What do you need to develop your sales successfully?

The answer is surprisingly simple: a successful Sales Development team is pretty much the only thing that can deliver optimised outbound sales campaigns.

So, what would such a team look like?

Establishing a Successful Sales Development team is definitely not just a case of hiring a clutch of talented sales people – but, similarly, you’ll go nowhere without them!

Effective campaigns rely on a much wider range of skills than the ability to sell. And a wide range of skills usually calls on a wider pool of talent.

To ensure consistent sales, the more time and attention your sales people can give each qualified lead, the more likely you are to see a higher conversion rate.

But this must be built on a bedrock of a pipeline that is consistently full of high-quality leads.

It is not advisable to multi-task roles within your sales team.

It just distracts from what they do best and prevents others, who are more qualified for such tasks, to deliver them more effectively.

Here are the four corners of an optimised sales development team.

Copywriters

Compelling, clean and easy-to-grasp written content will greatly increase your chances of clinching a sale.

But don’t stop there: your copywriter is undoubtedly in a much better position to craft sales emails than your sales team.

Audience attention spans are dropping, and they are dropping fast.

In 2000, on average, B2B web users navigated away from what they were reading after a very brief 12 seconds. But, today that figure has plummeted to just eight seconds.

And if we look at attention spans on social media you are looking at just 2.5 seconds.

Grabbing your audience’s attention and keeping their engagement is very much something that your copywriter is trained to do – to expect your sales people to suddenly turn their hands to this makes no sense at all.

Campaign strategists

As prospecting campaigns become increasingly multichannel, the small matter of cadence comes to the forefront.

Cadence is the ability detect exactly when and how leads are most likely to grant you a positive response. A campaign strategist will not only do this for you but also help you create the perfect conditions for encouraging such responses.

To put it technically, campaign strategists are masters of using processes and techniques to create outbound cadence. They understand how many touch points a particular campaign should adopt and, crucially, what touch points these should be – LinkedIn, email, phone, direct mail, paid search and/or video.

By having a dedicated function that is designing your multichannel campaigns, your sales team can once again concentrate on what they do best – sell.

Data researcher

Data is everywhere. It is the oil that lubricates prospecting.

Providing a helping hand with targeting, deciphering and curating data is critical in maintaining your pipeline.

Data researchers are able to cut through the noise, merge data sources and deliver a steady pipeline of accurate, relevant data, based on your ideal customer profile.

And, by channelling data through this customer filter, data researchers can support your strategist in determining which channels to use to target each type of lead.

Sales development representatives

Every lead should be qualified before being finally given over to your sales team. This is what your sales development representatives (SDRs) will do.

They will not close deals, but they will ensure that more deals get closed by vetting and checking that each lead that progresses is a good fit for a customer.
Standing on the shoulders of giants

Isaac Newton once observed that all his achievements were made possible by ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’.

Your sales development team are the giants that support every sale that is made.

And a stronger, better optimised team will help you sell more.

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