Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) execute B2B omnichannel outreach campaigns to generate leads. They are searching for potential customers, finding their contact information, writing emails, sending LinkedIn connection invites, cold calling, and sending SMS messages.
(1) The SDR creates a list of relevant people.
(2) The SDR sends digital communication to scan the market for interested people. This is typically done using non-voice omnichannel communication methods such as cold email and LinkedIn.
(3) The SDR engages interested people in a personal dialog, trying to get them into a call using voice and non-voice omnichannel communication methods.
Traditional sales development is a very inefficient process. SDRs manually create their list of contacts to reach, which takes about 50% of their time. They manually configure their campaigns, taking 30% of their time. Only 20% of their remaining time, SDRs talk to potential customers, engage in email or text conversations, and leverage their sales skills to make a valuable contribution.
The salespeople are supposed to be good at talking to customers. They are not necessarily good at compiling a database or configuring campaigns. Building a list of contacts requires experience in market research and working with large datasets, which is not necessarily an excellent skills match for a typical salesperson. Configuring outreach campaigns is a tedious operational activity, not to mention the time it takes to analyze campaign reporting and the results.
What would it take to automate these processes so that SDRs could spend most of their time talking to potential customers? It turns out it is possible! Automating this process will not just increase efficiency but also make these campaigns more thoughtful and more effective.
The automated sales development process has three main phases: Market Intelligence and Omnichannel Outreach.
Market Intelligence involves building a Contact Database of potential customers and gathering Market Signals. Contact Databases are composed of companies, people, and their contact details. Market Signals compiles information about the company growth rate, whether the company is hiring for specific roles, who are the people liking and commenting on social media posts of industry influencers, etc.
Omnichannel outreach includes advertising, cold email, cold calling, LinkedIn invites, and SMS texting. Steps 3, 4, and 5 can be automated and only step 6 will be done by a person.
Business intelligence includes Engagement Monitoring and Conversion Analysis.
Engagement monitoring includes collecting information about contacts engaging with the provided content. For email campaigns, for example, it includes how many emails were opened and how many clicks on hyperlinks in these emails were done.
Conversion analysis tracks the conversion of leads into MQLs, SQLs, clients, new revenue, and profits. These data would be collected for leads from different campaigns, targeting various audiences. This analysis throws light on which market segments are converting into customers better. This gives visibility into campaign performance to quickly reallocate budgets to the best-performing campaigns.
The automated omnichannel outreach does 80% of the work previously done by people. This is a huge time and effort saving. The SDR can do 5 times more in their time, while the automated outreach has only the tiny software cost.
Business intelligences provides valuable information to quickly make decisions on which campaigns are performing and which not, leading to a higher return on marketing investment.
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