The Early Stage Sales Development Playbook

A Guide for the Newly Hired SDR

Kartheek Mulpuri, Ian Grover

• Publisher: SalesCombine
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781087879277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

This straightforward, no-distractions guide to the sales development role at small- to mid-sized software firms will fast track your path to success in B2B sales. Get the inside scoop on everything from tools to mindset and jumpstart your sales career!

In The Early Stage Sales Development Playbook, Kartheek Mulpuri and Ian Grover pair extensive real-world sales experience with methodical research to bring you the best practices you need to succeed as a sales development representative at an early stage company.

How do I structure a successful outreach campaign?
How do I increase communication response rates?
How do I support my account executives, when given very little structure?
How do I keep a step ahead of the competition?

Find the answer these questions and more—if you're in or considering a career in technology sales, this book is for you. Up your game and edge out the competition with The Early Stage Sales Development Playbook!

Chapter 1: Overview

A typical sales team at an early stage technology company (defined as pre-Series B and/or fewer than 30 employees) will be run by the CEO or a Head of Sales. Depending on the business, the team will then typically have one to three account executives (AEs). AEs work to close leads, meaning potential clients, once they have identified that they may be fits for the product(s) that are offered. There may be a marketing person present—this person is likely to be junior- or mid-level. Adjacent to the new business team, a company at this stage will likely have one or two Customer Success Managers (CSMs), who are responsible for taking over the day-to-day relationship with a customer once they have been closed by the AEs. Last but not least, a sales team at an early stage company will include one or two SDRs.

In a sales team, an SDR’s role is to own the lead qualification process. What does that mean? We’ve put together the diagram below to explain what this process looks like.

Trying to understand this without context may be equivalent to the proverbial “drinking from a firehose.” Don’t worry, we’ll explain the concepts in this diagram and more in this book.

In this guide, we break the SDR’s job into three categories: preparation, outreach and lead acceptance. We organize this guide as such.

Chapter 2: Preparation

Onboarding

Your onboarding as an SDR can make or break your future in this role. This may be your first full-time job, first sales job, or first job in the industry you now find yourself in. Because of this dynamic, the learning curve is steep. What makes this so is that, at early stage companies, the present team has oftentimes not figured out best practices or documented the lead qualification process it has in the first place. Therefore, you will likely have to train yourself, figure out which techniques work, and determine why they work in the industries you are prospecting in.

To that end, in this section, we aim to systematize the process for onboarding. Onboarding should be focused on getting a new SDR up to speed quickly and comprehensively. Per TOPO, the average amount of time it takes for an SDR to train and ramp to full productivity is three months. With the framework we are providing you, our goal is for you to fully ramp much quicker than that.

Understand the Business

At the very beginning of the process, you will need to learn as much as you can about your company. Some questions you should ask are the following:

1. What does the team look like today as a whole?
2. Who are the leaders of the organization?
3. What are the business’s short-term goals and objectives?
4. What are the business’s long-term goals and objectives?
5. What are recent milestones the company has achieved?
6. Does the company have an engineer-driven or sales-driven culture?
7. Who manages sales?
8. Who does my manager report to?
9. What is the org chart of the sales organization?
10. Who are the point people in the organization for me to ask questions?
11. How are decisions made in the sales organization?
12. How should I interface with marketing?
13. What have the results looked like thus far on lead generation?
14. What have some of the challenges been on lead generation to date?
15. How is reporting done?
16. What are the key metrics the company tracks?
17. What are the key metrics the sales team tracks?
18. Does the team have collaborative meetings to discuss the status of leads and opportunities? If so, how often and when?

Second, you should look to learn as much as you can about the product. Some sample questions are below. In addition to these questions, you should get a full demo of the product from the AE or someone else on the team. It is tough to truly understand a product without one. Longer term, you should stay up to date on new features being added and new modules being launched.

1. What does the product do?
2. What is the product intended to do?
3. What is the long-term vision for the product?
4. What features are in development?
5. What are the shortfalls of the product today?
6. Why wouldn’t a company buy the product?
7. What value does the product deliver to the customer?
8. How does the customer measure success?
9. How does a customer calculate their Return on Investment (ROI)?
10. How satisfied are customers with the product? (What is the Net Promoter Score?)
11. What makes the product unique?
12. Is this product a must-have or a luxury?
13. How is the product positioned by the company today?
14. Does the product require an implementation period or is it fully functional out of the box?
15. If the product requires an implementation, what is the timeline?

Third, understand the market. Sample questions are below:

1. What are the target markets for the product? (Segment target markets by industry and/or buyer size)
2. What is our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? (The ICP is the customer that would see the most value from your company’s product)
3. How big is each target market and how are they prioritized?
4. Is each target market growing (how quickly?) or contracting (how quickly?)
5. What does competition look like for the solution?
6. How does our product compare pricewise against competitors?
7. If the product is more expensive, can the company justify the higher price due to better functionality?

A hack you can use to obtain many of these answers quickly is by shadowing AEs on their calls with potential buyers. Such conversations yield many of the answers to these questions. Many AEs were once SDRs so they will understand if you ask to join them on these calls. From a timing standpoint, the SDR should get answers to most of these questions in the first couple weeks.

Keep in mind that, oftentimes, management and employees will oversell the product and market. To get a balanced perspective, it helps to do third party research. Many actual users will post reviews...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Overview
• Chapter 2: Preparation
• Chapter 3: Outreach
• Chapter 4: Lead Acceptance
• Chapter 5: Measuring an SDR’s Effectiveness
• Chapter 6: A Day in the Life of an SDR
• Chapter 7: The Little Things Go A Long Way
• Chapter 8: Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors