Sales Development Representative Job Description +TEMPLATE
It is usually an entry-level position in a sales department, so to start as a junior SDR, you don’t need a higher education degree. The modern sales development representative’s (SDR) job is much more strategic than that. Sales representative interns tend to reach similar levels of education than sales development representatives. In fact, they’re 1.4% more likely to graduate with a Master’s Degree and 0.1% more likely to earn a Doctoral Degree. Given the importance of sales development representatives, you will need a strong set of technical and workplace skills to succeed in this role, as explored below.
Take a look at The Inviqa Group as an example of effective lead qualification. The web development and consultancy company uses Pipedrive to manage a rigorous and scientific lead qualification process. A potential sale goes from being a prospect to either a qualified lead or a dead end. While some sales organizations opt for both inbound and outbound activity, in this article, we’ll focus on how an SDR finds and nurtures outbound leads. With this Sales Development Representative job description sample, you can get a good idea of what employers are looking for when hiring for this position.
Are they a team player?
This role will be responsible for servicing inbound sales and related inquiries with a focus on engaging and qualifying all prospective customers. This role is one of the first touch points for prospects and has the opportunity to set the tone for the sales cycle following. In broad terms, SDRs typically focus on inbound prospects, whereas Business Development Representatives (BDRs) generate their own leads with outbound communication. However, these responsibilities are not exclusive to one or the other, and the terms are often used interchangeably, so SDRs may be tasked with handling outbound prospecting as well as inbound. Little did I know there was a different between a business development representative, a sales development representative, and an account executive. Sales development reps’ tasks revolve around expanding the company’s customer base.
LeadFuze aggregates the world’s professional data and the companies they work for, to give you an easy way to build the most targeted, and accurate list of leads imaginable. Adding this step in the sales process ensures that good leads get to the pitch and bad leads get removed from the pipeline. Every detail of a conversation must be tailored for each prospect using research on the company and industry, real data, and messaging based on their place in the sales funnel.
What Is a Sales Development Representative?
An SDR plays a very strategic role within a business’ sales cycle. They typically come in at the very beginning of a potential customer’s buyer’s journey. An SDR is often the first touchpoint from a sales team member after a lead has been passed down from marketing or found via prospecting. A sales development representative (SDR) is a sales rep whose job is to find pipeline through sales prospecting. Their main job is to connect with prospects on a one-to-one basis, e.g., through cold calling or via LinkedIn messaging. In SaaS sales, SDRs generally focus on building a sales pipeline through prospect outreach, lead qualification, and lead nurturing.
Confidence is important, but the ego can cloud an SDR’s ability to receive and implement candid feedback. The best SDRs proactively seek out coaching from high-performing peers and crave honest feedback from their managers. Getting real-time feedback is best, but you can also build out a list of all the questions or challenges you faced in a given week and debrief them with your manager during a scheduled one-on-one. Regardless of how you follow up, it’s important to always provide value so you engage the prospect in a relevant way, especially since you want to recapture their attention. A voicemail where you say something like, “Hey, just looking to connect again!” isn’t as enticing and inviting of a callback as sharing a new piece of news or content related to the prospect’s industry is. In a short amount of time, you have to entice a prospect you’ve never spoken with to call you back.
Sales Development Representative Related Jobs
In that case, you should consider hiring a sales development representative. The fact that many sales development representatives are fresh into the job market works well for companies. It’s great if you’re looking to mold sales staff into your processes and procedures. Once a connection has been made, SDRs are responsible for contacting leads, qualifying them as prospects, educating prospects about the product or service and scheduling meetings with the sales team. The primary responsibility for this sales role is to qualify leads. That job entails finding and filling in data of target accounts, nurturing inbound leads, and identifying both suspects and prospects.
When you’re reaching out to hundreds of leads, trying to record everything on paper or remember key details in your head is hard. To summarize, SDRs need many of the traits that make a good salesperson (which is why this is a great stepping stone to more high-level sales positions). This means going beyond general industry information and doing targeted research on specific leads. The SDR is responsible for finding all this information and using it to personalize communications.
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Read more about the SDR best practices in order to keep them focused and motivated to achieve sales goals. The first step to building a strong SDR team starts with crafting a robust sales strategy and understanding the number of SDR requirements. Once you identify the numbers of SDRs needed, you are ready to initiate the staffing and recruitment process.
Accelerate business revenue growth through customer connections, CX strategies, personalized experiences, and advanced telephony and CRM solutions. They need a competitive and gritty mindset, a never-say-die attitude, good knowledge of the buyer persona, and proper communication skills. It might seem easy, but, in reality, SDRs also have to figure out whether they’re the right fit for your business.
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- You can use several software options for video prospecting, including Loom and Soapbox by Wistia.
- Their measure of success is based on the number of sales qualified leads (SQL) they collect each month.
- Analyze your leads and learn how to communicate with different people across various channels.
- Simply put, video prospecting is customized outreach in a short, two-minute max video format.
- He does some quick research to find uncommon commonalities or interesting aspects of their profile, responds to comments on his posts, and sends thank you’s or personalized LinkedIn requests.
- It allows SDRs to see how their prospects are moving through the sales pipeline in real time.
Using strategies like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing), SDRs can identify if a lead is worth the time or not. At this stage, an SDR must gather information about the prospects by answering the following questions. In short, the roles of SDRs and BDRs largely depend on how departments are structured and often vary across businesses.