The Five Sales Development Plays To Nail In 2019 w/Dan Gottlieb @TOPO

Looking for sales tactics for your team? We’ve listed five sales strategies for you, plus a bonus, so read on to find out more.

RELATED: Sales Development Action Plan For 2019

In this article:

  1. The Evolution of Sales Development
    1. Develop a Live Call Framework for Sales Tactics
    2. Focus on Multithreading Target Accounts
    3. Design SDR Onboarding Activities
    4. Practice Time Management
    5. Communicate Valuable Content to Your Prospects
  2. BONUS: Master the Essentials in Your SDR Tech Pack

Five Sales Development Tactics For Your Team

Dan Gottlieb is a sales development analyst at TOPO Inc. He conducts trend research around the top patterns and sales tactics across different sales teams in the profession in entirety today.

These patterns and plays help their customers’ sales reps drive more traffic, more potential buyers, higher conversion rates, larger average deal sizes, shorter sales cycles, and lower churn rates. As a result, their customers grow two times faster than the competition.

The Evolution of Sales Development

Before we began discussing the five development plays, we talked about how the sales development landscape in business has evolved over the years.

Nowadays, sales development is no longer just an entry-level sales job.

Currently, more than half of the businesses’ pipeline flows through the businesses’ sales process. Because of this, many different types of specializations take place across different kinds of business segments.

Sales tactics are also already branching out beyond marketing, and traditional inbound or outbound sales.

The job description of a sales development representative is no longer just about booking business meetings. It has already evolved into supporting salespeople, sales strategies, and expansion within customers’ accounts.

These agents are already touching a higher number of leads while supporting a larger number of consumers and organizations.

Just to avoid confusion, SDRs are still taking a different role than Business Development Representatives (BDRs). While SDRs commonly focus on inbound or outbound sales, BDRs, on the other hand, usually generate potential buyers through cold-calling, referrals, and social selling.

Now, on to the tips mentioned by Gottlieb.

Inbound and Outbound Sales Definition: Inbound sales refer to bringing customers through digital selling. On the other hand, outbound sales refer to winning customers through social selling.

1. Develop a Live Call Framework for Sales Tactics

To begin, Gottlieb shared some of their research.

They learned that being able to execute a live call is one of the top factors for sales teams to be successful in selling. And to properly do this, your team needs to develop a repeatable and prescriptive live call framework.

This will help your SDRs break down each element of a live call. It will also help your team remember the important elements of a good call while creating a common and efficient vocabulary for all salespeople.

The first step in creating an effective live call framework is to create context for your team, which has two parts:

  1. Ingraining in everyone the purpose of reaching out to potential customers
  2. Teaching them how to convey the value they need to impart to a potential client

He also reminds the listeners, “There are three different ways that an SDR can convey value on the phone: they can tailor a value prop, they can share relevant use case story, or they can share an insight. Those are three ways to convey value. At the end of a phone call, I want to be able to say, how did you convey value on that call as an SDR?”

The key principle in implementing your sales tactics is not just giving your sales team a list of questions during training then expecting them to just pepper through the lists. Instead, we want to train the salespeople on conversational skills to leverage when they convey value when selling.

You should also be able to teach the sales team how to close for the next meeting with the prospective client.

One technique of having a meaningful conversation with potential customers is to suggest a timeout. Your SDRs can ask for a few minutes of people’s time.

They can ask questions like “Can I take the next 30 seconds to explain why I’m calling?” From there, the people in the call can decide whether to continue the discussion or not.

The main point is that potential buyers should know exactly what they expect to happen out of the next minute, so they can welcome what you’re saying.

2. Focus on Multithreading Target Accounts

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Multithreading target accounts for increased sales

The second sales strategy refers to being able to multithread different messaging into different threads within a target account.

He shared another research they did, where they found that across sales development organizations, 41% of sales teams have dedicated account-based sales professionals.

They do this by giving sales reps a list of accounts to prioritize. And within that list, based on your average deal size, you can consider the number of people they should try to go after within an account.

He also shared other sales strategies for effective selling.

He shared that when top-performing organizations target accounts, they’re more methodical about the people they’re going to be selling to, then follow them for a more sustained duration of time.

These sales tactics will help your salespeople make clear expectations about your revenue plan. It will also help SDRs pinpoint what matters more and how their time should be spent selling.

Prioritizing as a strategy starts with identifying and defining as an organization your ideal customer profile. This profile consists of a set of attributes that describe the highest value existing customers that you have on your business.

And then, you can use this profile to create a giant list of accounts to know which ones fall under the highest priority.

RELATED: How to Win at Sales Development – 27 Tips from the Experts

3. Design SDR Onboarding Activities

The third out of the five sales tactics is about creating an effective onboarding training for sales reps during recruitment. When you are initially training your salespeople, you may ask yourself – How do we get them focused?

Mentor your sales team by teaching the steps one by one. They need to learn all your company’s sales tactics by heart.

Also, you have to bear in mind that your sales team is learning the skills that will make them feel comfortable executing their job over time.

Similarly, they should also learn how to understand the context of selling via different platforms, to win effective sales. Your SDRs should also acquire the skill of making their prospects understand the value of what your business is selling.

As Gottlieb shares, “The main theme is to focus the onboarding on the role. Don’t send them to the new hire sales training and expect them to get value out of sitting there and learning about the sales process in their first two weeks.”

Also, you must remember that if you are looking for high-quality workers, look at the character attributes. These qualities will show you the workers’ coachability when they do get hired.

During recruitment, you may reflect through these questions – Is this applicant driven? Is he or she motivated by something other than sales? If the answer is yes, then this applicant could be an incredibly effective salesperson.

4. Practice Time Management

Time management is a secret weapon. Mastering this is one of the most crucial sales tactics.

If you’re overwhelmed with the number of tasks you have, then here is one of the most effective sales techniques – to simplify the day, break all tasks into three or four blocks of time where you focus on specific tasks for each time. Learn how to take healthy breaks as well.

Always remember that it’s also very important to figure out which tasks to prioritize first. Set your team’s initial expectations and be careful not to over-schedule or over-engineer the planning as well.

This might hinder your team from being flexible when your priorities suddenly change. By doing this, you can boost sales enablement within your business.

Inspiring healthy time management skills can also help your team move through your sales pipeline faster.  These would help them focus on customers and see who could be a good fit.

5. Communicate Valuable Content to Your Prospects

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Communicating value with clients for increased sales

And lastly, the fifth of the sales tactics is focusing on how to communicate effectively to your prospects when selling. It’s not just enough to focus on visual aids and other presentation materials as a sales strategy.

Your SDRs must also know how to make their potential buyers understand why they need to get your product or service. Your team should be able to demonstrate that they know their consumers’ current problems and how your team can solve these problems.

He also shared a proven technique. He said that during a demo, your SDR can tell stories of similar clients that also had a specific problem and how they overcame it by using your product or service.

BONUS: Master the Essentials in Your SDR Tech Pack

There are core tech essentials that everybody needs. And, what matters is that you have a focused approach in using these. Your team should know why you have these tools and when you’re going to use them in their sales process.

This includes making sure you’re mastering the little things about these tech tools.

Always monitor data synchronization between your CRM, data solutions, and engagement tool. This will help you get thoughtful data about what’s actually working and what’s not, along with the leading indicators into what sales method your team is doing.

Gottlieb also reminds us that everyone needs to master the essentials first before adding additional tech into the stack.

Mastering the essentials includes strict data management and an organized engagement platform. If not, then you have to look for ways to improve the efficiencies by diagnosing where the issues are.

Inspiring collaboration and efficient work ethic among your sales teams can sometimes be challenging. There are a lot of things to monitor to ensure that your SDRs are winning enough prospects during a sales pitch.

But, hopefully, these sales tactics can help. Don’t forget that first, you need to create a live call framework. Next, you have to focus on multithreading all your priority accounts.

Third, you have to develop rigorous and comprehensive onboarding activities. Fourth is to establish proper time management for the team. And lastly, teach your SDRs how to effectively communicate your product or service.

What are your techniques to maintain your team’s sales development performance? Share your tips below!

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