You need to grow your pipeline and the way to do that is to have an inside sales/SDR team. You are told that it's easy to startup an inside sales team or team of SDRs. Sure, have your Head of Marketing and Sales figure this out. Easy peasy...they should be able to do this in their sleep! Right?! WRONG!!!
Most CEOs, CMOs, CROs, VPs and Directors of Sales can't start an inside sales/SDR team. Sales and Marketing will fight all day to own the lead process, some think Marketing should own it since they typically own getting inbound leads or sales thinks they know how to target the sales messaging so they should own the group. Figuring out who owns the inside/SDR team is not a one size fits all, there are many factors to consider. There are all of the administration details too like what are the Rules of Engagement who owns what account or territory, nobody ever wants to decide who gets sales credit or who rightfully gets a leads let alone figure out a process for leads with marketing tools. Who should be making the decisions and creating processes?
Do you have a generalist or person that is a doer when it comes to sales and knows how to use the many shades of marketing automation tools along with having roles where you have had to sell internally and externally while hitting sales goals. Typically this role can help model that behavior of the desired role but not set up a permanent and scalable inside sales infrastructure.
Do you want the inside sales team to be a profit or loss center right away, if things are not done corrrectly your Cost per lead can skyrocket and your overhead can double before leads come in and sales get attributed to the inside team.
Most sales leaders typically posts the following job post to start an SDR team and this is not a good idea...this is like finding a needle in the haystack.
Develop, deploy, and lead a best of class team that can unlock the full market potential of our solutions.
Actively grow and manage team’s sales pipeline.
Educate, train, guide and support your team members to develop them into successful account managers; help establish clear career pathing the sales organization.
Understand and implement insight selling / solution selling structure - working closely with the core marketing team to amplify existing campaigns.
Creatively drive to identify new areas to lever new/existing partnerships into additional product and/or service offerings that can generate incremental revenue and margin for the company.
Coach team to identify, prospect, qualify, negotiate and close deals in an aggressive timeframe.Assist with developing business models to analyze and prioritize deals.
So...are you still willing to hire a person that may or may not know what your company or product and has no clue about the true culture or anything about your clients? If you are, your ask is near impossible and set's them up for failure. Oh and by the way who has time to mentor/lead them?
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