
Building A New Sales Team? Don't Make These 7 Mistakes
As a sales manager, you want to build a strong sales team to ensure your organization continues to grow and succeed.
Unfortunately, many managers continue to make the same hiring and team building mistakes — mistakes that could be easily avoided.
With that in mind, let us start by going over a few common mistakes managers make when building a sales team.
Then, we will look at how you can avoid making those costly mistakes.
1) Training SDRs as if they were Account Executives
2) Hiring junior SDRs and giving them full freedom
3) Not doing it yourself first
4) Keeping it cheap/scrappy
5) Thinking you can pay little money
6) Trying to scale with only warm leads
7) Not understanding the current state of the customer
Mistake 1: Training SDRs as If They Were Account Executives
This is the most common mistake, especially if your SDR organization falls within the sales department. If you’ve hired your SDR and had their onboarding be the same as the AEs, you’re in trouble for two reasons.
During onboarding, your SDRs learns about most of the features, they see the product in action and listen to the AE give a pitch. The reason that’s a problem is that the SDRs will start pitching product features.
Mistake 2: Hiring Junior SDRs and Giving Them Full Freedom
“Ok, I get it. No product training, so let’s just give them a phone, a computer and off we go, right?” I wish.
You’re going to be in deep trouble if you’re hiring SDRs and just telling them to do “as they wish” to get meetings. Unless of course every SDR you hire has a lot of experience and is great at what they do (these employees are not only rare you but also expensive).
Chances are that most SDRs you hire are transitioning careers or coming out of college so they have little business acumen. Full freedom = disaster. Coach your reps to keep the fun out
Mistake 3: Not Doing It Yourself First
“Wait, I’m a manager. I’m 40 years old, I’m not going to actually get on the phone and make calls, right?”
“Thanks for your time, the interview is over. You can leave now”
Just kidding. I’m actually a really nice manager. Ask my reps, or read my recommendation on LinkedIn, or whatever, I don’t care.
Unless your SDRs believe that their manager can do their job better than them, they will not follow their direction. They’ll feel entitled to more.
They want a promotion ASAP, more money. Also, they want to manage themselves and want to be AEs. If they feel they can train fresh SDRs better than you, you’ve lost their respect as a manager. That’s what I mean.
If they don’t perceive that you can do the job better than them, you’ll have a lot of turnovers.
“Oh shit, is that why my average SDR tenure is 4–8 months?”
Mistake 4: Keeping It Cheap/Scrappy
Well, that’s one reason why they’re leaving. The other one is that their job itself sucks when it comes to workflow.
You bought the cheapest sales acceleration tool, and the cheapest data tool, and so on. Let me tell you. You’re going to war — your SDRs are hunters. They’re getting on the battlefield of attention trying to engage VPs and C-level executives and they have the equivalent of bows and arrows. The winning teams have bazookas.
If you’re going cheap on data and sales tools, you’re dead. Not only because it’ll be harder to engage prospects, but also because the workflow is so frustrating that your reps will quit.
You won’t know this unless you’ve done the work yourself.
You know why else they quit?
Mistake 5: Thinking You Can Pay Little Money
“We budgeted $70K for the SDRs”. If you think you can hire reps for cheap, and keep it cheap for long, I want to welcome you to Turnover-World.
Bad tools, bad data, difficult workflows and bad pay. You would probably quit too, but have you ever tried doing their job? (See mistake #3).
The SDR job is mentally taxing and highly stressful. If their base salary doesn’t even allow them to pay rent and food, they’ll leave! You’re setting yourself for failure because “everyone is doing it that way”. If you continue following the status quo, you’ll continue failing.
Mistake 6: Trying to Scale with Only Warm Leads
Relying purely on trade show scans, mass newsletter emails, and other wide “net” strategies aren’t scalable. Why? Because there’s overlap.
Think about it. Two booths at Dreamforce won’t bring you twice as many leads as one booth. Going to twice as many trade shows won’t get you twice as many leads either. It’s mostly the same people going to these conferences. Two email blasts to your 20,000 person list won’t get you 2x the meetings as 1 email.
Target your outbound marketing to ice-cold leads
If you were able to get some results by purely using non-focused demand generation, your website, and other lead sources, scaling will be hard. You need to figure out how you can build a ppipeline from ice-cold leads.
This means turning your “Inbound Marketing” into “Outbound Marketing”. Outbound Marketing?! What the hell is that?! Some people call it Account Based Marketing. Select the accounts you want to go after and have your marketing team go hunt. Replace your nets for spears.
But to be able to do that you need to understand your customers well.
Mistake 7: Not Understanding the Current State of the Customer
Do you understand your customers? What about you SDRs?
This blog is an example. If you’ve read this far, it probably resonated with you. By bringing you insights, it shows I understand you. I won’t pitch you to get on a call though. I’m not eager to sell you ASAP. I’m interested in sharing more thoughts with you if you’re thinking of building or improving your team.
Can you do the same for your customers? Can your SDRs attract curiosity, and can your AEs turn curiosity into interest? If they can’t you’re doing it wrong.
By: Tito Borth (https://www.linkedin.com/in/titobohrt/)
