Your first SDR (sales development rep) job can seem daunting. As a foot in the door to the wide, lucrative world of sales, you want to impress as many decision makers as you can. At the same time, you are bombarded with expectations, processes, terms and techniques that are totally unfamiliar. It can be difficult to learn a completely new job and be immediately fantastic at it.
But it’s not impossible. Nailing your first SDR job may take some effort and practice, but it is completely doable. By sharpening your communication skills, sussing out what’s expected of you, rocking your company’s sales engagement platform and learning all you can about your product you can be the team success story in no time.
Sharpen Your Communication Skills
It should come as no surprise to you that much of your job will be communicating with people. You make cold calls, send emails, fire off messages, etc. The better part of your day will be spent communicating with people, so it stands to reason that to be a better SDR you should practice being a better communicator.
A lot of new salespeople think sales is about talking a good game, speaking fast and slick. It’s not. In fact, quite oppositely, being a fantastic salesperson requires you to remain silent when the situation demands and listen attentively to a prospect’s challenges and pain points.
Know What’s Expected of You
How will you know how to nail your job if you don’t know what’s expected of you? When first starting out, pick your team leader’s brain about expectations. Develop a clear understanding of what quantitative and qualitative metrics you will be evaluated on. Ask for an example of a model SDR – whether that’s a real person or a simply an ideal set of skills – and try to model yourself upon that.
Learn How to Use a Sales Engagement Platform
The quicker you can learn your team’s sales engagement platform, the quicker you can start crushing it with prospects. A sales engagement platform, for the uninitiated, is a platform used by teams to automate the sales process and make it more efficient. It does everything from prioritize your leads to schedule follow-ups, taking the guesswork out of choosing leads and developing a cadence. It can auto-dial prospects for you and auto-populate emails. You’ll probably be spending a lot of time on it, so it pays to familiarize yourself in advance.
Know What You’re Selling
Finally, this point is a brief but important one: get to know the product. The better you know the product you’re selling, the more confident you will feel talking about it as it relates to various prospects. For some prospects, your product might solve one issue; for others, it might solve a completely different one. In either case, you won’t be able to sell to them if you aren’t yourself sold on the product.
Your first SDR job is a chance to prove how invaluable you can be to a company, to display your tenacity, work ethic, communication skills and product knowledge. These four tips will help further your development and make you the best SDR you can be.