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 Tinesh Kansara, SDR Team Lead EMEA at Airship. He’s talking about rethinking the standard SDR to AE handoff. Let’s jump on in!
I help enterprise marketers better understand how to connect with their customers with Airship‘s Customer Engagement Platform.
Our main clients are from retail and travel, making the impact of COVID-19 tremendous. However, connecting with customers during COVID-19 is vital, so Airship is still helping brands get through this challenging period.
We’re no longer focusing on volume. Instead, we’re working a concentrated list of named accounts that we can educate and help either during COVID-19 or after.
It’s incredibly important for an SDR to become an industry expert. So, one huge change we’ve made is that SDRs have now been enabled and encouraged to demo the Airship platform.
The idea is to help SDRs to engage in insightful, market-relevant conversations with marketers to build their personal brand. In establishing trust, we hope our efforts will pay off in the future when our prospects return to business as usual.
The standard SDR to AE handoff is an SDR runs a qualification/discovery call and then passes on to an AE as quickly as possible to hit their target.
The problem is, this doesn’t work during COVID-19 as relationship building, and smart insights are what drives conversations. How can an SDR establish trust and educate if they’re looking to introduce a prospect to another colleague as soon as possible? Let’s not even mention the confusing buyer experience.
How can an SDR establish trust and educate if they’re looking to introduce a prospect to another colleague as soon as possible?
Consequently, we’ve empowered the SDR team to demo Airship’s stand-out features. Our SDRs can now have the confidence to engage in highly technical conversations with marketers to help them learn something new. Booking a meeting with an AE that will add real value based on previous SDR conversations naturally flows from there.
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