Customer post: simplicity is the secret to sales excellence

Guest post by Tom Cochrane, Business Development & Software Sales Professional at Crowdstrike

Our SDR organization is on a mission to create SQLs for our account executives to drive revenue and create opportunities. There is a 4 step sales workflow process that gets us to revenue.

The Four Step Sales Workflow That Gets Results

1. Sourcing leads/contacts → Answering the question: “Who should I reach out to?”

2. Hunting for the right point of contact over the phone  → Answering the question: “What should I say to vet, qualify, and build rapport with the prospect?”

3. What do I write (via email) → Answering the question: “How can I add value to their role and responsibilities while addressing their key pain points?”

4. Qualify or Disqualify → Answering the question: “How can I get next steps that makes sense given the discussion we had for that persona and their specific environment and timeline? Did we address and fully understand all of their requirements/specifications?”

How Improving Our Sales Engagement Processes Helped us Achieve Sales Excellence

We saw a huge part of our SDR's time being used to create persona-based messaging and everyone had their own version of the messaging.

Using Outreach, we were able to automate a significant portion of our email activities, and focus on connecting with prospects over the phone.

Our first decision towards sales automation was creating a “Master Sequence” that allows our SDRs to upload a list of random prospects to Outreach and have them auto assign to a specific persona, based off of the person's title. This allowed us to deliver tailored messaging based off of their job, pain points, and how we can add value. Creating a Master Sequence also allows us to unify our message and go to market in a clear, succinct manner.

This was done to unify our messaging across the organization (making marketing happy), but more importantly this allows us to increase our level of output on the phones.

In the first week after implementing Outreach our entire organization achieved a 16% lift in call volume.

As our SDR organization continues to grow in headcount, and as our ability to target messages at scale is honed, we plan to achieve simplicity through optimizing our outbound and inbound sales development efforts.

Planning ahead to scale the org, increase sales productivity, and reduce ramp time

More importantly, we need our SDRs planning their months (yes, this is plural). Even though SDRs are paid and often judged on a monthly basis, not having a focus on the future will hurt one’s ability to be consistent and causes burnout. By minimizing the variables that SDRs have to input we can better scale the organization, reduce ramp time, and address fewer areas they may be struggling with.

Consistent results are key for a SaaS business and the SDR business unit is the tip of the spear. They are on the front lines, creating critical pipeline for the company.  As individuals advance in their career, they grow into different functions such as: a hunter (i.e. net new sales rep), a farmer (i.e. renewals, upsell, and cross sell), or a manager. Regardless of the path one chooses, consistent delivery is key. It is important as a company to give individuals the tools and resources early on in their career to be able to achieve this.

Keeping the long game in mind is an important perspective one must continue to have while riding the sales roller coaster. Seeking to be even keel during the highs and the lows will allow continued focus on execution and keep the emotions out of it.