Tech
A Guide to SDR Tools
Sales intelligence solutions are software platforms designed to help organizations to increase sales by improving the executive, sales and marketing staff’s access to data. Sales intelligence is a relatively new job function which is based on both business performance and technology.
Before I get into the tools themselves, I want to introduce a very important member of every sales team: sales development representative (SDR). It’s where the SDR tools get the name from—in case you were wondering.
A sales development rep is a team member whose focus is on prospecting and lead research and qualification. All these technicalities are just a fancy way of saying that they essentially determine if prospects would be good leads.
They have two main roles:
- Connecting with as many leads as possible.
- Educating and qualifying said leads.
What Do These Tools Do?
They essentially are sales intelligence solutions that help your business through sales development. Toolkits like these are super important even with the elite of the elite SDRs working behind the scenes. The right tools and the right integration into your operation can move leads faster through the pipeline and help increase revenue.
Types of Tools
CRMs
Top of the list is CRMs. You can look at a CRM as a collective digital memory for your organization. It is illogical to expect every SDR to remember how they interacted with every prospect and how it went and that is why a CRM is essential in the sales process. Furthermore, it is important to store that information for future reference.
Even when working with a small sales team, a CRM is still important when it comes to shortening the sales cycles. With the aforementioned small sales team, manual data management may be possible although it doesn’t help in shortening the sales cycles.
Organizations have been breaking away from spreadsheets and unorganized shorthand notes and stepping into the world of these sales intelligence solutions.
A proper CRM can help provide deep insights into the efficacy of your sales teams as well as the health of your company.
Outreach Automation
In sales, setting up meetings and making contact with prospects is all part of the process. An organization can interact with prospects multiple times over different.
It is clear to see just how tenuous doing this manually can be. There are SDR tools to help in automating trivial tasks like this and they include:
Auto dialers
Want to get prospects on the phone faster? Auto dialers are the way to go. They reduce downtime by helping your team get on the phone faster and reducing the delays between calls. You can even connect these tools with your CRM so phone calls are generated based on numbers within your database.
Analytics
Analytics help you measure the success or failure of your approaches in different aspects like marketing and sales. You can use analytics to track the progress of SDRs and see who’s most productive or who has the highest close rate.
Email Templates
Email templates are customizable to allow your teams to generate and send outreach emails to new prospects just like that. They cover everything from thank-you emails to post-call recaps.
Lead Sourcing
If you have done sales, you know it takes more than a phonebook and a couple of cold calls to secure leads. What you need above all is to stand out from the competition.
The way to do this is having high quality data on the prospects, high quality in the sense you didn’t just scrape the data last minute from a website or something akin. The reason why this is not a good idea is the data may be ancient – some organizations forget to update their websites.
There are SDR tools that can scour market intelligence and sales data that is industry-specific and up-to-date, hence actionable.