If I Started My Career Over As a Business Development Rep Today

I have been reading a lot of Reddit forums lately around these BDR’s, SDR’s, or inside sales reps making hundreds of cold calls a day. First, let me get this out in the open, I am making any bold claims that cold calling is dead. The stance that I am taking is that I think it should be much more targeted, focused, and prepared with research.

One specific Reddit conversation mentioned that this specific SDR has less than 1% success rate when reaching out to prospective customers. This got me thinking about how I would attack the role of a Business Development representative if I had to start my career over. I can tell you one thing, regardless of what my manager said, I would not aimlessly pick up the phone and dial.

Let’s dive into some of the strategies I would put into place if I had to start my career over as a brand-new Business Development representative.

Phase 1 - Days 0-14:

I would focus completely on learning our current customer stories and why they purchased our solution, what the value was, and what business impact our solution had on specific metrics or processes (reduced costs by 20% or increased ramp time by 20%).

My next task would be to understand and properly group my accounts into “buckets”. I usually work within “A”, “B”, and “C” account buckets. Here is my criteria.

“A” Accounts: These are accounts that already have a relationship with us that we are trying to expand, or are the perfect customer (industry, vertical) for the solution we provide.

“B” Accounts: Prospective customers who have had an interest in our solution before (look at previous open opportunities), or might have leadership changes, changes in strategy, or folks who have used our solution recently joined this company. They might not be the perfect fit for our ideal customer, and maybe the industry isn’t perfect, but still, you can see the benefit of your solution.

“C” Accounts: This bucket is reserved for all the other accounts on your list. This is where the majority of these prospects will be on a Marketing nurturing campaign.

Phase 2 - Days 15-29:

This is where you are going to heavily research your top “A” list accounts. If they are public research their annual report, 10K (we wrote an article on why this is important), as well as look up your prospect’s C-suite and interviews they might have been published in. You are trying to find metrics to impact or initiatives to attach to.

Speak to the account team who works on this with you and ask for their point of view on where to spend your time. I would also get very familiar with your CRM and understand what previous opportunities there were at the account. Many times the timing wasn’t right, or the initiative could have been deprioritized.

The entire goal of these exercises is to gather a running document of notes on why your solution is a good fit for your prospects, as well as a point of view on how you can help them, and where you have helped other companies with similar problems or initiatives.

Phase 3 - Day 29+

Now that you have bucketed your accounts into your “A”, “B”, and “C” tiers, understand our top customer stories and the value associated, and started to form a compelling point of view as to why your top “A” accounts need your solution, it’s time to start with outreach.

You next goal is to put together a “Persona” of the typical buyer of your solution. Is it in IT, Service, Sales, Marketing, Commerce, HR, Finance, Supply Chain etc. Once you have identifed your buyer persona, then the goal is to find a short list of the most important people you would want to contact (usually between 3-5 people). Write hand written notes to all of them, and these notes would include your understanding of their company, their problem/initiative your solution can help with, and where else you have done this. THEN you call them (notice I didn’t use “Cold Call” here) because you have already sent them some basic information.

For the rest of your prospects within the top “A” and “B” companies you are trying to get meetings with, there are a ton of strategies here, and see a few of my favorites below:

Linkedin

Outreach Strategies

Leverage A.I.

Now there are many other strategies to deploy here, but this is how I would spend my time, and the stragegies I would deploy. I promise you that my response rate with these strategies will be much higher than 1%.

If you are new to the SaaS business development role, I encourage you to leverage these strategies. Happy Selling!