Whether you refer to them as BDRs or SDRs, business and sales development reps are a big deal. Eager, ambitious, and scrappy, BDRs are a valuable resource for building the pipeline your sales team needs and ultimately, driving revenue. Despite how important BDRs are to an organization’s bottom line, according to TOPO, only 48% consistently hit their quota.
Curious to learn more about what’s not working for BDRs, 6sense conducted our own survey to gain additional insights. According to our research, nearly half (46%) of BDRs are prospecting accounts that are not an ideal fit, and 57% of BDRs receive negative responses when engaging with a prospect. This indicates they aren’t targeting the right personas that are in-market at the right time and require better insights to prospect more successfully to drive predictable revenue growth.
BDRs are stuck in cold-calling limbo, hoping to catch a buyer at that exact moment between learning and decision-making. However, BDRs are often either calling too early in the buying journey to engage with sales or responding to an inbound request, which is likely too late to influence. The ideal engagement window has passed and our BDRs march on through their lists of cold leads to make more cold calls.
A recent 6sense survey found that BDRs spend about one-third (31%) of their time on unproductive activities rather than productive activities that allows them to close more deals by engaging the right prospects at the right time. Meetings, administrative work, and bad prospecting top the list of time-sucking unproductive tasks.
If you think about how much the B2B buying process has evolved in the past few years, it’s no surprise that cold outreach doesn’t cut it anymore. B2B buyers are drowning in sales calls, voicemails, and a swamped list of unread emails in their inbox. To make matters worse, B2B selling is more fragmented than ever. B2B purchases are now made by a committee of nine or more, with varying degrees of involvement or decision power, rather than an individual consumer. Combine all of these factors and you get a mechanism working against the classic BDR playbook.
Hold up! Don’t go running around the office unplugging phones quite yet! No cold calling doesn’t mean no calling period. BDRs still need to be reaching out and making dials, but only when armed with specific information and insights so they can have a well-informed conversation with a prospect that is ready to engage.
It’s up to Marketing to drive awareness, educate prospects prior to BDR outreach and warm up accounts as they progress from target to awareness to consideration and beyond. Armed with tools and technology. BDRs can then connect with accounts that are warmed and ready to buy with confidence and ease. B2B buyers have changed, but so have B2B selling tools. Adopting a modern tech stack is critical to significantly scale and accelerate revenue efforts while also delivering hyper-personalized, hyper-relevant multi-channel experiences for each and every account.
When an account does cross over to in-market, moving from the consideration stage to decision or purchase, Marketing has warmed the account up and they are ready for engagement from BDRs. As a result, 6sense prioritizes our outbound sales efforts on accounts we know are ready to engage and have the highest likelihood to generate pipeline, rather than wasting time on cold calls and cold leads.
Marketing already has the tools to help BDRs develop persona-based messaging. We do this by using existing customer data to make intelligent assumptions about their needs based on the keywords they have been researching anonymously in the Dark Funnel.
BDRs take insights from the Dark Funnel about a given prospect or buying team to build persona-based messages specific to the topic to provide value. Using value cards, Sales and Marketing pair trending keywords with personas to develop value propositions that are tailored to each roles responsibilities. BDRs then have the ability to quickly deliver personalized value to the different people across the buying team.
The 6sense ABM Orchestration Platform gives BDRs the insights they need in order to be successful. When an account moves from awareness to consideration, Marketing begins building and enriching a dossier on that account, including information about the buying team to better equip the BDR for engagement. This automated process helps to scale personalization efforts across your entire BDR team, regardless of the number of reps you have.
Given the proper support and access to the right technology, BDRs can work smarter, not harder. BDRs can confidently prioritize accounts and know how to best interact with prospects throughout the buying journey. 6sense then automates and alerts BDRs when prospects are ready to engage or take a meeting, so they know exactly when to reach out and with what tailored approach.
Ready to warm up accounts and better enable your BDRs to achieve success? 6sense is here to help! Check out our full ebook, BDRs are a BFD, that includes the entirety of our research, on the 6sense Content Hub!
