There’s no way around it: quality leads are vital for a business to succeed.
From large multinational companies to small start-ups, every business needs leads. But many companies struggle when it comes to generating quality leads. You may have an excellent sales team, but your reps can’t take on all the responsibilities in the sales process, from prospecting to closing. This is where many businesses fail – they expect to win by playing their salespeople at every position.
What they should be doing is specializing the team into different roles. In order to get quality leads, you’ll need to have quality people who specialize in generating and developing leads. BUT, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do all the heavy lifting.
As an outsourcing company, MMCY provides an affordable way to quickly scale up your business – by building your very own remote team of Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). We provide resources for telemarketing, lead generation, appointment setting, and so much more.
One of our clients, a mergers and acquisition firm, already had an established telemarketing unit that was based in the US. However, they wanted to test out a more affordable way to gain new leads and augment their team.
Initially, their focus was helping the bottom line. But there have been other benefits as well. For example, then their US office was hit hard with Covid-19, they had no new sales leads coming in for almost two weeks while their team members recovered.
That’s where having a remote team of sales reps located elsewhere was a huge support. Their remote team kept things running smoothly.
In today’s world that is still facing ongoing challenges from the pandemic, having a remote team is not only smart for your budget but is also a safety net.
We want to share our process and how we helped our client build a scalable, affordable solution that works in partnership with their in-house team. But first, let’s examine what it is SDRs actually do…
What is a Sales Development Representative (SDR)?
At MMCY, we follow a very simple sales development process:
Lead → Qualified lead → Customer
Easy to understand, right? You have leads coming in, you figure out which seems interested, and then you convert them into customers. BUT, how do you know the difference between a ‘lead’ and a ‘qualified lead’? What and who qualifies them?
An SDR is a sales representative that focuses on outreach, outbound prospecting, and lead qualification. SDRs don’t focus on closing business but connecting with as many leads as possible and determining if they’re good customer fits. An SDRs sole responsibility is to move leads through the sales pipeline. They contact every lead and determine who stays and who goes.
If a prospect is a good fit, SDRs schedule the next steps with someone higher in the organization. That could be a higher-level sales rep, an account representative (AR), account executive (AE), or even someone like a business analyst. It truly depends on the client and their individual business model.
SDRs are also responsible for educating and answering questions of potential leads. So essentially, the main job responsibilities of an SDR are:
- Connecting with as many leads as possible
- Educating and qualifying the leads they connect with
For example, one of our clients only works with businesses that meet a certain annual revenue. Our SDR’s are able to quickly assess if the lead meets this threshold or not. By qualifying the lead, they make sure they are only sending quality, warm leads that meet the business’s minimum requirements.
Since SDRs spend a lot of time talking to people, they also need to possess excellent communication skills and be charismatic enough to encourage your leads to learn more about your product or service.
We make sure we provide candidates that speak excellent, easy-to-understand English.
Our Process
As we mentioned earlier, one of our clients (a mergers and acquisition firm) wanted more potential leads. So we built them a remote team that consisted of:
- 3 Telemarketers that make 200 calls a day and aim to get 1-3 warm leads per day.
- 1 Appointment Setter that speaks to the warm leads and prepares them for an appointment with one of our client’s business analysts.
- 1 Virtual Assistant that supports the manager (and will fill in as needed while the manager is on maternity leave)
Our client provided the calling scripts (based on their needs), a list of common sales objections, and examples of how to handle them. They also provided the initial training.
Together, we developed a step-by-step guide for the SDRs to follow daily and outlined the expectations and metrics we would be measuring them against. Each of them was coached on the basics, including the best methods for identifying the right companies to target, finding the emails and phone numbers of the contact person, cleaning up their lists, and enriching the data.
It was the responsibility of our three telemarketers to cold call business owners and deduce if they were qualified leads. They would then upload the qualified leads onto our client’s CRM.
Next, the appointment setter would contact these business owners and set appointments with as many of them as they could. By leveraging an SDR remote team, our client was able to get more qualified opportunities and focus on what is most important – closing deals.
Overall Benefits of Remote SDR Team
Hiring our SDR team helped our client:
- Focus on converting opportunities into customers
- Support their US-based telemarketing team
- Reduce customer acquisition costs by ensuring no unqualified opportunities enter the pipeline
- Decrease opportunity-nurturing costs down the line and increase the likelihood of seeing greater ROI for the marketing team
- Significantly help the bottom line by securing leads that converted into paid clients and reduced operational expenses
In this way, SDRs directly contribute to your organization’s revenue growth. For a total of five remote affordable resources, our client is growing their leads, booking appointments, and focusing on the core functions of the company. And this is all done on a month-by-month contract.
Frequently Asked Questions
We get a lot of questions about our SDR team. Here are some of the most popular.
Q: What Hours Do Your Resources Work?
Our office is open 24 hours per day with resources working the hours that our clients request. Most of our resources work US shifts (9 am to 5 pm EST) or UK shifts (for our British clients). However, we are very flexible, and it’s easy to adjust based on your team’s needs.
Q: Is Our Data Secure?
We take data very seriously. Our Director of Technology is an expert in cyber security and has decades of experience focused on this very issue.
However, we also recommend that you provide a full brief of what you expect from the resources.
In today’s work, with so many working from home due to the pandemic, we know that this is an issue that every company is concerned about–even for their own in-house resources. Our SDR team will follow your protocol.
Q: Do the resources speak English?
Our resources have great English, with many of them leaning towards an American accent. You will be able to interview all candidates and choose the ones that you like.
Q: How much does a resource cost?
We charge an hourly rate. You can pay per month to our office in New York. Prices vary based on the specific role and level of experience required. For specific prices, please contact contact@mmcytech.com
Is a Remote SDR Team Right For You?
Getting one or more Sales Reps might be right for you if:
- Do you have a business unit that needs more sales?
- Would you like to support your current sales team with additional resources?
- Would you like to scale up quickly?
- Do you need to cut costs and gain more affordable labor?
- Do you want to see if telemarketing is right for your team in a risk-free way?
If you answered yes to any of these, a remote sales team might be right for you.
To explore more about building your own tailored remote team, contact us today at contact@mmcytech.com