salesdevelopment Archives

Transforming Cold Calls: A Personal Experience and Two Key Tips for Successful Sales Pitching

I recently got a cold call from an SDR. What happened?

She asked if this was Grant, and I said it was.

She then immediately launched into a generic pitch about her product for over a minute. No personalization to me or my company, and it sounded like she was reading directly from her script.

I listened without interrupting. I know she has a tough job; I’ve done the job before and didn’t enjoy it.

It was clear me to that the product wouldn’t be a good fit for us now, so I told her I know she has a tough job and asked if she was open to feedback. She said she was, so I gave her two pieces of advice:
1. Make your pitch sound more natural so that it’s not obvious you’re reading from a script.
2. Personalize. Research me and my company before the call at least a bit so that you can tailor the pitch to make it more relevant to me.

What advice would give to this woman?

Inbound Lead Qualification: Best Practices, RACI Matrix, SDRs Reporting to Marketing

We recently moved inbound lead qualification from the Sales Development team to the Marketing team to create a more streamlined end-to-end process.

Here’s how we’ll continue to keep a close connection between Sales Development & Marketing.

We created a RACI matrix to define how to collaborate and delineate roles & responsibilities (kudos Lyndsey Lumpkin!).

We wanted to ensure:
– That the Inbound SDR will continue to have a peer group of people in a similar role
– There is a career path for them into Sales (or Marketing)
– They can benefit from the great training from Sales Development on soft skills, sales techniques, product training, etc.

Again, kudos to Lyndsey for creating this and for Caleb Norris and Nick Latz’s input on this and our overall plan.

We can foresee a future in which we route leads directly to AEs, but we’re not there yet.

What would you change or add to this matrix?
Does yours look similar?