As an ad agency, you need to consistently reach your sales goals to continue building your company. However, the sales process can often be quite time-consuming. As you continue expanding and offering increasingly complex services, you may find that your sales team has to spend more and more time on each prospect. One solution to this problem is to begin working with an SDR team. SDR teams help companies like ad agencies boost their outbound sales numbers by taking over the early stages of the conversion process. Want to know if hiring an SDR team is right for your agency? We’ve put together everything you need to know to make that decision in the sections below.
SDR Teams
SDR stands for Sales Development Representative. This is a type of sales rep that focuses exclusively on outbound prospecting. An SDR’s goals will differ from those of a typical sales rep in a few ways.
SDRs generally aren’t as concerned about bottom-line conversion numbers or sales quotas. Instead, their focus is on pushing prospects through a company’s pipeline.
For instance, an SDR may have a list of email addresses or phone numbers of potential prospects that your company hasn’t reached out to yet. It would be the SDR’s job to reach out to these individuals or businesses and begin working them through your pipeline.
Companies sometimes hire or build out teams of SDRs when they notice that their sales teams aren’t pushing prospects through the pipeline as quickly as management would like.
How an SDR team fits into your broader sales department
Think of an SDR team as the first point of contact for outbound sales leads that are just entering into your pipeline. An SDR will nudge prospects through your pipeline, qualifying the strength of each lead as they go.
Eventually, an SDR will pass a lead ready to be converted onto a company’s standard sales team. At that point, the company’s main sales team can focus on converting the lead immediately instead of coaxing them through a lengthy pipeline.
How Can Hiring An SDR Team For Outbound Sales Boost Your Numbers?
SDR teams are full of outbound sales specialists. These employees have developed a high level of expertise in bringing cold leads from the first point of contact to the moment they’re ready to be converted.
Because of this expertise, SDR teams can improve the efficiency at which a company can turn cold leads into warm ones. Using an SDR team will also give your standard sales team more time to focus on conversions, which they do best.
To put it simply, working with an SDR team can boost the efficiency of your sales process. And if you can make your sales process more efficient, then you can reach your sales goals much faster than would otherwise be possible.
Is An SDR Team Right For Your Ad Agency?
Working with an SDR team certainly has its benefits. But doing so won’t be right for every agency. To decide whether it’s a good fit for your outbound sales process, you’ll want to consider the following factors.
Consider the length of your sales cycle
SDR teams provide the greatest impact when a company’s sales process is lengthy. That’s because if you have a long sales process, it means that your sales staff is currently spending a large amount of their time on non-conversion activities.
If your sales pipeline is already very short, an SDR team won’t have as much of an opportunity to make an impact. You may still be able to increase the efficiency at which your agency can close new deals, but the cost of adding an SDR team to your existing staff may not be worth the marginal benefits you receive from doing so.
Think about your average sales price
Your agency’s average sale price is another key factor to consider before signing on an SDR team. Generally, the larger your average sales price, the longer your outbound sales process becomes. If a prospect is going to spend money on your agency, they will take more time deciding than if the costs were lower.
Are your salespeople cold calling prospects?
Cold-calling can be very time-consuming and is only successful about 1-3% of the time. If your existing sales team members are spending a lot of their time on the practice, then you may want to hire an SDR team to take over.
SDRs specialize in early-stage sales tasks like cold-calling. They’ll provide you with a better success rate and free your sales team up to focus on the late-stage sales cycle tasks that they do best.
How complex is your product or service?
Complex services tend to take longer to sell than straightforward ones. If your ad agency offers a wide variety of complicated services, then your sales staff may be spending an inordinate amount of time walking prospects through each of those services.
An SDR team can take this process over for your agency. They can explain everything that matters to your prospects so that your existing sales team can focus on selling instead of educating.
How niche is your market?
Companies that operate in niche markets also tend to have longer sales cycles than ones that provide more generalized services. If your ad agency specializes in non-standard services or working with non-standard clients, then an SDR team could be a great solution for your outbound sales process.
Alternatively, if your services and clients are standard for the industry, then you may not benefit as much from working with an SDR team.
If You Hire An SDR Team For Outbound Sales, Here’s What To Look For
Experience above all else
The most important thing to look for before hiring an SDR team is experience. You need to know that the team you’re hiring has already succeeded in the advertising industry.
During the interview process, you’ll want to look for specific examples demonstrating the real-world impact an SDR team has had in the past.
Remember, the purpose of hiring an SDR team is to add a group of specialists to your sales staff that can navigate the early stages of the sales process more efficiently.
If the SDR team you hire hasn’t done that before, then you have no way of knowing whether you’re hiring specialists who can get the job done or just a group of general salespeople who won’t have much of an impact on your sales goals.
The right personalities
SDRs have to deal with rejection even more often than an average salesperson does.
The SDRs you want should be comfortable speaking to people on the phone all day, knowing that they’ll be rejected much more often than not. To that end, you should prioritize hiring candidates with confident demeanors, outgoing personalities, and undeterred motivation.
Of course, it can sometimes be hard to recognize whether someone truly possesses these traits or only says that they do. That’s why it’s best to ask your candidates for specific examples of how they’ve demonstrated these personality traits in the past during the interview process.
Strong, relevant skills
You’ll also want to make sure that any SDR teams you consider hiring possess the skills needed to get the job done for your ad agency. Here’s what you should be looking for:
- Capable of understanding and delivering value propositions
- Ability to accelerate call volumes
- Skilled at asking insightful discovery questions
- Ability to find the correct point of contact for a new account
- Capable of working around objections skillfully
SDR Teams: The Bottom Line
The answer to this question depends on the nature of your ad agency. If you have a lengthy, complex sales process that involves a lot of work on the front-end, you will be able to benefit from working with an SDR team.
If you’d like to leverage your outbound sales process, consider using LeadLander. Our platform will help your SDR team, and your existing sales staff learn more about the behaviors and goals of existing prospects. LeadLander will also help you identify new leads that you haven’t even discovered yet.
You can also reach out to us directly here if you have additional questions about what LeadLander can do for your outbound sales process.