Salesforce: How an SMB Startup Practices Sales Development

OREANDA-NEWS. July 07, 2016. Born in 2011, the OG SalesLoft team had the dream and desire to succeed, but soon crashed and burned -- in a way many SMBs do. We were operating on an antiquated business model that neglected things like culture and scalability.

To remedy these wrongs, we rebooted the company from scratch. And now, in 2016, we’re an SMB tech startup with the title of Atlanta’s Best Place to Work. Over 80+ employees wide, and six core values deep, together, SalesLoft delivers the most comprehensive sales development environment in the world.

And as early practitioners of the sales development movement, we get asked a ton of questions from growing teams on how to build, structure and scale SMB sales development teams.

At Rainmaker 2016, our annual sales development conference, our CEO Kyle Porter answered some of the most popular SMB questions on how we practice sales development. But before we get into the “how,” let’s first focus on the “why.”

When a sales organization first looks to scale, the first strategic move is to sales development.

Why? Because sales development is the biggest movement to hit the sales industry in the last decade, and it’s the number one way to specialize, personalize, and convert more opportunities, faster.

The frontline sellers are prospecting and qualifying leads, seamlessly handing off SQLs to the closing team for what optimistically will become a closed-won deal. And the SalesLoft philosophy is based on these sales development tenants:

• Glorify the Role
• Metrics Driven
• Recruit, Train, and Lead
• Account Based + Seats Pipeline
• Efficiency

Sales Development Team Structure

A common SMB question is: how should we structure our sales development teams?

At SalesLoft, our teams are split up by Outbound and Inbound reps, each reporting to different managers. The Outbound SDRs report to the Director of Sales Development, and the Inbound SDRs report to the VP of Demand Generation.

Based on that structure, this is the overall revenue breakdown between teams:

• 49% Outbound
• 39% Inbound
• 12% AE Sourced

Now, the Inbound team is held to specific standard when it comes to their revenue expectations. From conversions, to MQLs, S(DR)ALs, SALs, and deals closed, the funnel of expectations is as follows:

The Outbound Process leads us to the next move beyond sales development: Account Based Sales Development — a targeted sales development approach in which prospective customer accounts are treated as markets of one, reached through hyper-personalized campaigns.

The standard Outbound expectations have a similar funnel, based on named accounts, interactions, conversions, SALs, and deals closed:

“If we know the reps capability, we can figure out how many reps we need and what quotas to set in order to deliver that pipeline.” -Kyle Porter

And as the sales organization scales and specializes, different metrics start to emerge as the most important, and goals begin to shift. Traditional sales organizations have always had these three mainstay metrics for Account Executives: the concept of opportunities, a consistent sales cycle, and a win rate.

But with the professionalization of the SDR team, modern sales development metrics look more like this: account stages (the pre-opportunity), a sales development cycle (starting at the first touch), and an account conversion rate.

The differences are subtle, but the key to top of the funnel success is in the specialization, the personalization, and the focus on the right sales development metrics.

This is what lead us to an even newer SMB structure: sales pods. Sales pods are collections of cross-functional roles, each dependently intertwined to achieve a specific and scalable goal within a sales organization.

Every company structures their sales pods differently, because every organization has different end goals and pipeline dreams for their sales pods. But when we set up our first sales pod, the overarching goal was to increase the average customer spend by tripling the average deal size. For our product, the best way to achieve this goal was through a mid-market pod.

The structure of our first mid-market pod was designed with three Sales Development Reps, two Account Executives, and one strategic Account Manager. The theory behind this structure was to create multiple pods that each fill a representative/role for every division that touch the enterprise client experience from start to finish (i.e. find, sell, and keep).

After running this mid-market sales pod for a month or so, our team has learned a few valuable lessons:

• Affiliated reps are more productive than unaffiliated reps.
• SDRs messaging significantly improves based on proximity to AEs
• AEs and SDRs have a mutual desire for each other.
• We didn’t know what we were missing in terms of existing client upsells.
• There are major creative benefits to sitting together, like bouncing ideas and tactics off of each other.

All in all, what we learned is the importance of teamwork and mutually shared results. “The success of one team member is success for all,” says Clint Green, SalesLoft AE and Strategic Sales Pod Lead.

Sales Development Career Matrix

Another common SMB question is: what does your SDR career matrix look like?

We have a few philosophies on how to recruit great people. First, we look for behaviors that represent active sales personalities, like former recruiters, or even door-to-door salespeople.

But most importantly, we look for people with a desired career path. When we bring candidates in for the SDR role, we make sure they see exactly what their path at SalesLoft will look like:

“We want to have an opportunity for them to show leadership and management skills for promotion down the road. It helps people understand what’s next and where they’re going.” -Kyle Porter

Sales Development Execution Tips

Top of the funnel Sales Development Reps are the frontline sellers.

They’re in the trenches, arming the gates of your sales organization and acting as the ambassadors and protectors of your customers, product, and company. They honor their fellow reps by adhering to their playbook and honoring its precise execution.

But modern SDRs are more than just top of the funnel, quick-fire salespeople. They’re sincere sellers with intentionality and agility, and their processes — and their customers’ processes — are in a constant state of adaptation and growth.

1. Use sentiment and disposition. In the old days of sales, managers would have loved to know what happened on a call. But they hated micro-managing reps through CRM. So we created sentiment and disposition. Now, you can see stats based on each individual rep based on their specific skills.

2. Practice personalized messaging. The ongoing debate of automation vs. personalization is coming to an end. We tracked if an email is templatized or personalized, and based on that analysis, we found that nearly 4x the emails that are personalized get replies.

3. Measure call openings. A prospect and a prospector meet in the middle of the woods — and the person with the most confidence decides where they walk. Your call opening defines where the rest of the call goes, so make it count.

4. Go for efficiency. Part of the professionalization of sales development is all about the percentage you reach out to. Take a look at the difference between these two SDRs, and you tell us who is better:

We hope that these philosophies motivate you to build and expand your SMB into a modern sales development team, and take your organization to the next level.