Congratulations! Hiring your first Sales Development Representative (SDR) is a major milestone. But how do you ensure that you’re providing effective onboarding, adequate training, and the right mix of incentives?
In this blog, you’ll find training and support tips to accelerate ramp-up and reduce burnout. That way, your first SDR can hit the ground running and help fuel your company’s next phase of growth.
The most successful SDRs all share certain traits:
Initiative
Drive
Resilience
Competitiveness
Curiosity
Of course, thriving as the first SDR in an organization requires all of these in full measure.
But this role also demands an enormous capacity for learning, adapting, and experimenting to develop a repeatable sales process that future members of the team can follow.
The key to a successful SDR onboarding? Provide the most acute level of support by reinforcing those behaviors.
Here are three things your team can do:
1. Impart the Mission
To get SDR onboarded right, focus on providing incremental knowledge transfer through a thoughtfully structured learning program.
At the most basic level, it should be designed to provide your new SDR with a clear understanding of their role, responsibilities, and expectations for performance. Hands-on, tactical training is essential.
But the first, most important thing you need to impart is an introduction to the company’s culture, mission, and values. Emphasize the company’s founding story, its philosophy of serving customers, and ultimately, its unique purpose in the marketplace.
The first seller on your team, and all those who follow, will draw from those narrative elements countless times as they engage prospects. Making that story compelling and ensuring that it gets incorporated into your sales process is critically important.
With a grounding in the company’s purpose and differentiators, you can start to layer in training on technologies, sales process, marketing alignment, quotas, and more.
2. Provide Hands-On Training
Experiential learning is the cornerstone of effective SDR onboarding. This component of your onboarding regimen should cover areas like: exploring product use cases, practicing pitches and scripts, talking to existing customers, and setting up records in the customer relationship management (CRM) system.
There is a significant amount of ground to cover, so it can be helpful to categorize training into higher-level skill areas.
Here are some core elements to consider.
Product and service use-cases: What set of problems are your customers trying to solve when they seek out your company? It sounds basic, but you need to get your first seller to deep dive into this question and frame the answers in their own words. Then, they can start to connect product features, benefits, and competitive positioning to a sophisticated understanding of customer needs, instead of just memorizing talking points.
Enablement tools: Empower SDRs with the sales techniques that have yielded the most success. This includes cold calling tips, email outreach cadences, and effective use of sales scripts. Role-playing exercises can help SDRs gain valuable feedback and practice skills like objection handling in a friendly environment.
Technology training: Successful sales leaders balance creativity and operational excellence. The art of engaging prospects and building rapport is essential to closing deals. But you also need to firmly set expectations for contact data management, forecasting, pipeline development, and much more. Make sure to provide practical training on account-based marketing tools, lead follow-up workflows, and expectations for managing daily tasks in your CRM system.
3. Set Performance Goals with Metrics
Establishing clear goals and performance targets is crucial for sales success.
This includes revenue metrics, such as quarterly sales quotas. But it also includes metrics for daily sales activities, including outbound calls, emails sent, and meetings or demos scheduled.
In tandem with setting and relaying these expectations, you should also clearly communicate incentives tied to meeting or exceeding these performance goals. Keep lines of communication open and establish a regular cadence for evaluating progress and providing constructive feedback.
Looking for more tips on setting up or scaling your sales organization? Let us know. We’d love to help.
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