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Quick Guide: Empowering BDRs to Help Them Thrive

Get more out of your BDRs, and help them win, even amidst a recession. The key is to hone in on the shrinking pool of companies that are still ready to buy. Here’s how.

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10

Chapters

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Focus Time and Energy On Your Most Likely Buyers

Chapter 3

Save Time & Utilize AI to Nurture Your Lower Priority Accounts​

Chapter 4

6sense Can Help You Find Buyers

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

Pretty much everyone is predicting a recession, and it’s already impacting marketers and sellers. As potential B2B buyers re-evaluate investments and slow their purchasing plans, it’s no longer merely efficient and effective to understand which potential customers are still in-market — it’s a matter of downright survival. Unless your marketing is spot-on, inbound leads are likely to slow. And you can no longer afford to ask your BDRs to cold call every conceivable customer. That’s how you burn out good people and exacerbate the challenge of finding and keeping talent. Your challenge is to help your BDRs hit aggressive sales goals in spite of:
  • Fewer B2B buyers: The percentage of ideal customers that in-market will shrink as companies pull back spending to preserve cash.
  • Tighter budgets: Expect your own marketing budget and other expenses to come under scrutiny.
  • Labor constraints: If you’re lucky, your team will avoid layoffs — but new hiring may be impossible.
Brass tacks: You’re going to be asked to maximize productivity without demoralizing your team.  Fortunately, there are always buyers — even during recessions. The trick is finding them without blowing your (potentially shrinking) marketing budget, and in spite of a limited headcount. If you’re relying on brute force mass marketing and outreach to fill your funnel, you’ll have a rough few quarters. Here are ways to make the most of your limited resources to maximize ROI, keep your BDRs happy, and maintain growth:

Chapter 2

Focus Time and Energy On Your Most Likely Buyers

Drawing up an Ideal Customer Profile and calculating your Total Addressable Market does not give you an accurate picture of the total sales opportunity available to you. Instead, you need insights into these key areas:

1. Know Who is Considering a Purchase

It’s critical to identify which of your ideal customers are in-market, which means they’re:

  • Actively researching your brand,
  • Looking at your competitors, or
  • Reviewing solutions for the problems you can solve

When your BDRs can focus on customers already showing buying intent, they have a much better chance of closing deals and earning commissions. When you can also provide clues about what customers are thinking — before the first call — your BDRs have another huge advantage.

By focusing on in-market accounts and capturing insights into their buyer journey, you greatly enhance win rates and morale.

Most of this intent data comes from third-party sites — not on your own. If you’re waiting for people to fill out a contact form on your site, you’ll reach only a tiny fraction of your potential customers who remain in what we call The Dark Funnel™ — where buyers conduct a wealth of anonymous research before they ever speak to a sales representative.

6sense is designed, in part, to help you:

  • Understand who these potential buyers are
  • Flag them for marketing and potential outreach
  • Strategically connect with members of their buying teams

(To get an idea of the quantity and names of the companies currently in-market for your solution, you can use this free In-Market Demand Report. It provides data about the opportunities worth focusing on.)

2. Know Who Is Entering a Critical Buying Stage

By studying intent signals, 6sense can predict the buying stage of a prospect and alert you when they’re likely to be receptive to outreach.

There’s a sweet spot in the Consideration and Purchase stages when BDRs are most likely to convert prospects into opportunities — especially when they leverage data about what prospects have been researching.

3. Know Which Accounts Represent the Best Revenue Opportunities

Knowing which accounts are in-market is great. But knowing which accounts are most likely to generate revenue is magical.

When 6sense customers connect their CRMs and other systems to our revenue platform, our AI studies all available data about their current customers and past deals. It also looks for patterns in the marketing and sales activities that led to those customer acquisitions.

The data is used to:

  • Recommend actions to optimize ROI
  • Understand the value of potential deals in the pipeline
  • Predict the total value of onboarding specific customers
  • Prioritize outreach to customers who are most likely to help you hit or exceed revenue targets

This data gives BDRs their best opportunity to maximize their outreach, hit quotas, and spend more of their time driving revenue for the company and bonuses for themselves.

Chapter 3

Save Time & Utilize AI to Nurture Your Lower Priority Accounts

Focusing on the best accounts is the right call but, paradoxically, BDRs can’t afford to leave stones unturned, either.

Unworked leads are anxiety-inducing for sales teams. You don’t want managing low priority accounts to take precious time away from providing white glove service to your best prospects. But you also shouldn’t leave money on the table or alienate potential customers who never hear from you.

AI can help you reach and nurture your lower priority accounts to surface ones that are ready to enter a purchase conversation. 6sense recently acquired Saleswhale, which provides this capability to clients.

It identifies underworked leads and uses AI to send and respond to emails, with a goal of qualifying prospects and either booking a meeting — or handing off hot prospects to the human members of your team.

Chapter 4

6sense Can Help You Find Buyers

To hit sales goals and maintain growth — especially during times of economic downturn — you’ll need to laser focus on the shrinking pool of buyers and effectively reach them with personalized, meaningful pitches.

And you may have to do it with tighter budgets and leaner staffing.

We can help.

6sense recently commissioned a Total Economic Impact (TEI™) study conducted by Forrester Consulting. The study examined the potential ROI a customer can achieve by deploying the 6sense Revenue AI™ solution.

According to the study, organizations using 6sense Revenue AI can achieve:

  • An ROI of 454% over three years
  • Recoup their investment in less than six months
  • With ROI increasing steadily thereafter

For a guided tour of how we can help you grow revenue, book a demo.

Ready to see 6sense in action?

Picture of The 6sense Team

The 6sense Team