I worked as a sales development representative (SDR) at IBM for the first five years of my sales career. I learned then (and appreciated even more as an account executive) that SDRs are often the unsung heroes of high-performance sales teams. I still appreciate the critical role that SDRs play in gathering account intelligence and building credibility with campaign responders when they call or email me when my research crosses paths with their campaigns.
My experience in this role provided me with a sales development process and a foundation of sales skills. As my career progressed, I often applied the ice-breaking and credibility-building skills I learned as an SDR to be a more successful inside sales and field sales rep.
I learned how to:
- Build rapport and engagement with prospects.
- To use value-based selling techniques.
- Actively listen to prospects and customers for signals.
- Ask questions and handle objections.
- Be self-aware of when I needed the help of more experienced colleagues to close deals.
In this post, I’ll define what SDR sales are and what an SDR is. Next, we’ll dive into the skills every sales development rep needs to master.
Table of Contents
What Is SDR Sales?
An SDR sales team drives business growth for companies in industries like SaaS by identifying and nurturing potential leads. By focusing on SDR sales strategies, companies can streamline their lead generation processes and improve overall sales performance.
Next, let’s review what SDRs do and how their responsibilities differ from other sales roles.
What Is an SDR?
A sales development representative is a sales or marketing team member who is responsible for prospect outreach and lead qualification related to inbound marketing campaigns. They are often confused with business development representatives (BDRs) who develop leads through outbound prospecting within a defined territory or industry.
As an inside sales team member, an SDR focuses on outbound prospecting, moving leads through the pipeline, and qualifying the leads they connect with. While SDRs don’t close deals, they help sales reps by determining whether a lead will be an ideal customer fit.
SDRs are measured on their ability to move leads through the sales pipeline. They focus on nurturing quality leads over closing deals. On the other hand, sales reps are measured on their ability to close deals that meet or exceed their quota for a given time period. Although the two are different, these roles rely on each other to meet their individual and business goals.
From start to finish, the inside sales team structure functions like this:
- The marketing team sends lead information to the SDRs.
- The SDRs are responsible for qualifying and nurturing leads until they’re ready to purchase.
- Sales reps take over at this stage to position the right products at the right time to close the deal.
This workflow is simple and serves as the foundation for most sales operations.
There are eleven essential skills that will help you succeed as an SDR. If you're an SDR, bookmark this list for reference. If you’re a manager, you’ll want to share this list with your team in your next sales meeting.
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- A three-step objection handling framework
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- Video Prospecting
- Highly Customized Outreach
- Active Listening and Adaptability
- Strong Follow-Up
- Coachability
- Self-Awareness
- Organization
- Curiosity
- Relationship-Building
- Resilience
- Overcoming Objections
1. Video Prospecting
Video prospecting has gained popularity over the last few years, and it’s popular for good reason.
Simply put, video prospecting is customized outreach in a short video clip, usually lasting less than two minutes. Unlike a phone call or an email, the prospect can connect with you on a more personal level without the time commitment of scheduling a Zoom call. An SDR doesn’t need to be a technical master or Oscar-worthy movie star to create effective videos — you just need to be comfortable on screen.
At HubSpot, we've seen great results with video prospecting. Our team uses Vidyard — an easy-to-use tool that lets you quickly create videos using your webcam and screen share function. You can embed video clips in your emails, LinkedIn posts, Google Slides decks, and even HubSpot Sales Hub.
If you are experiencing on-camera fatigue or camera shyness or want to perfect your video delivery at scale, you can even create an AI avatar that (according to Vidyard) looks and sounds like you.
There are many more software options for video prospecting, including Loom and Soapbox by Wistia. I’ve tried these apps for giving guided demo tours and sharing recorded presentations. They enrich emails and LinkedIn posts with more humanity.
Pro tip: Practice your video skills by creating short, engaging clips to interview yourself, deliver value with a quick tip, and ask to schedule a call. Review the video and take note of your delivery and how it might come across to a viewer.
You can also optimize your process by monitoring the performance of different types of videos to see what prospects prefer best. The more videos you make, the more efficient your workflow will be. In time, you'll be able to whip up customized videos like they're emails.
2. Highly Customized Outreach
As an SDR, balancing quantity and quality when prospecting can be tricky. You want to build a healthy pipeline for your sales reps, but you know that connecting with qualified leads takes time.
Brandon Kirsch, a sales manager at HubSpot, balanced quality and quantity in his outreach efforts. Emails were personalized and timely for the prospect and addressed an immediate need. Here's an example:
Hi Michael,
I hope this email finds you well! Based on my research on LinkedIn, you seem to be heading marketing initiatives that focus on Dunder Mifflin's overall growth strategy.
After doing some research on Dunder Mifflin, a bunch of things stood out to me as reasons to have a timely conversation about how inbound marketing HubSpot could help:
- Employees at Dunder Mifflin have explored our all-in-one solution before, however, the timing wasn't right.
- You‘re currently using a few different marketing tools—A, B, C, D, and E. I’m curious how things are going with them and if you'd be open to a conversation about HubSpot and using an all-in-one marketing automation platform.
- Looks like you understand the importance of content marketing inbound marketing based on the blogs, white papers, & testimonials — but there‘s a huge missed opportunity because it doesn’t seem to be gated.
- You've got “buy now” and “order” options on the site, but you're missing out on converting at least 90% of your total website traffic to the site.
- Here at HubSpot, we've had some exciting product updates to the marketing & sales platforms as of January 2019.
Are you interested in connecting sometime this week? Feel free to book 15 minutes with me here [insert link].
Thanks in advance,
Brandon
Pro tip: Develop a scalable process for writing customized emails and prospect research. LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help you gather important information about a business in one glance. Once your prospecting blitz is underway, a tool like HubSpot’s free meeting scheduler can help you plan calls to connect.
3. Active Listening and Adaptability
How can SDRs continue to add value to a sales process that is becoming more automated every year — especially in the prospecting stages?
In my opinion, the best way for an SDR to demonstrate their value-add is to adopt active listening techniques. A chatbot might be able to qualify a lead, but it can’t ask layered sales questions or listen to information as well as a human being (at least not yet). The interaction between a prospect and an SDR should be genuine and helpful — not robotic and forced.
No matter what your company sells, you must be highly attuned to phrases that indicate a prospect could be a good fit for your company’s products or services. This is where active listening comes in. An adaptable and empathetic SDR focuses on gathering valuable information that will help them move a prospect further down the pipeline rather than checking lead qualification boxes.
For example, my sales team had a weekly SDR “film club” where we would review a seasoned SDR’s recorded call. In one of the call reviews, this SDR discovered that the prospect's company offered a freemium version of its product. The prospect confirmed the annual value of an average new customer, and the SDR immediately moved on to the next topic.
Swing and … miss. The SDR could have explored the following with his prospect:
- How many new freemium users a month do you generate?
- How do you nurture relationships with freemium users? Customers?
- What percentage of freemium users convert to paid users?
- What are common triggers for freemium users to upgrade?
- How do you re-engage users who used the free product once several months ago?
The answers to these questions would have been crucial to understanding how to solve a major pain point for the prospect. In general, these questions can uncover a wealth of information about virtually any business that offers a free or reduced-price trial of their product. These questions help an SDR understand not only the opportunities within the prospect’s company but they also help the prospect reflect on things they may have been putting off for another time simply because no solution existed yet.
I remember on one occasion, I was working on an outbound campaign, connecting with customers who my company wanted to migrate off their legacy platform to the modern SaaS technology. I called the CTO of a government agency, who surprisingly answered the phone on the second ring. We had several interesting conversations, and I used active listening skills that I had just learned in sales methodology training.
The customer was very interested in migrating to the latest technology and had managed the modern platform in his former job. Yet he had some public sector procurement policies to follow before he could invest in the migration.
We built a strong relationship, and fortunately for me, I moved to a field sales role where I could close this deal, which ended up being a seven-figure sale, including services and applications. The CTO told me that I was the only person he liked working with at my company because I listened to his needs and was responsive and proactive in meeting his expectations. He also said he realized he could be demanding to work with and had been voted the most difficult customer by another IT firm. I think I learned more from working with this customer than any other throughout my sales career.
As you can see from my story above, practicing active listening means being adaptable — pivoting away from a prepared checklist and recognizing when an opportunity to dig deeper presents itself. A successful SDR understands the value of being present and having a real conversation.
Pro tip: To improve your active listening skills, level up your sales conversations by:
- Taking notes, and telling the prospect you are doing so.
- Regularly confirming important statements the prospect makes.
- Monitoring your body language so you’re not signalling boredom or lack of attention.
Active listening means knowing when it’s time for you to speak up and when it’s time to sit back and listen.
When you’re an active listener, you engage with the prospect/lead and gather the pivotal information you need before you send them further down the sales pipeline.
4. Strong Follow-Up
Ideally, SDRs want to speak with a prospect on the phone, but sometimes, a voicemail is the next best option.
But leaving a good voicemail is harder than it sounds.
In a short amount of time, you have to entice a prospect you've never spoken with to call you back. Some people like to be concise: “Hi, I'm [Salesperson] from [Company]. I would like to speak with you about X strategy. Give me a call back at XXX-XXX-XXXX.”
Personally, I like to add a snippet of value to this equation: “I saw you are building a new manufacturing facility in X. I would like to tell you how we helped our customer, Dunder Mifflin, manage their production and distribution growth.”
Leaving a good voicemail is an indispensable skill for an SDR, and thus requires practice.
Pro tip: Don't simply go through the motions so you can log activity in your CRM — be committed to quality touchpoints across all the activities you complete to move a prospect through the pipeline.
Regardless of how you follow up, it‘s important to always provide value so you engage the prospect in a relevant way, especially since you want to recapture their attention. A voicemail where you say something like, "Hey, just looking to connect again!" isn’t as enticing and inviting of a callback as sharing a new piece of news or content related to the prospect's industry.
5. Coachability
Coachability is one of the most essential traits an SDR can have. Confidence is important, but an SDR’s ego can cloud their ability to receive and implement candid feedback. The best SDRs proactively seek out coaching from high-performing peers and crave honest feedback from their managers. Getting real-time feedback is best, but you can also build out a list of all the questions or challenges you faced in a given week and debrief them with your manager during a scheduled one-on-one.
I had some great managers as an SDR, yet I admit there were times when I wasn’t as receptive to their coaching guidance as I should have been. I remember times when it was difficult to connect with someone on the phone, which made getting into a coachable mindset challenging. It felt like the only coaching I could apply was voicemail etiquette. Yet, on the occasions I did speak with a live prospect, I was more confident navigating through discovery calls to qualify leads.
Pro tip: A great way to champion coachability is to seek coaching and development opportunities. You can attend sales training and ask others (like mentors or coworkers) for feedback on your performance to evaluate your skills and better your processes. If it’s challenging to receive feedback, consider that you and the person giving it have one common goal: improving the sales process as a whole.
6. Self-Awareness
As an SDR, you should be aware of your strengths and weaknesses and let them guide the technical depth or business breadth of your calls. It makes the prospect feel they are speaking with an advisor who wants to understand their business challenges — not just a telemarketer. When you know what you’re amazing at and where you can grow, you can create strategies for dealing with a bad call or rejection.
For example, an SDR who lacks organization skills might create a physical checklist they can keep handy for every call so they don’t miss any steps. An SDR who is really good at building rapport might need to set a timer for each call so they don’t spend too much time with a single prospect and get off track.
Pro tip: Self-awareness will help you and your sales manager analyze your performance, including the wins and setbacks, and reflect on what went well and what didn't.
Self-aware SDRs will ask for feedback from managers and colleagues to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for growth. They’ll also take the time to review their past performance, like sales call transcripts, to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for growth.
7. Organization
Sales processes vary from person to person, but adopting and sticking with them is critical to staying organized. Schedule management helps SDRs manage their days and prioritize the activities that are key to their success (e.g., email outreach, calls, and meetings.)
When you’re organized, it’s easier to keep track of your leads, qualify your pipeline, and design a workflow that helps you nurture important relationships that lead to closed deals down the road.
Pro tip: Organizing your day-to-day sales processes will help you master your outreach cadence so you can have thoughtful and meaningful prospect interactions. You could write out a to-do list to prioritize your tasks for the day and plan for upcoming ones. Or integrate your Google or Outlook calendar and use the meeting scheduling function of your CRM and keep track of key dates in your process.
8. Curiosity
Successful SDRs are curious and eager to learn. Being curious about learning a new product, industry, or organizational knowledge can help them in their current role, but it will also help them as they grow in their career.
SDRs should initially have a solid foundation of their company's products and services and clearly understand their buyer personas and the everyday challenges prospects face. This helps them to position the strengths of their company and its solutions relative to prospect needs and competitive solutions in the marketplace. However, they should be guided on how deep they dive into customer needs and solution details before passing an opportunity to a more senior salesperson.
When I was an SDR at IBM, I always asked lots of questions in meetings and training sessions. My colleagues relied on me to ask the questions they wanted to but were concerned they might look silly for asking them. I probably tested the adage, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” several times. However, my curiosity was an asset as an SDR, and I think it is today as an avid researcher and writer.
Pro tip: Curiosity is something that you can build, and you can remain curious as an SDR if you continuously seek out new leads to broaden your pipeline, take the time to prospect and learn about leads, ask questions during conversations, and commit to continuous learning on the job.
Gathering new information is relatively easy and often free through internal resources offered by your organization, online research through blogs (like HubSpot), training sessions from sales professionals, industry events, and meetings with colleagues. Learning is a continual process that great SDRs should prioritize.
9. Relationship-Building
Effective SDRs are able to build genuine, trusted relationships with prospects. They should prepare them for your company’s multi-tiered sales process before turning them over to your account manager for deal closure.
I found the best way to build relationships with prospects was to help them understand what an SDR’s role and responsibilities are and to assure them that I would be their advocate.
To be a successful relationship-builder, you must be able to communicate with a wide variety of people across multiple channels. Whether you are connecting with a contact over email, presenting to a prospect in a virtual meeting, or sending them a pre-recorded video, you’ll want to clearly communicate your points and ideas that keep them engaged.
It’s also important for SDRs to have sufficient emotional intelligence to connect and empathize with prospects and understand their goals and needs.
Pro tip: A great way to become an effective relationship builder is to build rapport with prospects. It’s easier to do so if you’ve researched their business and their role within it so you can have conversations centered entirely around them and their needs. Finding common ground during your research can help you break the ice with casual conversations about your shared interests.
10. Resilience
There‘s no doubt that SDRs have a tough job. Unlike sales reps, whose main goal is to close deals, most SDRs don’t get that type of glory.
I remember challenging days from my time as an SDR when it was difficult to get prospects on the phone or respond to voicemails or emails. I was doing A-B testing on my voicemail scripts, icebreaker lines, and emails before I knew what A-B testing was. I was fortunate enough to get some great solution sales methodology training during my years as an SDR.
In addition to the hard skills we’ve reviewed, maintaining a positive mindset is a soft skill that — for many people — can’t be learned in a book. Resilience takes practice. If you're flat or discouraged one day, it can resonate over the phone. Your prospect will pick up on your low energy and may consider it a red flag about working with your company.
At the same time, bad calls happen to the best of us. Recovering and learning from them is challenging yet necessary for progressing in your sales career. Whether a prospect was rude or you made a mistake, it’s okay to feel frustrated. However, allowing those feelings to derail your motivation for the rest of the day will negatively impact your next batch of calls.
Pro tip: Resilience is not necessarily something that can be taught, but becoming more resilient as an SDR means:
- Understanding that a “no” isn’t personal.
- Knowing that having a bad day doesn’t define your skills.
- Reframing setbacks as an opportunity to figure out how to improve the situation instead of getting stuck in it.
- Practicing objection handling.
Don’t let these temporary roadblocks ruin your day — or the prospect’s day either. Resilience is crucial for keeping your head in the game. Developing this ability now will also be invaluable down the road when you have to recover from losing a big deal without skipping a beat.
11. Overcoming Objections
This last skill is critical to sales development rep success: objection handling. 35% of sales reps say that overcoming price objections is their biggest challenge, but that doesn’t have to include you.
Overcoming objections is a skill that most reps develop over time. They learn the solutions their business offers and develop an understanding of their value and how they work. When you can position these solutions to eliminate a pain point for the prospect, you start to develop trust — which is a key factor that influences whether they’ll buy or not.
I discovered that my best discovery calls were when I asked open-ended questions in the beginning and allowed prospects to describe their current state and challenges. I would wait for the prospect to fully describe their needs and priorities before describing how my company could address their needs.
I found that a better understanding of the big picture helped me to thoroughly address objections and how my company (and possibly its partners) could help them address their business challenges. Interrupting to discuss product features and functions often could take the conversation off on a tangent that wasn’t an effective use of the prospect’s time (or mine).
Pro tip: Overcoming objections is so critical to an SDR’s success that we developed an entire resource dedicated to the practice. If you don’t have time to check it out now, download it below and save it for later.
Handling objections can be one of the biggest obstacles sales reps overcome in their careers. Download our guide, Prospecting and Objection Handling: Templates and Best Practices for Sales Success, which offers templates and best practices you can start using today in your calls and emails.
You can also implement the practices I’ve mentioned on this list, like gathering peer feedback on how you handled objections, or even partnering with more experienced SDRs and salespeople to learn more about how they handle objections and move on from them.
Improve Your SDR Skills
Consistently practicing these SDR skills will help you master them in no time. Your learning opportunities don’t stop here, though. We’ve got even more great tips, templates, and tools for sales prospecting and objection handling that you’ll want to keep in your back pocket. Your inside sales team will thank you.
Free Sales Objection Handling Guide
An easy-to-use guide full of templates, best practices, and strategies for salespeople and managers looking to close deals.
- Data-backed behaviors top sellers use to combat pushback
- How to write effective meeting invitations
- A three-step objection handling framework
- And More!
Download Free
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