Insights and Research for Marketing, Sales Development and Sales

One of the most critical roles a sales development rep (SDR) plays in an organization is to qualify prospects before they speak to sales. But the pressure to quickly qualify and handoff meetings to sales reps often results in leads that are passed along before the prospect has been fully qualified. This issue is compounded by sales reps with differing opinions of what constitutes qualification and who may ignore qualified leads that have come from SDRs. This lack of alignment causes problems on both sides of the handoff.

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Sales development reps (SDRs) are responsible for creating qualified meetings for sales reps. While this seems like a straightforward process, TOPO has identified a breaking point.

Many sales organizations fail to address what happens before and after SDRs set up those meetings. This oversight creates confusion.

SDRs pass leads before they are fully qualified, sales ignores qualified leads, or sales fails to document what happened in the meeting and next steps. More often than not, issues like these lead to a lack of alignment and the SDR program suffers.

Touch patterns matter. The job of a sales development rep (SDR) is to contact prospects with engaging, value-based messages so that the prospects will respond and ultimately schedule a meeting. The biggest challenge for an individual SDR is not having enough guidance from management for the touch pattern activities that make up their primary job function.

Once you have nailed the product market fit in the seed stage, your focus in Series A is determining whether a small set of sales reps can meet your target revenue number. In other words, can they convert interested, relevant buyers into real opportunities and deals? At this point, you should be looking for ways to optimize the sales process so that you can prove your model is viable at scale.

In part 2 of this series on our Sales Management Market Guide, TOPO focuses on how these technologies deliver value to sales leaders, key considerations when evaluating sales management technology, and the increasing demand for insights and engagement.

The Sales Team Lifecycle is a roadmap companies can follow to effectively put in place the right salespeople, processes, technology, and metrics as they grow from seed to Series C. This roadmap provides a proven approach to aligning the sales team with the company’s size and growth, and setting expectations for what is required at each stage. By following this framework, companies can avoid making the mistakes that introduce unnecessary risk into their sales organizations, go-to-market strategies, and growth plans.

A world-class sales development organization starts with a plan. As the team on the front lines communicating the value of the company to prospects every day, they need to be prepared. TOPO’s framework helps define the necessary strategy, development of processes and procedures, and assembling sales development tech stack for company growth.

Predictable sales execution is the most important aspect of successful sales from leadership to the sales rep. Today, the ability to deliver on these core responsibilities is not optimized. The day-to-day tasks of reviewing the pipeline, recommending next best actions, and creating forecast visibility suffer from imperfect data. Data that is only partially recalled by the reps and therefore entered incorrectly. Data that falls through the cracks and is left out of the database altogether. Data that is not optimally captured and therefore not visible. Data that is visible, but not easily scanned by busy sales leaders. Data, in other words, that is suboptimal—and therefore leads to unsatisfactory sales results.

Sales Development role in account based programs is the biggest story in sales development today. The role SDR’s play is a critical piece of the account based movement but its really really hard to pull off. This story and more emerged in the 2019 TOPO Sales Development Benchmark.