For an employer who’s just succeeding in hiring a sales representative with the perfect resume, you still have an obligation to prepare any new candidates for the position before sending them to deal with prospective customers. Hiring the best candidate for a crucial position is not an easy process: we expect prospects to work hard for a position and show us why they’re the right fit for the role. However, the hiring process is a two-way street. Once a talented candidate has committed themselves to a role, you need to make sure that your SDR onboarding process makes the best possible impression on a new hire. This will help them get a flying start in the workplace while also allowing you to set the right tone for your workplace’s culture from their very first day on the job.
Crucially, a strong SDR onboarding process is proven to help with staff retention, which is vital when you’ve landed a valuable new hire who could just as easily find their talents appreciated at one of your competitors. Hiring a new team member is a costly process for any employer, and if they leave soon after accepting the role, it will result in a significant waste of your business’ time and money. In short, poor onboarding processes risk the confidence of new staff and could seriously impact their morale and work rate in a new position.
The role of sales development representative (SDR) is one of the roles for which these considerations could prove most significant. If you’re not taking your onboarding processes seriously, an SDR will find themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to positively representing your company and attempting to drive up sales. The result? Your company’s bottom line will be seriously undermined.
Why Prioritize SDRs?
Source: pixabay.com
You may be wondering why it’s so important to focus on onboarding an SDR in particular. The answer is that SDRs perform a critical role in your sales team that will have direct ramifications for the potential of the rest of your sales department’s performance. SDRs don’t close deals, but they do perform the vital role of developing contacts and chasing down leads. A motivated and hardworking SDR provides your salesman the chance to drive up your company’s profits and also contributes to the vital first impressions that your business makes with prospective clients. A great SDR creates opportunities for successful sales, which will prove critical in deciding your company’s overall performance.
How to Successfully Develop an SDR Onboarding Plan
Source: pixabay.com
You think you’ve found the perfect candidate and gotten them to commit to a future with your company, so how do you ensure they’re prepared to excel? No matter how badly you need a candidate to tackle the work that awaits them, taking the time to onboard an SDR could reap dividends in the long term. Here are the critical stages for ensuring a comprehensive onboarding that will help both your company and your new employee build a stable foundation for future success.
Develop Product Knowledge
A thorough and robust understanding of a service or product forms the basis for any successful sales team. Core competencies should be crucial to your sales onboarding process, but first, your new SDR needs to understand your offerings’ key USPs.
For many businesses like automobile dealerships or catering companies, grasping the selling points of an offering should prove reasonably straightforward. However, companies with more niche or specialist products and services (especially in a B2B sales environment) will need to ensure that new SDRs are sufficiently familiar with their products and services to effectively communicate their value in the marketplace.
Whether selling complicated financial instruments such as insurance plans and debt consolidation services or making a case for technically detailed industrial solutions, a base level of knowledge has to be established to ensure an SDR can pivot effectively throughout the sales process. Suppose your offering is especially complex or has a highly varied tiering of sales packages and subscriptions. In that case, you may have to break down the essential information into more digestible learning modules throughout the sales onboarding process.
Establish Customer Profiles
Once a new recruit understands what it is that they’re selling, the next step in the SDR onboarding plan is to educate them about who they are selling to. For a sales campaign to be effective, it needs to take into account the personas and demographics of the audiences that are most likely to respond positively. This can help focus your sales and marketing efforts and ensure that SDRs aren’t expending their time and effort on leads that are less likely to generate sales.
While an understanding of demographics can broadly inform your sales initiatives, customer profiles provide more focused insights and generate a template for effectively predicting the actions and responses of your customers. A customer profile looks beyond basic categories like age groups, and gender divides and tries to establish your buyers’ specific ambitions and behaviors. This, in turn, can inform new SDRs in their work and show them how best to appeal to prospective customers at different stages of the sales journey.
Evaluate Your Competitors
Very few businesses in the world have the luxury of disregarding their competitors. A successful sales campaign takes account of the landscape of the modern marketplace, and to do this, there needs to be an intimate awareness about the activities of commercial competitors. Such an understanding is essential if your SDRs are to effectively distinguish your offerings from the available alternatives and communicate the advantages your company can offer that competitors can’t.
If your SDR onboarding process doesn’t provide detailed answers to these frequently encountered talking points, new hires will struggle to promote your offerings with any conviction. If, for example, a competitor is marketing a similar product with a lower price point, your SDR needs to be able to explain why something like extra functionality or superior aftersales support makes your offering a better value proposition.
Familiarize Them With Your Sales Processes
Once a new SDR understands your offerings, target market, and competition, it’s time for them for sales onboarding to familiarize them with the tools they’ll need to execute their role. These will vary depending on your business, but there’s an excellent chance that this will include a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that the entire sales department utilizes for the pursuit and engagement of leads.
Using a lead generation service for pursuing sales could be critical to fulfilling the position of SDR and will help create sales tunnels for the rest of the team. Without a good knowledge of this, your new SDR may inadvertently cause issues by contacting a customer too many times or failing to connect them with the relevant stage of sales, thereby harming your chances of a successful conversion.
Develop Their Sales Manner
Many people have personalities that naturally lend themselves to successful sales. However, just because a new SDR might not exhibit an obvious aptitude for this proficiency doesn’t mean they won’t be capable of becoming a valuable asset to your company. Many SDRs just need to be pushed in the right direction to grasp the interpersonal skills required to fulfill the role.
An excellent way to prepare them for this is by role-playing with managers or current team members as part of the SDR onboarding process to get them comfortable with the fundamentals of a sales pitch. Try and negotiate a balance by letting them start slowly, but don’t be afraid to provide them with more challenging scenarios moving forward. It’s important that they get a feel for the possible directions a dynamic customer interaction can take before having to tackle these situations while there’s a real sales opportunity on the line.
Final Thoughts
Source: pixabay.com
If you’ve just hired a qualified SDR who’s aced all your interview questions, your natural inclination will be to start them in sales work as soon as possible. But taking the time to develop a thorough SDR onboarding process will ensure that any new recruits have the knowledge and tools to represent your products and services at the highest level. While many aspects of developing the best SDR onboarding plan will depend on the nature of your business, an investment in a new hire represents an investment in the future success of your company and is the best way to defend against common errors that might otherwise be made by recruits getting to grips with a new job.
