3 Strategies to Motivate Your Sales Development Team

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3 Strategies to Motivate Your Sales Development Team

There is no doubt that the SDR team is one of the most challenging teams to manage. Mainly because most SDRs start the job aiming to progress towards a career in sales or marketing.

Yet, the SDR team is one of the main influencers on the pipeline. We have asked two of our OppGen Experts about their strategies to motivate their Sales Development Team. 

Neil Bhuiyan | Founder and SDR Coach at HappySelling

Austin Fuller | Director of Sales at Nuarx

Let’s jump in!

Motivating your SDR team relies, essentially, on recognition. So here’re the three main strategies to motivate your Sales Development Team —

Random acts of kindness

One thing that has a great impact on a company’s success is creating synergies within departments, creating one big team. This culture is developed by spending time together having a meal or even playing a game!

In the current situation, this proves to be a challenge, although there are other ways of showing your team that you care about them. Why not send them an egift card for getting 130% of quota, or their favorite coffee or beverage via UberEats? 

Key takeaways:

  • Suprise team members with delivery for lunch
  • Mail them something nice  like company swag or a home office accessory
  • Keep morale up; make the team culture fun and use tools like HeyTaco and RandomCoffee

Publicly celebrate wins

In the quick vide below, Austin refers to the idea of ‘camaraderie’ when it comes to replicating “the experience of sharing in each other’s winds”. He shares, “Try using a Slack Channel or group email whenever somebody closes a deal so everyone can participate and celebrate.” 

“Having a social channel to give public recognition will keep the momentum going, it’s going to be motivating. Because when the days are hard and you’re all alone in your house, and you’re telling yourself in your head that this guy is not going to buy from me, you’ve got to combat that”.

Neil also recommends giving the SDR their moment to shine by asking “the SDR to share their outbound success in a team meeting with two slides on how they did it”. 

Just like Austin’s Slack Channel, these few minutes of recognition will also help “inspire their peers and share a success in the following session”, which will keep the ball rolling.

Plus, sharing learnings along with success stories, make sure everyone’s getting better as they go.

Give them creative liberty

Austin makes the point that something else to try is “to get people to own their own solutions and get people to collaborate”. Discuss what new problems have risen up and “create their own solutions so that they’ll be more prone to use those solutions and thus more motivated to test out the thing that they created”.

Key takeaways:

  • Let your sales reps and SDRs think of unconventional approaches to prospecting or other activities. It’s more fun if they own it.
  • Set aside a time where everyone collaborates and exchanges ideas and new approaches
 

Want more strategies for motivating your SDRs? Check out the webinar.

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