If your GTM model involves business development reps (BDRs) or lead development reps (LDRs), then you've done the math and effectively balanced lead generation with customer engagement. You are insourcing for efficiency, and thus following a best practice. To optimize your team for productivity, further alignment is needed. Here's how you know your BDRs and sales teams are misaligned:
- They debate what a “good” conversion rate is (i.e., marketing or sales qualified leads, closed and won rates).
- High turnover of BDRs/LDRs (i.e., less than 12 months).
- High no-show rates for first appointments.
- Poor results, including consistent missed targets.
Any of these issues signals a need for leadership. Here is how you address it:
- Develop ideal customer profiles (ICPs). If your BDRs and sales teams cannot clearly explain what a great customer looks like and why they are ideal, you have work to do. ICPs should be universally understood, thoroughly documented, and effectively taught well in advance of initiating any contracts, or sending an email or making a phone call. Begin by defining why a customer is ideal for your business. It could be their industry, their likelihood to spend with you, how well your products or services align with their needs, size, or internal organizational structure. The lack of clearly understood ICPs will result in poor conversion rates. To quickly assess this for your organization, review a list of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and determine if titles, industries, and potential deal sizes have consistency. If they are all over the board, you may want to dig deeper.
- Personify your buyers. BDRs are often filled by someone looking for an entry-level role in the sales organization. Typically, these individuals are younger and may lack experience with the types of people they are selling to. They need to understand how prospects think, act, and feel. Beyond that, they need to know when the prospect buys, why they buy, what they buy, and how they buy. If your list of personas is 80% pictures and graphics, you should question whether the profile is robust enough to be of value. Personification requires interviews that fall within (and outside of) your ICPs. It requires win/loss interviews and a good deal of research including touchpoint analysis, customer satisfaction surveys, and observing real sales calls with a critical eye.
- Ensure sales processes include measurable exit criteria between stages. Sales processes should have clear, measurable criteria for progressing leads between stages. To move an MQL to an SQL status in your CRM requires the establishment of Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. Top-tier B2B companies not only meet these basic qualifications but also incorporate grading, scoring, and source information to enrich the lead with further viability details Whatever your standard, there can be no such thing as “bad leads" — only leads that do not conform to a stringent set of requirements before being moved forward. Establish these requirements and ensure consistent enforcement as a management responsibility.
- Create daily scrums, communication, and collaboration. It's hard to meet a BDR that wants to make a career out of being a BDR. They are as interested in advancement as they are in making commissions. If there are no interactions, their morale and productivity will decline in downward spiral of dissatisfaction and discontent. Beyond that, alignment can only happen with frequent interaction at an account and contact level. Assess if your team has the necessary tools and permissions for effective communication beyond just IM and email — for example, do they know each other’s pipelines, opportunities, and issues?
- Institute team goals and recognition. Employers that pay BDR commissions by reducing that of their sellers create a zero-sum game. Combine this with an aggressive selling team, which you should strive to have, and it becomes the perfect recipe for an “us vs. them" mindset. If you must, reduce all commissions to pay for this new team, but avoid deal-specific commission cuts. Formal and informal peer-to-peer recognition is the least expensive and potentially the most powerful way to align BDRs. When the great things that teammates do for one another are celebrated publicly, it fuels the desire to do a good job.
- Employ joint sales calls. BDRs can learn considerably as they observe leads progressing through the sales process. Involving both the salesperson and BDR on the first customer call offers a learning opportunity and helps avoid miscommunication with the prospect. The first few minutes of the call should be handled by the BDR who reconfirms expectations and lines up the value of having an expert take over and answer the prospect’s questions.
Consider these six activities as a start, and understand that they represent the minimum level of effort you owe to your own future. There is always room to improve the effectiveness of your BDR team by aligning them to your selling teams (and to the broader organization). When managed correctly this team will fill future openings faster, ramp faster to quota than outside hires, demonstrate greater loyalty, and serve as role models to their own replacements. Defining an ICP can be difficult if it is based on opinions alone. SBI's ICP Evaluation Tool will support your efforts, by gauging whether your team's perspective aligns with yours regarding your ICP and the reasons for targeting them.
Download resource