Work with inside sales to qualify your leads

- [Instructor] Marketing outbound lead generation should be combined with inside sales in order to qualify your incoming leads. The best lead generation programs work hand in hand with an inside sales team to qualify inbound leads and supplement those leads with sales outbound efforts. An inside sales or a sales development team is a group of in-house sales reps that focus on both following up with marketing leads and generating their own leads through outbound sales efforts. You can think about your SDR team as really an extension of marketing.

There's three different types of SDRs that you should think through and whichever one you have is very much dependent on your organization, the size of your organization, as well as your goals. So the first you have inbound SDRs. So the inbound SDRs are sales development reps that focus on following up with qualified marketing leads. And so these reps do not have a quota for any type of outbound calling, they merely follow up with leads incoming from marketing. Now this works very well if you have an incredibly high marketing volume.

If you don't have as high of a volume you have to go with the second or third SDR version. So number two, outbound SDRs. So these are sales development reps that generate their own leads through outbound multichannel prospecting. And an outbound SDR-only team is great if you don't have a big marketing team, if you're just starting out, and if you need to develop that pipeline. So many organizations will have a hybrid SDR model. So these are sales development reps that have both an inbound and an outbound follow-up quota.

So this could be set up a few different ways. You might have SDRs that are in charge of inbound and outbound, or you might have an inbound SDR team and an outbound SDR team. So very much depending on the type of lead flow you have and your goals will be dependent on whether you do have kind of these teams split, or whether you have one SDR that's handling both inbound and outbound. So how do SDRs differ from traditional sales reps? It's quite simple, SDRs will qualify leads and warm them up, so a sales team can focus on what they do best, close deals.

So if you do have an inside sales or SDR team generally they are goaled on setting up appointments, setting up meetings, so your SDRs will generate leads, they'll qualify marketing leads, and they'll set up meetings for your account executives, your traditional sales reps. And so your sales reps will have those meetings and focus on closing deals. So essentially your SDR teams are kind of like the farm team for your sales reps, they are getting pipeline ready for the sales reps to close.

So how do SDRs get leads? What are the different ways from an inbound and an outbound perspective that they generate leads? So from inbound there's a couple of different things, again, depending on your organization size and what your goals are, there's a couple of different ways that you can think about inbound SDRs. So for a very small organization that doesn't have a lot of incoming leads, doesn't have a lot of pipeline, has a smaller marketing team, you might send all incoming leads to the SDRs.

So this means that everything coming through your website and your programs will all get routed to the SDRs. This is certainly not my preferred way, because I do feel that it is nice to give the SDRs more qualified leads, however if your lead volume is very low you might want to send kind of everything to your SDRs and then go from there. So the second way is through leads that are marketing qualified and these leads get routed to SDRs. So if an incoming lead hits a specific score threshold that indicates that they are marketing qualified, either because of some behavior that they've done, or because they fit the account profile, those leads get routed to SDRs.

And so these are the two different ways that you can think about giving incoming leads to your SDRs. So what about outbound? So there's a couple of different ways that SDRs can handle kind of their outbounding. So the first is that your SDRs are assigned target accounts for their outreach. So if you have a very strong target account approach you might split your target accounts up amongst your SDRs, especially if these target accounts are quite large and you have multiple different divisions or departments your SDRs will be focusing on building those accounts out and reaching out to the different roles within those target accounts.

So the second way that SDRs can outbound is through doing their own research and selecting their own accounts for outreach. So this might be in connection with an AE, so often SDRs are paired up directly with an account executive, this could be also based on territory, whichever way you slice it the SDR himself is responsible for researching and selecting their own accounts for outreach. So either you are assigning accounts to your SDRs or your SDRs are doing their own research within certain parameters.

So just a quick reminder here on the marketing to sales development handoff process, because this is incredibly important. You need to make sure that your marketing and your sales team are very, very well aligned, particular when it comes to your SDRs. Do think of your SDRs as an extension of your marketing team. And you want to make sure they are appropriately qualifying all of these leads that you're generating through all of these programs. So step one, an open lead. So a lead enters your database from a variety of different marketing tactics.

So whether it's through content syndication, paid email, maybe it's an event, maybe it's social, you get leads that come into your database. So step two is a marketing qualified lead. So the lead will take a variety of additional activities and this person will fit a specific demographic profile. After that lead hits a certain score threshold it moves to marketing qualified stage and gets passed to your SDR team. So after that you have a sales accepted lead.

So an SAL, a sales accepted lead, is when an SDR gets a marketing lead and determines whether or not this lead is worth follow-up. Once that lead begins the SDR process it becomes an SAL, and then once the SDR successfully schedules a meeting that's when that lead becomes sales qualified, or an SQL. But it is important at this time, when a sales rep does get a marketing qualified lead, that they are accepting it, or they're recycling it back to marketing, or they're disqualifying it.

So the best SDR teams are targeted, so focused on a select group of target accounts, so no need for large-scale email blasting. I do believe that sales development teams should be account-based, particularly if they are paired up with an AE. Personalized, so their outreach is based on cross-channel research on the company and the individual and they are creating personalized emails, they are being very personal in their outreach, so that means using what they found on LinkedIn, through social channels, to talk to that individual as a person, to send that very direct communication.

The best SDR teams are multichanneled, so they should not be on the phone. SDR outreach should combine email, phone, social, direct mail, events, and more. And the best SDR teams are integrated. SDR should be closely aligned with marketing for a very coordinated outreach. So the other thing you need to think through is that you need to determine your outreach cadence. And so that means how often and in what forms will your sales development team reach out to prospects before they get recycled or pushed back to marketing? And so your cadence very much depends on your organization, what your comfort level is.

So here's an example from SalesLoft, it's a slide that shows a 7 day outreach cadence, and then it shows day-by-day what a sales development rep should be doing. So day 1, phone and email, day 2, phone call, day 3, phone call, day 4, email, day 5, day 6, break, and day 7, email. Now, of course, I personally would include social outreach and direct mail in here as well, but again, this is very depending on your own personal use case.

The idea here is that you have a variety of different touches over a course of a set amount of days. So there are key sales and marketing process requirements in order to make this effective. So, of course, the effective lead handoff process, that's what we talked about a little earlier with MQLs being to the SDRs and then the SDRs accepting the leads. Lead scoring implementation, so if you are not passing every single lead over to your sales team you do want to implement some type of scoring that does have MQL thresholds.

Set up a service-level agreement for timely lead follow-up. So this is basically marketing having an agreement with sales saying after an inbound lead comes in they have X amount of time to follow-up with that lead, it's generally anywhere from a few hours, it could be 24 hours, and then if a lead is not followed up in that time then their boss and other executives will get an escalating chain of emails that the inbound lead is sitting. And then finally, and most importantly there needs to be a one team, one goal mentality between the SDRs and marketing.

SDRs should be thought of as really this personalized extension of marketing, the two teams need to work really in sync, they need to know and be aware of what each team is doing, it is incredibly critical that the alignment here is really on point. Much like your marketing outreach, your SDR outreach should also follow similar principles. You don't want your customers marking your SDR email as spam, and so in addition to the marketing emails that you are sending, your SDRs are likely also sending emails either through their personal email accounts or by using tools, like outreach.io or SalesLoft.

So here are some best practices to think about and that your SDRs should think about when communicating with prospects. So number one, make it personalized. If your SDRs are doing research on the various prospects they should have an idea on how to personalize each email message to speak directly to that prospect. So you also want to make it useful. So it's important with your SDR outreach that you're reaching out for a reason. What useful types of content are your SDRs providing to your prospects? It's great to have the ability to not only try to sell the product, but you do want your SDRs to provide additional value.

Make it fun. So people like receiving sales emails that have a fun message to it. Your SDRs should not be afraid to use memes, to use gifts, to use other funny language to make people open it. Make it social. So make sure that you are training your SDRs on how to connect with folks on social and how to engage in conversations on social. And so your SDRs should absolutely be using social media as a way to reach out. By working together, your SDR team can be one of your most powerful lead generation weapons.

So definitely take time to make sure that your sales development team becomes an extension of marketing, and that they understand what you're doing for outbound lead gen, and they really become part of that strategy and part of that program.