2017 Sales Teams: the New Normal

SDR, LDR and BDR… what is the difference?

Sales, Lead and Business Development reps in a SaaS sales context…. are these just different words for the same role?

Times have changed and so has sales. As a business leader in today’s competitive landscape, your team can’t afford to fall behind. So what’s going to really set your organization apart? Your modern sales team, of course. But what does it look like?  From my experience as a recruiter who builds technology sales teams of every level, I can tell you that the single most important thing you can do to improve your sales and lead generation results is to specialize your sales roles into the following:

• Prospectors
• Inbound Lead Qualifiers
• Closing
• Account Management / Customer Success

Think you’re ‘too small’ to specialize? All you need is two people (and sometimes just one) to begin. In fact, specializing can be easier for early stage companies who are more agile; and more challenging if you already have a team of generalized reps who mix lead gen work with closing.  

If you are a company that still has its salespeople prospect, close, respond to leads and manage customers – you will see incredible productivity, morale and reporting benefits from dividing up the sales team into at least four specialized functions:

1. “Inbound” Lead Qualification: Commonly called Market Response Reps and some companies call them Sales Development Reps. They qualify marketing leads coming inbound through the website or 800 number. The sources of these leads are either marketing programs, search engine marketing, or organic word-of-mouth.
2. “Outbound” Prospecting / Cold Calling 2.0: Commonly called Sales Development Reps or Business Development Reps, this function prospects into lists of target accounts to develop new sales opportunities from cold or inactive accounts. This is a team dedicated to proactive business development. Highly efficient Outbound reps and teams do NOT close deals, but create & qualify new sales opportunities and then pass them to Account Executives to close
3. “Account Executives” or “Sales”, are quota-carrying reps who close deals. They can be either inside or out in the field. As a best practice, even when a company has an Account Management/Customer Success function, Account Executives should stay in touch with new customers they close past the close until the new customer is deployed and launched.
4. Account Management / Customer Success: Client deployment and success, ongoing client management, and renewals. In today’s world of “frictionless karma,” someone needs to be dedicated to making customers successful–and that is NOT the salesperson!  “Account Management” usually implies a quota-carrying salesperson working with current customers.  “Customer Success” implies someone without a quota (that is, unbiased) whose job is solely to help customers get more value from your product, whether through hands-on help, education and training, etc.

If you want sales growth to be your ‘normal’ in 2017 and every subsequent year, take a close look at your current team setup and get these specialized roles into place.

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