There may have been a time when you contacted every new lead. As you’re starting your business, it’s important to learn everything you can from your early leads and customers — How did they hear about you? What are their challenges? What do they like and dislike about your product or service?
But, as your business grows, and your sales and marketing become more sophisticated, it’s not realistic to talk to every new lead. Instead, you need to prioritize sales development to identify the leads that are worth pursuing at a deeper level.
Sales development is the process and/or team that focuses on the early stages of the sales cycle, including customer research, prospecting, initial engagement, and lead qualification. Sales development reps (SDR) focus on outbound prospecting and don’t have certain quotas to meet each month.
Instead, the SDR team focuses on moving leads through the sales pipeline. They may receive a list of leads from marketing, which they use to call and email prospects to qualify which leads should be handed over to a sales rep. This allows sales reps, who do have quotas, to spend their time with prospects who are most likely to make a purchase.
SDRs use a variety of sales development tools to help with this process, like auto-dialers, scheduling tools, email automation, CRM software, and more.
Sales tools help you increase efficiency and productivity by eliminating manual, repetitive tasks. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of possible sales tools available, making it challenging to figure out which ones are best for you.
To help identify the most effective sales tools, we’ve bucketed the most common sales development tools by categories and highlighted one or more options for that category. Here’s what we found:
Sales development teams perform repetitive tasks by nature; each time a new lead comes in, they’ll need to start over and complete the same qualifying process again. While you can’t completely eliminate this repetition from the job, you can make the process easier with sales tools.
Streamlining and automating these manual tasks not only make your sales team happier, but they’ll also be more productive.
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