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 Hailey Pobanz, Enterprise Sales Development Manager at GitLab. Let’s jump on in!
As a former Director of Sales and Global Sales Engineer, I have years of experience scaling SaaS sales teams in the EMEA region. I’m also a human mom, dog mom, and avid Yogi.
As a remote company that essentially enables developers to work remotely, in some ways, the crisis has enabled us to tell our story with more relevance. We have also reduced our overall sales goals. Our priority remains a family first company, and the team has been fully supported in taking time off.
Initially, we shifted focus from identifying the customer’s pain points to being a voice for working remotely. We stopped actively selling and instead worked to support our prospects by sharing our knowledge and building trust, which in the long run, will help us move opportunities forward when companies are ready to make a move. We made sure to ask customers and prospects how they were doing. We also changed our goals up a bit to reflect the actions and behaviors we want from our team at this time.
People still want to talk and maybe have more time to do so – but the conversation has changed. We didn’t slow down sales development but acknowledged that the conversations we were having would generate a more long-term pipeline. Rather than focusing on bringing in net new logos, we focused on driving the right relationships with the right prospects (or expansion within customers). For Enterprise business, this is also crucial. By shifting the conversation, we stayed relevant, and our SDR team continued to hit their targets.
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