When people envision the Business Development or Sales Development role, they may picture a room full of people on the phones trying to coerce unsuspecting prospects into buying something they do not need. Those days have long been over, but with each year the role is still evolving. Today, personalizing outreach has created tremendous success for Business development professionals. Personalizing outreach goes beyond making sure your templated emails are reaching the correct titles. It’s also about making sure you are able to explain to a prospect why you are reaching out to them in particular.
In the modern sales era, “the buyer” can basically research all the information needed about a product or service through a simple Google search. Because of this, the role of the SDR has changed. No longer is a sales development professional responsible for educating the masses on their products or service, but their role & mentality should be shifted to one that is similar to a “broker”. The SDR’s goal should be to match up the possible needs of the prospect to the solution your company offers. You may not know the inner workings of that company yet, but by personalizing your messaging & researching that specific company, you can get an idea of how your solution can help them.
Some may say that the vast amount of information that can be gathered by buyers has weakened the SDRs’ position overall. However, companies’ & individuals’ increased use of social media, blog posts, news articles, etc. have truly given the SDR an immense advantage. With the combined use of sales tools (SalesNav, ZoomInfo, LimeLeads, etc…) & this added information, SDRs can not only find the right POC, but they can do deeper research & find out why that person would benefit from a conversation with your organization.
Modern SDRs should keep in mind that just because you & your prospect went to the same college, for example, that doesn’t mean they should feel obligated to respond to your outreach. What you should be researching are reasons why this specific person would value learning more about what your team has to offer. Personalization & these ‘reasons why’ should be determined using the information you discover. For example, say your solution assists an organization’s HR function & you read an article stating that a target account just received a round of funding and are “planning to grow their team to 200 by the end of the year”. After reading this your messaging should be tailored to that specific company and you should highlight how you can assist them in hitting their goals.
This happened to me last week when I reached out to a tech company in the cybersecurity space. On paper, this company was an ideal prospect for demandDrive’s services since we build and manage sales development teams for tech companies. I found them the same way most SDRs find companies, I used LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Sales Nav allowed me to narrow my search & find companies that were comparable to some of demandDrive’s current clients. From there I found individual prospects with the correct titles and imported all of them into our CRM. So far, this is all very standard and not out of the ordinary for any SDR. However, this is where the personalization came into play.
At this point, I research the company itself. I reviewed blogs, news articles, & social media posts. It was there where I came across an article that stated that this company was looking to expand its sales team drastically. That piece of information was crucial & is extremely useful when explaining my reasoning for why a conversation with demandDrive would be beneficial. After researching the company, I began to research my prospect’s LinkedIn pages. I found a post from their VP of Marketing saying they were hiring for SDRs, obviously another major trigger event for us. From here, I crafted a personalized email that explained that the news article & her social media post led me to think it made sense for me to reach out to them. The outreach resulted in a meeting booked!
By reviewing these outlets, an SDR can easily craft a personalized message to that person. If you have a solid purpose behind your outreach & can explain your reason for reaching out to that person, in particular, you will see a world of difference. People will start thanking you for reaching opposed to not giving you the time of day!