Inside Sales industry veteran Trish Bertuzzi finally put wisdom down on paper after many years of work and the result is the new best-seller, “The Sales Development Playbook – Build Repeatable Pipeline and Accelerate GROWTH with Inside Sales”.
Trish is an icon in the field of professional, B2B inside sales with years of speaking and consulting on the topic so it is refreshing to see a consolidation of her thoughts in one place. In addition to her own thoughts are best practice ideas from top sales leaders, practitioners, and experts plus The Bridge Group research.
The premise is that a focused role, the Sales Development Rep position (SDR) and also sometimes called (BDR or ADR) has a strategy and set of best practices for it to be successful. I like the way the book is broken into six areas so you can go right to where you need to first:
• Strategy
• Specialization
• Recruiting
• Retention
• Execution
• Leadership
Are you at the beginning stages of an inside team or specifically the BDR role? Start at Part 1: Strategy. Trish lays out the overview.
Need onboarding ideas? Go right to Part 5: Execution.
If you look around the web you’ll see thousands of ideas and suggestions to pull an SDR team together and try to make it productive – with internal SDRs, contracted SDRs, local, remote, inbound-focused, outbound-focused, and other characteristics. If that isn’t enough, there is no shortage of opinions with some only working in certain circumstances. That leaves you stuck to try piecing it all together – undoubtedly why so many people post “how to” questions in LinkedIn groups. People are looking for the steps to success. Those building sales teams need more than the “what” but they need “the why”.
When I did a Google search for “How to Build an SDR Team” I got 378,000 results.
Do yourself a favor – download the Kindle version or pick up the paperback of the Playbook.
I’m partial to Chapter 36: Manage with Meaningful Metrics because the numbers can help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of each person on your team – how they are connecting, if they are having meaningful conversations, and how those conversations are converting from a call to a next call to potentially new revenue.
You won’t find a better book to lay out how the sales development function on a sales team works, what to do, and how to make it all work together. It turns out that all that wisdom put onto paper is easy to read, helpful, and has great stories that drive each point home.
Lori Richardson is recognized on Forbes as one of the "Top 30 Social Sales Influencers" worldwide and is a Top 25 Innovative Sales Blogger. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with sales teams in mid-sized companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog for sales strategies, tactics, and tips.
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