Hiring and building a high-performance SDR team offers a variety of benefits. SDRs cold call, follow up with warm leads, research prospects, and qualify potential buyers. This allows your sales reps to focus on closing deals with more qualified leads.
What can you do to ensure you create an SDR team that effectively handles all of these responsibilities?
In this post, we will cover:
- The challenges of building an SDR team
- Determining team structure
- Identifying ideal candidates
- Recruiting & hiring strategies
- Effective onboarding & training
- Continuous improvement
Let’s jump into the challenges you may face when assembling your ideal SDR team.
WEBINAR REPLAY:
How to Hire and Build a High-Performance SDR Team
Follow along with our presentation to discover key strategies to hire, train, and retain your best SDRs.
Challenges of building an SDR team
As you begin to build your SDR team you may come across a few obstacles. We’ve listed these challenges below to make you aware of what you will be facing:
- Time and money costs associated with hiring
- Recruiting motivated SDRs
- Preventing SDR burnout
- Creating a sales development process
- Offering training, resources, and tools for your SDRs
- Maintaining alignment with different departments
With so many challenges, it may seem difficult to create your SDR dream team. However, with the right strategies, you’ll be hiring and retaining your best SDRs.
Determining your SDR team structure
Before you begin hiring and training your SDRs, you first need to figure out the structure of your SDR team. Think about your needs for an SDR team and how they will fit into your organization.
How many SDRs you’ll need can depend on factors such as how many leads your sales team needs and the size of your total addressable market.
And who will your SDRs report to? While most SDR teams report to sales, you may consider positioning them under your marketing team if you have a large inbound lead volume or under a dedicated sales development department if you have the means.
Additionally, some organizations divide SDRs along inbound and outbound lines, while some solely stick to territory assignments. What makes sense for you depends on your sales process.
What makes a good SDR candidate?
Recruiting the right SDR candidates can greatly impact your sales process.
Decide whether you’re open to entry-level hires or if you require more experienced candidates. It should be noted that many individuals you interview will see the role as an entry point for their sales careers. Keep in mind that entry-level SDRs require more training and oversight, while experienced SDRs typically cost more to compensate.
As you review candidates, here are some skills we recommend assessing:
- Understand and deliver value propositions
- Find the correct point of contact for an account
- Handle objections by understanding prospect needs
- Ask discovery questions to gather prospect information
- Master the repeatable daily process put in place
- Navigate the CRM and other required tools
- Consistently accelerate call volumes
SDR recruiting & hiring strategies
There are different approaches you can take to hire SDRs. You may choose to hire reps as the need comes up, or some find it effective to continuously recruit and maintain a bench of candidates for the high-turnover role. How you approach hiring depends on how many resources you can dedicate to the recruitment process and your needs for new SDRs over time.
As you get to the interviewing stage, keep skills and personality in mind. Determine not only whether candidates have the required skills for the SDR role but also whether they have the aptitude to learn them. For example, assessing how much they researched your company beforehand can be an indicator of their prospect research skills as an SDR.
If this is a lot to take in, you may think to hire an outsourced SDR team as opposed to hiring in-house.
SDR onboarding & training
Providing an effective onboarding and training process for your SDRs allows for them to succeed in their new role.
There are a variety of components your new SDRs will need to be trained on:
- Product knowledge
- Messaging and how to tailor it
- Closing tactics for appointment setting
- Your company’s tools and processes
We recommend standardizing your process and recording it in an SDR Playbook to guide your training. We’ve created an SDR Playbook Template to help you get started.
The best way to offer a smooth transition to your workplace is by outlining clear milestones and letting new SDRs start calling sooner rather than later.
Facilitating continuous improvement for SDRs
Facilitate continuous improvement leads to more motivated SDRs which can give you a better outcome for your pipeline.
Offer ongoing training to help your SDRs progress in their role and break up the day-to-day monotony of the job. Performance-based incentives and exposure to different roles in the company that align with an SDR’s career goals are other methods worth implementing for continuous improvement.
WEBINAR REPLAY:
How to Hire and Build a High-Performance SDR Team
Follow along with our presentation to discover key strategies to hire, train, and retain your best SDRs.
Hire & Build a High-Performance SDR Team That Gets Results
Hiring and building a high-performance SDR team can boost the top of your pipeline while giving your sales reps more time to nurture leads and close sales. The strategies shared above are ways we’ve been able to find success for this integral role in the sales process.
If you’re looking for a simpler way to set more appointments, then our experienced SDRs are here to help. Our SDRs understand prospecting best practices and have experience working with organizations in a wide range of industries. Be sure to check out our appointment setting services to learn more.
