Snapshot
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The first phase of sales development saw companies leveraging technology to optimize workflows and maximize their bottom-line.
The first phase of sales development saw companies leveraging technology to optimize workflows and maximize their bottom-line.
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Today, the onus has shifted on marketing to help turbocharge sales development reps by sharing data silos, productive use cases, and using content to make them more proficient.
Today, the onus has shifted on marketing to help turbocharge sales development reps by sharing data silos, productive use cases, and using content to make them more proficient.
Around two years ago, the spread of covid-19 kicked off a revolution in b2b marketing. It pushed enterprises to accelerate their digital adoption and expand their technology stack to meet the evolving customer requirements. With everything now established in the stack, enterprises aim to realign their distribution and communication channels in a holistic go-to-market strategy.
The advent of sales force automation and other CRM tools defined the first phase of SalesTech. However, companies are now experiencing a technique boom in sales, signaling a new phase in sales enablement. But many enterprises are yet to align their marketing teams with the sales development functions. Leading organizations, however, have adopted a few best practices that have helped their sales development teams succeed amidst quickly evolving market dynamics.
Change is here: Technology matters, but people are more valuable
After significant development in marketing technology, the business world is abuzz about innovations in the sales technology stack. But the biggest story is still about people. In the last year alone, there have been around 20% growth in sales development reps versus face-to-face executives. These are actual human beings who are identifying and engaging with in-market demand. While enterprises have a strong urge to become more tech-savvy, vanguard organizations are using people to push business performance forward. This means that organizations that focus on empowering and enabling their workforce are more likely to outperform their competitors.
The year 2022 will be all about enabling sales development reps and helping them effectively execute the fundamentals of demand identification and engagement. They must know which accounts to target, whom to talk to, and what to say. Enterprises must also align their seasoned demand generators from marketing to enable and train their sales development reps. Top performing teams are already ensuring that the requirements of both marketing and sales teams are considered before investing in technology infrastructure. Let’s look at some of the future-forward practices for SDR enablement in 2022:
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Get the sales development reps on the suitable data sources
In the dynamic world of enterprise solutions, top-performing marketers have gravitated away from the top-of-funnel email blasts. Even if an organization has not completely transitioned to an account-based approach, they have moved past the spray and pray approach. They are now exploring how qualified SQLs are generated.
Companies are increasingly leveraging an intelligent combination of first and third-party behavioral data to fuel their marketing campaigns. Such data comes from the company’s owned and operated demand generation channels along with third-party database service providers. As a result, they are reconfiguring their content to support buyers’ journeys and nurture leads until they are ripe for closer contact. Furthermore, enterprises must ensure that their sales development reps have access to high-quality data to achieve better outbound results. According to a report, real-time purchase intent data is the second highest contributor to SDR quota attainment, right after cadence tools. Also, it is crucial that enterprises provide high-quality data resources to their business development teams and train them on how to leverage those data.
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Focus sales development teams on productive use cases
Top-rung sales and marketing leaders must focus on the triggers that inform the marketing actions. Many of the same triggers can also be acted on by sales development reps. And when combined with high-quality data, outbound call activities can provide an extra push to make demand generation campaigns more successful.
As the market finally settles in, enterprises should look to leverage a smart mix of online and offline events to maximize their demand generation ROI. They also need to undertake proper post-event follow-ups that will boost their conversions and carry the sales momentum forward. Third-party intent data can enable marketers to identify prospects who are actively researching in the market. This helps them to design emails, event advertising, and outbound telesales service better suited to individual buyer personas.
Enterprises must extract behavioral data and overlay it on their web traffic so that they can provision their sales reps with the contacts to call and topics to begin with, even if no one is filling out the online lead generation forms.
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Enable the sales reps to be proficient with the content
Mature demand generation teams have already learned that there is a greater value attached to customizing content to make it more relevant for a particular audience. Furthermore, with the increase in digital interactions over the last 2 years, customers now rely on self-service information gathering of a product or service. Also, leveraging high-quality and relevant content, marketing teams can reduce up to 19 minutes of sales reps that are spent on pre-call research. With slight modifications to the campaign/asset preparation process, marketers can provide actionable insights they have utilized directly to sales reps within their workflow.
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Train the sales development reps on a schedule and through ad-hoc open-door availability
In complex business functions, it is difficult to train adequately on feature/function alone. A crucial element here is streamlining the first 15 seconds of dysfunction of a sales pitch to achieve disproportionate benefits. Marketers can extend the persona work, including customer feedback insights, to provide a consistent stream of sales training around the functions/roles the sales development team is selling into. Also, the top leadership must maintain an open-door policy with the sales development reps to make learning easier.
Conclusion
The trend towards growth in sales enablement will only rise in 2022. Companies are now looking at sales development as an increasingly professional role. Vanguard organizations have torn down some of the longest-standing barriers between the siloed sales and marketing departments. Going forward in 2022, marketers must help the sales development team understand and leverage their marketing inputs effectively to generate higher revenue. On the other hand, sales development reps must also take the lead and leverage as much marketing expertise they can to bolster their core processes.
Contact us to get detailed insights about our holistic demand generation services comprising of telesales service, field sales & marketing, digital marketing, and database services.Read Responses
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