2020 has been full of challenges – especially when it comes to leading a sales prospecting team.
We got fifteen SDR leaders in the B2B SaaS industry to tell the stories behind their recent pivots. In each article in this Strategic Prospecting Tips series, you’ll find real, unfiltered advice from one Sales Development Leader that’s influencing the B2B SaaS industry worldwide.
Today we’re hearing from Sarah Downey, VP of Sales Development at Staffbase about personalized outreach. Let’s jump on in!
Formerly, I scaled and led the business development team at Booking.com. I also ran the EMEA sales development team at Optimizely for three years. Now, I’m heading the Sales Development team at Staffbase.
Given our product’s nature, we’re a tool that has become even more important as companies struggle to determine how to best communicate with their workforce. Staffbase now allows us to bring the most critical elements of our product to our customers quickly.
However, our biggest challenge has been that our prospects have been exceptionally busy as they’ve needed to get information to their employees. It’s proving difficult to find time to enter into conversations to evaluate any changes, even when they’re proving to be essential changes.
We’ve re-segmented our team to have individuals who are more focused on inbound vs. outbound. We’ve also added a prospecting tool to help scale the number of prospects we can reach out to.
Sales Development has always been the dance between quantity and quality. We needed to figure out how to scale quantity alongside maintaining the high quality, personalized outreach we know works.
So, we’ve enlisted the help of a working student to help us marry that balance by creating customized videos where we can show each prospect what our product would look like for them. She’s helping us to do research and producing the videos/gifs. An SDR is then able to quickly record a customized talk track to ensure we can reach a larger number of prospects with relevant messaging and valuable content for them.
We’re able to share a lot of knowledge gathered through our other customers over the past years and establish ourselves as partners.
We’ve also shifted to ‘value add’ emails. We’re providing content written around crisis communications for our prospects, without asking for anything in return. We’re in a fortunate position that we’re able to share a lot of knowledge gathered through our other customers over the past years and establish ourselves as partners.
Our team is in this for the long run. We’ll be here when our prospects have more time to dedicate to make adjustments and add new solutions to their comms strategies. Overall, we believe that by sharing the vast knowledge and resources we have, we’re showing that we aren’t just after a quick sale, but here to help make a long-term difference in their companies.
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