“Ideate which channels will perform the best, and implement the tested channels that are high performing.”
A common tactic to test new channels is the Bullseye Framework. It takes a look at all of the different methods to gain traction and categorizes them into how plausible they are to execute. The framework is effective because it gives you the option to explore channels that might be considered “long-shots” while still keeping you focused on your top preforming channels.
There are plenty of tips, tricks, hacks, shortcuts, etc…out there for SDRs. They aren’t always applicable. Each SDR is different, just like each product is different. Knowing which ones work for you and which don’t is the key to becoming a top rep.
