The Sales Development Playbook

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. MICHAEL E. PORTER (Location 228)

The value of a sales development effort is measured by increased won business per account executive and/or accelerated new customer acquisition. (Location 265)

The first team sets introductory meetings for the account executives. The second is tasked with finding prospects for the meeting setters to call. “I have a colleague who uses the term creative avoidance. Noodling on your data inside of CRM is a great way to avoid making calls, as is flipping through people on LinkedIn,” shared Ross. “That’s why we do a hard separation. The people making the calls don’t update the data. They’re not responsible for finding the next lead or finding a better contact.” The strategy is paying off: (Location 328)

listen? Crazy busy Curious Why care? Curious Interested Why change? Interested Active Why you? Active Committed to you Why now? Committed to you Committed to (Location 402)

BANT: budget, authority, need, and timing. (Location 568)

PACT: pain, authority, consequence, and target profile (Location 588)

Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else. JUDY GARLAND (Location 703)

One outbound SDR can typically target one hundred to two hundred accounts per month. This is cumulative, not net new. During the month, some accounts will be qualified and others disqualified, and the rest will remain in a working status. At this point, you might be wondering about setting quotas. Hold that thought, as we’ll cover quotas later on. (Location 983)

new reps learn most effectively when the approach involves chunking, sequencing, and connecting. Let me summarize what that means.   CHUNKING: It’s easier to learn a new subject in bite-sized chunks. When you overwhelm someone, information isn’t readily absorbed. You have to break the material down into smaller, easier-to-absorb blocks. For example, learning about all the different prospect personas involved in your sale can be overwhelming. Expose new reps to each persona—one at a time. Paint the picture for how they relate to each other and form the org chart.   SEQUENCING: Determining what comes first, in order of importance, is key to learning (think: logical building block). Decide what’s essential to learn now versus what can wait. It does little good for new reps to learn features and benefits before they learn about prospect pain and the implications of the status quo.   CONNECTING: This ties it all together. You’ve created a learning sequence built with bite-sized chunks of information. Now you need to connect the dots. Say your reps have just learned about prospect challenges and prospect personas. Now, help them link each prospect to the business drivers that resonate best with them. Then when you cover messaging, reps will understand the story behind the story. (Location 2605)