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Sales development representative

Learn the importance, tactics, and skills to be a successful SDR

A sales development representative (SDR) is a sales professional who focuses on generating new business opportunities for their organization. Their primary responsibility is to research and prospect potential clients, qualify leads, and set up appointments for the sales team. SDRs typically work in conjunction with marketing and sales teams to increase revenue by generating a pipeline of qualified prospects. They often use various outreach methods such as cold calling, email campaigns, and social media outreach to reach out to potential customers.

What is a Sales Development Representative?

A Sales Development Representative (SDR) is someone who focuses on prospecting, qualifying, and moving prospects through the sales process. 

 

They work in tandem with account executives (AE), who manage the relationships with existing customers as well as close prospects that are delivered by sales development reps.

 

While the specific tasks differ from company to company, the mission of an SDR is to bridge the gap between finding qualified leads for the AE and providing them with everything they need to successfully close their deals.

 

Some organizations also fracture the sales development representative role into discrete functions based on market or channel. Some examples of titles include:

 

  • Enterprise sales development representative
  • SMB sales development representative
  • Inbound sales development representative
  • Outbound sales development representative
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What Do Sales Development Representatives Do?

The core job of an SDR is to drive qualified leads and move them through the sales pipeline. 

 

To do this, their duties can be broken down into four main areas: prospecting, outreach, qualification, and nurturing relationships.

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Sales Prospecting

Sales prospecting involves identifying potential customers through various sources such as social media, inbound leads, or industry events.

 

This is the defining role of a sales development representative. In most organizations, SDRs source and engage with every lead before involving an account executive. 

 

The SDR's primary goal is to create a pipeline of potential customers that the sales team can work with to close deals.

 

Prospecting involves research as well as identifying key decision makers and contacts within an account:

 

  • Researching: This can involve researching companies, industries, and individuals to determine their potential interest in the products or services being offered.

 

  • Identifying Decision Makers: Identifying the decision-makers within those companies who are responsible for purchasing the products or services.

 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps sales professionals research companies, stay up to date on company news, and identify individual decision makers and buying committees within companies.

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Outreach

Outreach involves contacting these leads via phone, email, social media, or in person to build relationships and qualify them as viable prospects for further contact from AEs or closers. 

 

The outreach process often involves message templates and sales sequences. Sales sequences are repeatable playbooks of a series of messages sent to leads to determine their fit and interest in booking a meeting. 

 

To improve outreach response rates, target the right person and tailor the message to their pain points and motivations. This requires research, but it will stand out among the massive amounts of outreach emails most people get. There are many tools to help with outreach, including LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

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Qualification

Qualification is an important step where SDRs determine the "fit" of a lead. How qualified a lead is depends on an organization’s lead scoring criteria. 

 

Organizations often develop an “ideal customer profile” that includes details like company size, company revenue, job title, and pain points. Qualification also involves determining the interest level of a prospect as well as their budget and purchasing power.

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Nurturing

Nurturing relationships involves maintaining ongoing contact with qualified prospects to keep them engaged until they become ready to buy.  

 

The nurturing process is often automated and based on segmentation. For instance, if a lead is a good fit but not interested, they may be enrolled in a sales sequence that reminds the SDR to follow up in a few weeks or months to re-engage the prospect. 

 

Sales development reps are also tasked with assigning qualified leads to account executives and account representatives at the appropriate time. For sales organizations, this is often represented by the success metric, "leads assigned to sales reps.”

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Why Are SDRs Important?

As the front line of the sales process, SDRs interact with every lead, eliminate unqualified contacts, and nurture potential customers to enhance the probability of successful sales.

 

Companies often hire their first sales development representative after a sales plan has been built and has shown some level of success. SDRs can optimize and scale the existing process to generate more revenue.

 

Sales development representatives help account executives focus more of their efforts on closing deals, which is a separate skill than sourcing deals. The combination of the two roles creates an efficient sales machine.

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6 Common SDR Tactics to Book Sales Meetings

Sales development representatives often use a variety of tactics to book sales meetings with prospects, some established and tried-and-true and others experimental. Here are six of the most common tactics used by SDRs:

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1. Cold Calling

Cold calling is a tried-and-true method that still works for many organizations. It allows sales reps to quickly establish contact and qualify potential leads. That said, it’s a hard tactic to pull off in many industries because if done poorly, it can be disruptive and can bother prospective customers. Effective cold calling comes down to preparation, timing and qualification, having a great script, and the right sales attitude.

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2. Deep sales

Deep sales is a relationship-driven approach to selling that emphasizes upfront research and leverages actionable insights, allowing organizations and their sellers to shift their performance curve and drive more revenue. This approach is commonly known as social selling or modern selling which leverages social media platforms such as LinkedIn to reach out to prospects to start sales conversations and nurture relationships. This can be done by connecting with decision-makers, engaging in conversations, and sharing relevant content.

 

Modern SDRs often build audiences on platforms like LinkedIn to build trust and relationships with potential buyers. It’s a blending of inbound marketing and sales outreach.

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3. Email Prospecting

Sending emails is one of the most common sales prospecting tactics. It allows sales reps to quickly reach out to a large number of prospects at once while still maintaining a personal touch. 

 

Several email outreach tools exist today to help sales development representatives balance automation with personalization.

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4. Events and Webinars

Whether hosting events and webinars or participating as a guest at others’ events, virtual events are one of the most effective lead generation strategies used today. 

 

When done well and consistently, they allow teams to build trust and relationships with audiences who have a particular pain point.

 

Modern sales organizations are exploring hybrid events as well, with an in-person component simultaneously streamed online and then later used as on-demand content.

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5. Referrals

Despite being less predictable as a lead generation source, referrals are still one of the strongest ways to generate qualified leads. Referrals come in “warm,” since the referrer is explicitly vouching for the company’s product or services. 

 

While many organizations simply let referrals happen when they happen naturally, smart sales organizations employ sales development representatives to proactively ask for referrals from top customers. These leads are often highly likely to convert to meetings and deals.

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6. LinkedIn InMail

LinkedIn InMail is not a tactic, but rather a platform where sales development representatives can more efficiently target prospects with messages.

 

SDRs use LinkedIn InMail to invite prospects to webinars and events, ask for referrals, work with partners on collaborative deals, and to identify and contact target prospects directly.

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Where do SDRs sit in the org chart?

Sales development representatives typically sit within the sales organization, and often report directly to sales managers or sales directors. 

 

They work closely with team members such as account executives and account representatives to help advance qualified leads into sales conversations.  A sales development rep needs to collaborate effectively with other sales team members to ensure sales processes are followed and sales goals are met.

 

However, in some companies, SDRs sit underneath a cross-functional growth team or even on the marketing team. This is because they are often employing high-velocity tactics that can be approached using experimentation and can often benefit from collaboration with performance marketing efforts. 

 

SDRs often work closely with marketing for inbound lead generation and qualification, so even if they’re not sitting on the same team, there will likely be a large amount of collaboration.

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How Sales Development is Used in B2B

The sales development representative role is more common in B2B companies than in B2C companies. 

 

B2B brands often have long sales cycles, complex deals, and thus, they need to generate not only a large amount of leads, but qualify them to ensure account executives aren’t wasting their time with bad fit leads. 

 

A key factor in B2B is in qualification. While B2C brands can use sales development to generate tons of leads, they often have an easier time at closing deals since the price point tends to be lower and the purchase process simpler.

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SDR vs BDR

Sales Development Representatives and Business Development Representatives form the prospecting engine of a sales team.

 

While both focus on sourcing and qualifying leads, the SDR focuses more on inbound sales activities like responding to inquiries, follow-up calls, product demos, etc.

 

BDRs may do some of these activities but tend to focus on outbound sales processes like cold calling, sales automation, and sales campaigns. 

 

In many industries, BDRs are focused on “outside sales,” going to events or workplaces to work leads. While not always the case, sales development representatives are usually part of the “inside sales” team, working leads from their phone or laptop.

Sales Development Representative vs Account Executive Responsibilities

While SDRs are responsible for identifying prospects, initiating contact, and qualifying leads for further sales activities, AEs manage relationships with existing customers and close sales with new prospects.  

 

By the time a prospect reaches an AE, they should be well-qualified and highly likely to close.

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Skills Needed to Succeed as a Sales Development Representative

Since sales development representative roles tend to be entry-level, candidates may not have direct sales experience yet. Still, it’s important to index on the following traits that predict success in this role:

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Persistence

Because sales development representatives work with such a high volume of leads, there will be many bad leads and disappointment. They need determination, skill, and creativity to push through and get the right leads to the right sales reps to hit sales goals.

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Outreach

In sales development, there are two types of research important to the role: market research and prospect research.

 

Market research is the broader process of identifying, defining, and refining a target audience and buying group. It’s not only determining the right accounts to go after, but the right people within those accounts. This also involves competitive research, allowing you to identify customer pain points and how your solution solves them as well as differentiates from market alternatives. 

 

Prospect research is all about learning about a specific account or person. At the most basic level, sales development representatives should be able to determine who is the decision maker or buying committee and find their contact information.
 

To go a step further, the more they learn about each person within the account, the likelier it is that the SDR will get a favorable response. This information could include background education and experience, interests and hobbies, or anything else that can help make the conversation warmer in the early stages.

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Product and industry knowledge

While product and industry knowledge should be a core part of a sales training plan, sales development representatives benefit from having a solid understanding of the market they’ll be operating within. If they don’t already have this knowledge, they should be able to show efforts towards learning about the space and that they can pick up this information quickly. 

 

This demonstrates persistence, research capabilities, and preparation – all important traits in an SDR.

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Organization and time management

Great SDRs tend to have personal productivity systems by which they operate. Some break down their tasks into time blocks on their calendar. Some have specific days or times for prospecting versus qualification. 


Great SDRs also leverage tools and technology. Instead of manually researching and reviewing every prospect, they can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, for instance. They become amazing at using CRMs to log touchpoints with prospects. They leverage automation without reducing effectiveness in their outreach.

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Conversational and listening skills

Sales development representatives need to be great communicators. 

 

The key skill is listening. If they’re an active listener and can truly empathize with the prospect, this will go a long way sending the lead down the funnel. 

 

Of course, they also need to be able to speak, write, or converse. Depending on the channels you use, it could be beneficial to index more highly on one of these than the others. 

 

For example, if most prospecting and outreach is done via email, it’s obviously important that the SDR can write persuasively. 

 

However, if webinars, events, and social video is the key focus of the organization, speaking on camera will be an important skill. 
These skills should form the basis of your job description when hiring a sales development representative.

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Why sales teams need SDRs

When it comes to prospecting, outreach, qualification, and relationship-building activities, sales development representatives are essential to any sales team. 

 

This role can help organizations scale their efforts once they’ve already established a functional sales plan and process. SDRs also lead to greater efficiency, as they help AEs focus on closing high value and well-qualified accounts.

Arm SDRs with better technology

The role of the sales development representative is challenging and multi-faceted, but LinkedIn can help. 

 

With Sales Navigator, sales development reps can leverage advanced search filters, lead recommendations, and insights, allowing them to identify and target potential prospects more efficiently.

 

Advanced Lead and Account Insights gives SDRs the ability to collect information about leads and accounts, such as company news, job changes, and shared connections, enabling them to personalize their outreach and build meaningful relationships.

 

InMail messages allow sales development reps to reach the right prospect at the right time, with customized messaging that drives sales opportunities. Request a free demo or try a free trial today.

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