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 Team Lead that’s influencing the B2B SaaS industry worldwide.
Today we’re hearing about updating outreach strategies from James Buckley, Head of Business Development at Attest. Let’s jump on in!
Before joining Attest, I worked at the renowned purchase software platforms Divido & Duologi, as Head of New Business and Head of Sales, respectively.
Like many businesses, COVID has had a direct impact on our conversion ratios across multiple outreach channels. We’ve actively increased our output to keep on top of our numbers as these ratios have decreased, and we’ll come out as a stronger unit because of it – we’ve set ourselves a new bar as to what’s achievable.
I’m thankful to say that we’ve managed to weather the storm relatively unscathed and have seen no change in terms of personnel within the SDR team. In terms of process, we’ve focused heavily on outbound prospecting as organic traffic has slowed slightly. And it’s been an excellent opportunity for the team to experiment with creative outreach techniques. Video power hours have been a great initiative to come off the back of this period!
Having clarity of process is crucial with a fully remote team. It’s been an excellent opportunity to recognize our blind spots and refine our playbook to ensure best practices and processes are clear and scalable.
An example of this was the introduction of Jiminny, which has been a game-changer for the team. Individuals can take the lead on their development and then share best practices to help everyone up-skill as a group. On top of that, the ability to build out scorecards for our scripts has also enabled me to coach at scale, ensuring we have a repeatable methodology that can be tweaked and optimized.
When the world is moving so fast, you can’t just rely on what was working for you previously.
This period has also magnified the need to continually experiment with outreach strategies and techniques, even more so than usual. When the world is moving so fast, you can’t just rely on what was working for you previously. Now, we have a way higher focus on marginal gains. Anything from reply rates on videos to the success of different intros on a cold call is under the microscope. It’s been a time where we’ve all had to level-up quickly, and I’m confident we will come away from this stronger.
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