The pandemic sent shockwaves of change throughout our market as businesses slashed budgets, laid off hundreds, and reprioritized future investments. BDRs need to be more agile and adaptive than ever before.
Gone are the days when buyer behaviors and needs changed every few years. Now, they’re changing quarterly, or even faster. There’s no guarantee that messaging that generated results six months ago will resonate today.
Prospects have more information at their disposal than ever, and they have high expectations for receiving personalized customer experiences. Alongside this is the ever-revolving door of new trends, demands, and new goals that prospects now rally around.
The only way to keep up is to embrace change and stay current with your prospecting. We know it’s not always easy, so here are four tips on how to keep things fresh.
1. Curiosity Cultivates ‘The Current’
Throughout my Sales Development career, I’ve noticed that curiosity is often overlooked as a hire-worthy characteristic. Some folks think that qualities like hard work, perseverance, and coachability should come first.
Curiosity deserves way more attention.
It’s a big reason why 6sense BDRs are always on their game. They’re constantly thinking about new avenues to take to earn even more success.
For instance, remaining curious through the pandemic led our BDRs to experiment with creating LinkedIn videos as a replacement for some emails and calls they would’ve otherwise made. These LinkedIn videos were novel. They caught the attention of prospects. And they earned BDRs more meetings on LinkedIn than ever before.
It’s true that the BDRs’ messages could’ve reached prospects through traditional channels. But by thinking outside the box and using a tactic that made sense for the times, our BDRs earned a new level of engagement.
Curiosity and a growth mindset are things that should be encouraged in all BDRs’ prospecting.
What small steps can your team take to prioritize staying up-to-date?
2. Having Regular TONE Meetings
Every week, I conduct a TONE meeting with my BDR team. As you might guess, this is how we set the “tone” or expectations for the week ahead. TONE stands for…
- Targets: Where do you currently stand with prospects?
- Objectives: What are you committing to this week?
- New: What tactics or strategies are you testing? What are the methods behind them? What are the key takeaways?
- Execution: What’s your execution strategy to hit your numbers and quotas?
TONE meetings usually last about 30 minutes and pack a real punch in value for the time. While they’re important for many reasons, I want to highlight the impact that the “New” in TONE has. “New” requires every BDR to come to TONE meetings with a fresh tactic and/or strategy that they’ll test for the week.
These new practices don’t have to be terribly disruptive, but they must relate to staying current with prospects’ desires today. This might mean testing a new subject line to include in a prospect email, or finding an interesting way to stand out on social media.
Even when the changes seem small, they make a monumental difference in encouraging BDRs to remain curious, be creative, and spark new ideas in one another that have a big-picture impact.
3. Refresh Your Cadences
While TONE meetings keep the ball rolling, in-depth quarterly cadence refreshes are a must. You never want your cadences to go stale. The market is constantly evolving. People adapt. And so do their expectations.
That means a cadence that worked great this quarter may not have the same success two or three quarters down the road.
At 6sense, we scrutinize the effectiveness of every cadence every quarter. A key reason why we’re able to manage this is that all of our cadences have intention behind them. Cadences are — and should be — created based on specific goals, not at random. Knowing the intention behind each cadence will better allow you to assess its impact and find new ways to enhance its execution.
During our quarterly reviews, each cadence is assessed for strengths and weaknesses. We ask questions like:
- How can we correct the shortcomings of the cadence?
- How might its strengths be translated to meet current needs?
- What characteristics can keep it successful in the upcoming quarter?
These are questions I encourage you to ask yourself and members of your BDR team. If deeper conversations like these aren’t already happening, schedule those quarterly meetings now to make them a priority when the quarter concludes.
4. The Power of Value Cards
We use something called value cards to keep our prospecting relevant at 6sense. Value cards are statements we create for each persona based on trending keywords. They allow us to message content in relevant ways to match our personas’ interests.
Let’s say the trending keyword “predictive analytics” might be discussed with a Marketing Ops leader within the context of data segmentation capabilities. However, a CMO might care more about its focused spending proficiency.
Value cards are an easy way to stay current with your prospecting. Like your cadences, they should be updated quarterly.
This might sound like a big to-do list, but it isn’t. You only have to update value cards with keywords that are trending right now. After all, there’s no point in going down the rabbit hole and creating cards for words that your prospects are no longer searching for.
When you adapt to the needs of your prospects, your interactions with them become more meaningful … and they drive more success for your business.
Conclusion
The desires of our prospects represent the heartbeat of our sales strategy. BDRs must sync to their rhythm and constantly ask themselves how we’re changing to meet the current climate of our market’s landscape.
There’s truly no time like the present to make sure you’re:
- Prioritizing your efforts to stay current (such as TONE Meetings & quarterly cadence/value card refreshes)
- Encouraging yourself and other BDRs to get curious
- Thinking outside the box in smart ways (such as LinkedIn videos vs. certain emails during the pandemic)
