Uncomplicate – How to hire Sales Development Representatives (SDR)
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
It is no secret that the world of sales is rapidly changing. It is no longer good enough to just cold call and pray that the person on the other end finds your product useful. A lot of research goes into finding the right audience for your product and this is where a Sales Development Rep (SDR) comes into play.
With SDRs becoming crucial for any product’s success, how exactly do you hire one? What qualities should you look for? Heather R Morgan, chief executive officer, SalesFolk, has some suggestions.
Before we get there, who are SDRs?
The SDR team is responsible for moving leads through the pipeline. They are usually given leads by the marketing team and then they get to task by sending emails or calling prospects to gauge their problems. This way they can qualify the leads and help the sales team meet their targets by giving them the right set of people to target for a particular product. Thanks to SDRs, the sales folks need not do the prospecting any more. They can directly jump in and do the actual selling to an already qualified prospect.
Tip 1:
“One of the things that is important not just for SDRs but for anyone you hire is— good written communication skills. Everything is becoming online (be it) phone calls or webinars,” said Heather. Thus good writing skills will help you reach out to prospects and keep them engaged with your content.
With the modern workforce becoming increasingly remote and distributed, good communication skills will bring your colleagues closer too.
Heather has specific multi-step writing tests for potential sales hires. This test involves writing an email to a sales prospect and also a prospecting and qualifying exercise, wherein the candidate must decide if the lead is qualified for a sale or not, among other things.
Tip 2 and 3:
If good communication is an important skill, the two other skills you need to test for are empathy and resourcefulness.
“Make sure they have empathy and are also resourceful. They need to be thorough and not stop until they find the right information. This does not mean being obnoxious, you just need to be persistent in sales,” said Heather.
(This post was co-produced by Praveen Ramesh.)
