How Do You Coach SDRs ?

As a sales manager, a big part of your job is coaching new sales development representatives (SDRs).

Sales development teams help bridge the gap between sales and marketing. They receive the marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and engage with contacts to assess if they are qualified and have a purchase intent.

The process of engaging with a prospect, qualifying them for the sales reps, and discovering if they have purchase intent and budget is critical for the success of any SDR. You, as a manager, need to have multiple tactics to coach your team to call for success.

Goals and Expectations

The goal of training your SDRs is to have them excel in their roles. But if you leave them in the dark about what is expected of them, they will have a rather hard time achieving their goals.

Some KPIs you need to define include:

• How many calls are you expecting them to make every day?
• How many leads should they find on a daily/weekly basis?
• What is their quota for the number of follow-up calls/meetings arranged?
• How many of the leads they passed to sales reps were closed-won?

Library of Resources

Knowledge sharing is key to success. You should always create educational materials for your new hires.

• Sales/SDR playbook - This should include the best practices for CRM maintenance, prospecting, objection handling, and using sales development tools.
• Sales and industry articles - Provide your SDRs with blogs, influencers, and trend sources to keep them on top of their game. Focusing on new trends and technologies, email and cold calling, and social selling will be of great help.
• Scripts - To prepare your new SDRs for the real deal, give them the scripts they can use for live calls, voicemail, email, and cold calls.
• Competition overview - Business is a battle, so knowing as much as possible about your competitors will be helpful.
• Company updates - Make sure you give them timely heads up about everything that can affect the whole SDR process. This includes product updates, product training slides, and so on.

Practice

As you cannot become a great swimmer by just reading the manual, SDRs need to practice and acquire the skills required to succeed. Make sure you set aside some time to work with them on the skills they will need to follow. That will significantly increase their efficiency.

For instance, you can:

• Work with them on handling rejections.
• Help them draft email drip templates.
• Share with them some effective prospecting practices.

You can leverage modern technologies that transcribe the SDR call in real-time and compare the text to your sales playbook. Like the one provided by Sellerz.io, such technologies can calculate a score based on what has been said or not, based on a playbook you defined. Such technologies can ensure the SDR is following your process and playbooks and show them the correct way to qualify a lead.