How to Scale an Inbound Sales Team: Our First Month with Our First BDR Team
One of the challenges I face as a sales and marketing leader is that sometimes it’s hard to see where marketing ends and sales begins. In an age where people often think this kind of alignment is some otherworldly utopia, being able to hire new inbound marketers isn’t so bad.
I have high standards for our marketing and sales teams. My KPIs and status reports are a little less cut-and-dry than your typical (separate) sales team and marketing team.
I’ve written before about the importance of inbound marketing, how buyers have changed. How authentic thought leadership today is more important than ever before. And I also wrote that potential customers on the end of the phone line expect salespeople to be knowledgeable and professional.
Our new BDR team has been here for just over a month, and in that time he’s already helped our content marketing efforts by being more active on social media. He also works to build bridges between the customer journey from prospect to opportunity.
And it’s been one month.
Inbound marketing is a great strategy, but it can be even more effective when combined with inbound sales. This means that an inbound salesperson has the responsibility of identifying prospects and guiding them through their decision-making process.
If this sounds similar to a traditional sales process, it’s because the modern inbound sales team is not very different. There are two key areas where you will see the greatest difference between these teams.
1) Inbound sales teams focus more on the buyer than the seller.
2) Inbound salespeople are more personalized than outbound. They provide a better experience to the customer by personalizing their work.
The first thing I had our new BDR team do was study the buyer personas. They are fictional representations of your customers and employees, so they can help you to be a better salesperson.
Next, I had him read through all of our content. He was also supposed to talk with the MQLs who downloaded from us before and ask them questions about what they were looking for in an ebook.
In the end, he was comfortable with our story and could speak to what each buyer persona would be bringing in terms of pain points.
He had more in-depth conversations with the MQLs. He would call them and talk about what they read, or he would email them articles that were relevant to their interests.
What this means is that the salesperson has to make a certain number of MQLs (which are also called “qualifying appointments”). Once they do, then they can move on and either have a demo or deeper discovery meeting.
I realized that it’s not about the seller, but rather the buyer. Our inbound BDR team has been able to add a lot of value for our prospects beyond what we can do with marketing. The result is a more personalized product demo and shortened sales cycle as well as time for account executives to focus on helping each individual prospect.
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