SDRevolution: Video Course for Managers & Leaders
Hiring, Training, & Onboarding Best Practices
Course Summary
Sales development has changed drastically over the last 5-10 years as B2B sales has evolved.
Traditionally, hiring & training for SDR teams was simple and repeatable: grab kids fresh out of college, give them a list, sales technology, and send them off to pound the phones.
However, sales messaging and outbound outreach has grown massively over the last decade and buyers are overwhelmed by sellers, sales conversations, and the endless potential to buy.
In response, today’s buyers do more research themselves, rely less on sellers to influence their decisions, and connect with vendors much later in their buying process.
Sales Development or Business Development Representatives are likely to make the first impression for your brand, so it’s paramount to align your hiring, onboarding, and training practices with the needs of your buyers.
Modern SDR teams are winning in this sales environment by doing more research, being more personalized, and providing enough relevance & value to stick out against competitors.
Without a system for finding good sales hires, effectively onboarding, and consistently training sales reps to perform, B2B sellers will struggle to compete in this new setting.
To help you maximize sales outcomes and grow SDR performance, we interviewed 7 sales development experts on modern best practices for hiring, onboarding, and training SDR teams.
Course Details
- x7 Videos of Expert Interviews
- x7 Downloadable Interview Transcripts
- x1 Downloadable eBook
- 26,928 Words of In-Depth Overview
4hrs 31 minutes Completion Time
Course Benefits
- Audience development & social selling strategies to empower your SDRs
- Understand the big picture infrastructure needed for SDR teams
- Improve your ability to identify, attract, and recruit good sales hires
- Build an empowered SDR team with the right culture & hiring strategy
- Best practices for effective sales development onboarding & training
- Motivate & manage SDRs with different generations & personalities
- Develop business development processes to improve performance
- Get a crash course on modern outbound prospecting techniques
- Harness multiple types of sales channels for strategic sales development
EPISODE OVERVIEW
EPISODE #1
Sales Development Recruiting, Training, & Career Paths
Building a sales team is tough. Finding good hires, motivating reps effectively, and developing a strong sales training program is even harder. See the infrastructure behind successful sales development programs and the systems needed to hire, onboard, and train effectively.
EPISODE #2
Finding Good Sales Hires & Building Sales Development Team Culture
Every company has their own unique needs, obstacles, and market opportunities that affect how they should approach sales development. Learn how to identify good sales hires, build a cohesive SDR team, and create an empowering sales development culture for your situation.
EPISODE #3
Process Development & Performance Management for Sales Development
Without good process, the people you hire and technology you buy can only take you so far. Companies often have it backwards, allowing their team and technology to define the entire process. Understand the systems, methodologies, and goals behind creating a successful business development process for SDR teams.
EPISODE #4
Outbound Sales Development: Prospecting & Cold Messaging Techniques
Without a doubt, outbound prospecting with cold call & email is getting harder. How can you train reps to stick out from the crowd and resonate with buyers? See how successful outbound SDR teams are achieving results and get modern tactics for generating more meetings.
EPISODE #5
Strategic Sales Development & Types of Sales Channels
In today’s sales environment, it’s much harder for SDRs to rely on a single channel or approach for connecting with buyers. Sellers need to be strategic and multi-threaded. Learn how to empower your SDR team with multiple types of sales channels like the phone, email, and social.
EPISODE #6
How to Use LinkedIn for Sales Development & Social Selling
Social is still a relatively new channel for sellers and these digital communities are quickly evolving. Without the right best practices, SDRs will struggle to use social channels effectively. Learn how to leverage social correctly to empower reps with more reach and influence.
EPISODE #7
Conversational Marketing & Sales Automation with LiveChat + ChatBots
Live chat allows real-time communication with leads and customers. While live chat is big in B2C spaces, they’ve only recently entered the B2B sales spotlight. See how conversational development can reduce friction in the buying cycle and help generate more meetings.
Episode Details
Episode 1: Sales Development Recruiting, Training, & Career Paths
Building a sales team from scratch or overhauling an existing one is a tough job. It all starts with a system for finding good hires, onboarding reps, and continuous training to improve outcomes.
Easier said than done.
Without a solid understanding of the sales skills SDRs need and a well-structured sales training program, it’s easy to lose control over the outcomes your SDR team can produce.
Attracting the right reps and building a system to properly onboard and train them is necessary to drive performance and keep your brand relevant in a wildly competitive hiring market.
In this episode you will learn:
- How to properly define your SDR program to ensure a cohesive, successful team
- The psychology of selling & key sales skills hiring managers need to recruit good SDRs
- How to create a successful sales onboarding program for your SDRs
- How to create sales training programs to better coach and manage your SDR team
- How to effectively motivate and manage reps of different generations and personalities
- How to structure the right career path for business development professionals
Episode 2: Finding Good Sales Hires & Building Sales Development Team Culture
Finding that perfect SDR is a wonderful moment – all of the hard work you’ve put into recruiting and hiring finally pays off when you see them crush quota month over month.
A good sales hire like that doesn’t grow on trees. It boils down to many factors: good business acumen, the sales skills to succeed, mindset, work ethic, and more.
However, it’s equally important that new hires are the right cultural fit for your company, the SDR team, and the person managing them.
Too often is cultural fit overlooked in the hiring process.
To build a winning SDR team full of passionate reps, you need to understand the personalities, motivations, and sales development approaches that make your team cohesive and successful.
In this episode you will learn:
- Key elements you need to consider when recruiting, evaluating, and hiring sales development reps
- How to build a hiring strategy around your specific selling situation
- The importance of continuous learning, humility, and creativity in SDR managers
- How to consistently affect and manage change within your sales organization
- The impact of internal marketing, team buy-in, and leading change management
- Different ways to leverage your personal brand to attract candidates and find the right hires
Episode 3: Process Development & Performance Management for Sales Development
A sales development program is comprised of many moving parts, but it can be boiled down to 3 big components: People, process, and technology.
People to reach buyers, technology to help them do it, and a process to follow.
Seems simple enough. However, most companies tend to build a team in the wrong order. They start with people, find them tools, and build a selling process around that.
Without a process in place before investing resources on new hires and technology, you risk losing control of performance and becoming reliant on specific people or software for success.
To maximize your ability to create repeatable, predictable outcomes with SDRs, you should define a clear sales development process that can be easily replicated to new people and tools.
In this episode you will learn:
- The differences in process development between sales development and closing roles
- How changes in buyer behavior and expectations have impacted sales development
- The Bucketing Methodology process for SDR training used at The Sales Developers
- How to build a repeatable, trackable process for your sales development function
- Key metrics to measure the effectiveness of your SDR team
- Top tips for consistently testing & optimizing your business development process
- Advice on the future of the sales development function
Episode 4: Outbound Sales Development: Prospecting & Cold Messaging Techniques
Outbound prospecting is a great way to get your message in front of as many qualified buyers as possible.
As good as it can be, sales prospecting is getting harder. Today’s buyers are overloaded by sales outreach. In response, modern buyers have become much more aware of their options and have more control over when and how sellers enter the scene.
Becoming more personalized and relevant in your messaging is the new norm. Reps that take the time to learn new outbound techniques and improve messaging will reap the rewards.
In this episode you will learn:
- Modern multi-threaded approaches to help SDRs successfully connect with buyers
- How to balance sales automation and personalization with outbound outreach
- The difference between being personalized and relevant at scale in sales development
- Key elements to successfully managing an outbound SDR team
- Tips for building or improving an outbound sales prospecting process
- How to keep your outbound SDR team motivated
- Considerations for different business models, sales environments, and manager situations
Episode 5: Strategic Sales Development & Types of Sales Channels
In the past, it was much easier for sales professionals to use a single channel and focus on volume over conversation quality.
However, there are now multiple types of sales channels available to SDRs and buyers have evolved in how they expect to be influenced.
For sales development reps that rely on or avoid specific channels, this can cause challenges with performance and limit their ability to connect with buyers.
To maximize the success of your SDR team, reps need to be trained on how to leverage several channels and take a multi-threaded approach to sales development.
In this episode you will learn:
- The evolution of how sales channels are used together in sales development to build sales pipeline
- How to train SDRs to combine multiple types of sales channels
- Tips to remove call reluctance and empower sales development reps on the phone
- Example multi-channel sales development tactics used by SalesLoft to help generate more booked meetings
- Key performance metrics needed to improve your sales development program
- How to optimize your SDR team for success and improve outcomes
Episode 6: How to Use LinkedIn for Sales Development & Social Selling
Social selling is really taking off. More and more sales development teams are adopting social channels like LinkedIn to better engage with prospects.
It’s growing so fast that many managers are struggling to keep up with the latest best practices for interacting in social communities. This surge of activity and lack of accountability by many sellers has led to a lot of misuse on social channels.
Understanding how to use social networks like LinkedIn for sales development is key to connecting with modern buyers outside of direct sales channels. With the right process for social, your SDR team can maximize their reach and influence more buyers.
In this episode you will learn:
- Social selling best practices and common mistakes to avoid on social channels
- How to build credibility on social networks and become a resource for your target audience
- Key elements to successfully using LinkedIn for outbound sales and sales development
- Tips for leveraging social selling automation and marketing tools to generate more meetings
- Ways to effectively connect, warm up, and transition prospects from social channels to a sales conversation
- Who you can leverage for help when developing messaging on social
Episode 7: Conversational Marketing & Sales Automation with LiveChat + ChatBots
Chatbots and live chat are part of a new wave of sales automation. They are proven to help convert the traffic on your website into tangible leads and opportunities faster.
However, new channels come with new challenges for how SDRs can use it effectively.
How do you train reps to handle chat conversations vs traditional outbound channels? What’s the best chatbot to use? When should a live person take over for the chatbot?
These are just a few of the many questions about conversational development and marketing that are dominating the B2B sales world.
To maximize the outcomes of live chat, companies need to take a serious look at these questions and clearly understand how it fits into their sales development process.
In this episode you will learn:
- Why speed-to-conversation before competitors is critical for connecting with modern buyers
- The evolution of the conversational development & conversational marketing function using live chat + chatbots
- Key sales skills needed for SDRs to succeed in a conversational development role
- Best practices and effective tactics for using live chat and chatbots
- How to train your sales development team to use chat as an effective sales channel
- The balance between chat automation and human authenticity
- Ways to equip and support SDRs using live chat and chatbots
There are a lot of moving parts to consider when improving, revamping, or building a sales development team. Now that it’s harder than ever to stand out to buyers, the sales development function has become paramount for B2B sellers trying to drive growth.
Many organizations are tweaking tactics and making incremental changes in the right direction. However, this evolution in buyer behavior is quickly pushing companies to rethink the infrastructure behind how they hire, train, and manage SDR teams as a whole.
To better resonate with potential customers and generate more qualified leads for your pipeline, SDRs need a strong management team and an environment to support their success.