The SaaS Sales Method for Sales Development Representatives: How to Prospect for Customers: Sales Blueprints, #4

Copyright ©2018. Published by Winning By Design LLC, a Delaware company

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The contents of this book were created in the United States of America.

Edited by Fernando Pizarro and Dan Smith

Revision 5.0

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Winning by Design LLC

San Francisco, California

United States of America

For more information, visit www.winningbydesign.com

More from Winning by Design

The SaaS Sales Method for Sales Development Representatives: How to Prospect for Customers is part of Winning by Design’s Sales Blueprints series. Other books in the series include:

The SaaS Sales Method: The Science and Process of Sales

Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization: How to Design, Build and Scale a Customer-Centric Sales Organization

The SaaS Sales Method Fundamentals: How to Have Customer Conversations

The SaaS Sales Method for Account Executives: How to Win Customers

The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers: How to Grow Customers

Contents

Introduction

1    Inbound

1.1   Alerted

1.2   Nurtured

1.3   Inbound from Word of Mouth

1.4   Social Inbound Play

2  Outbound

2.1  One-to-One Outbound Prospecting (1:1)

2.2  Group-Based Outbound

2.3   Measuring Engagement

2.4    Prospecting Around Events

3   Target-based Prospecting

3.1   Account-based Prospecting

3.2    Alert-based Selling

3.3   CxO-based Outreach

4   Content

4.1 Curate Content

4.2   Create Content

4.3   Content Journey

5   Hand-off

Summary

Conclusion

About Winning By Design

Introduction

In modern sales organizations, prospecting requires the sales professional to provide value from the first interaction. Most companies generally break this team into a separate function or job title. Whether the role is called a Sales Development Rep (SDR), an Inside Sales Rep (ISR), Business Development Rep (BDR) or Account Development Rep (ADR) the function is similar and includes all the activities required to find and qualify prospects and prepare them for the selling process (which we cover in a subsequent book). This book is designed to outline those activities and provide you with best practices, and we will primarily use SDR to represent the person primarily implementing these activities.

NOTE: This book is meant to get dirty! We encourage you to write in it, do the exercises, dog-ear the pages, and do anything else that will help you interact with the content.

A brief review of customer engagement

In The SaaS Sales Method Fundamentals: How to Have Customer Conversations, we discuss how to have conversations in a variety of interactions. Now we are going to turn a variety of interactions in a series of sequences. Predefined sequences we can repeat are called Plays.

Figure 1: Initiating conversations through interactions, sequences and plays

Fourdifferent ways of prospecting

Prospecting can take many different forms, but generally falls into four categories we have placed on the customer journey below.

Figure 2: Overview of the prospecting processes along the customer journey

Customer-centric qualification

In Figure 2, you will notice there are several measurement points along the journey. These measurement points can be used as criteria to determine whether a lead is qualified. We have listed some common qualification criteria in Table 1.

Traditional qualification used BANT™, CHAMP™, or MEDDIC™, all processes in which customers are asked if they have Budget, are the Decision Maker, have a Need, are working to a Timeline, and so on. These qualification methods do not apply in a customer-centric approach because the customer gains no value during the qualification process, often leading to the customer being standoffish.

Table 1 Progressions of leads as they develop

Prospect: A person who expresses interest online.

MQL: Marketing Qualified Lead, a person who expresses interest and fits the profile.

SQL: Sales Qualified Lead, a person who expresses interest during the sales process.

SAL: Sales Accepted Lead, is a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) that has been reviewed and passed to the sales team for approval.

EXERCISE: Identify the criteria that might make a lead fit to be a PROSPECT

Criteria can be static, such as company size. They can be time-driven, such as an event experienced.