Over 20 sales development leaders from the Bay Area’s fastest growing companies once again convened last Friday for TOPO’s Sales Development Council #14. These Councils offer a unique forum for sales development leaders from high growth companies to learn from each other and share best practices.
TOPO launched its Demand Generation Practice with a mandate to help companies adopt account-based go-to-market strategies. A year later, the account-based movement dominates the B2B sales and marketing landscape. During this time, the TOPO Analyst team has identified two major trends that dictate whether companies will succeed or fail with their account-based efforts.
Over 30 sales development leaders from the Bay area’s fastest growing companies once again convened last Friday for TOPO’s Sales Development Council #13. These Councils offer a unique forum for sales development leaders from high growth companies to learn from each other and share best practices. Each Council features three speakers who share the processes, plays, organizational elements, and technologies they use to drive key revenue metrics. This Council produced a few key themes, including discussions about SDR effectiveness and performance, how companies define qualification criteria and creating effective outbound emails.
The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) defines the firmographic, environmental and behavioral attributes of accounts expected to become a company’s most valuable customers. It is developed through both qualitative and quantitative analyses; and may optionally be informed by predictive analytics software.
Unlike the term “target customer,” which is often used to describe any company that might buy a product or service, the ICP is focused on the most valuable customers and prospects that are also most likely to buy. The Ideal Customer Profile should also not be confused with the Total Addressable Market or Total Available Market, which are calculations or estimates of the universe of potential target customers.
The ICP is a foundational, organization-wide decision impacting downstream sales and marketing efforts. It aligns marketing, sales, service and executive teams to the highest-value accounts. It also creates focus on scalable and repeatable strategies and tactics to engage and convert top accounts. And it drives target account list creation, segmentation, organizational structure, and other key activities.
Sales development leaders spend as much as 60% of their role recruiting. They spend significant budget working with recruiting firms, painstakingly define an ideal candidate profile, and spend countless hours interviewing. Ironically, the same rigor put on the recruiting process seldom carries over to onboarding. The result is, organizations dedicate time and resources to getting the best SDRs to join their team, only to leave them hanging once they are in the seat.
Of course, this isn’t true of all organizations, and perhaps this is hyperbolic. But here are the facts of the onboarding problem:
TOPO’s Sales Development Council #8 gathered over 30 of the brightest sales development leaders from the bay area’s fastest growing companies to the Rosewood Sand Hill in Menlo Park last Friday. The morning kicked off with a networking breakfast in which attendees made new connections with their peers, shared best practices and challenges, and learned from what each leader is doing in their own organization. The council event officially began with a brief introduction from TOPO CEO, Scott Albro, who announced the three speakers for the morning: Craig Rosenberg, Chief Analyst at TOPO; Jon Parisi Sr. Director of Revenue Development at GuideSpark; and Matt Amundson, Director of Sales Development at EverString.
Consistently generating sales qualified leads in the enterprise is a constant struggle for outbound sales development teams. This presents a significant challenge for the 93.4% of companies that conduct outbound prospecting, and particularly for the 54% of organizations that have a dedicated outbound SDR role. For these organizations, the traditional “numbers game” sales strategy in which SDRs send mass cold emails and make calls with the same generic message no longer produces results in the enterprise.
Effective time management is essential to SDR productivity. 83.4% of SDRs fail to consistently hit quota each month, in large part because they lack this critical skill. The problem is so prevalent that in TOPO’s SDR benchmark research, 33.3% of high-growth companies cite challenges around SDR time management as one of the top three challenges for their organization. These challenges include:
Over 30 sales development leaders from the bay area’s fastest growing companies once again convened at the Rosewood Sand Hill in Menlo Park last Friday for TOPO’s Sales Development Council #7. These Councils offer a unique forum for sales development leaders from high growth companies to learn from each other and share best practices. Each Council features three speakers who share the processes, plays, organizational elements, and technologies they use to drive key revenue metrics. This Council produced a few key themes, including discussions about the hiring and interview process, onboarding strategy, and coaching best practices.
TOPO hosted the sixth meeting of our Sales Development Council last Friday at the Rosewood Sand Hill in Menlo Park. TOPO Councils are a unique forum for sales development leaders from high growth companies to learn from each other. Each Council features three speakers who share the processes, plays, organizational elements, and technologies they use to drive key revenue metrics. Sales Development Council #6 attracted over 35 sales development leaders who shared their best practices for designing, building, and managing a world class sales development function. A few key themes emerged at the particular Council, including discussions about buyer-responsive sales development process and plays and technology proliferation in the sales development organization.