The current B2B marketing landscape has become more competitive than ever before. So, it takes a lot of trial and error to find an effective B2B lead generation strategy for your company in such a scenario. For this reason, a lot of businesses choose to outsource their sales operations in an effort to increase their revenue. Therefore, sales development representatives (SDRs) and business development representatives (BDRs) or an overall B2B lead generation agency have a big impact on the sales process and can help your company bring in more revenue if deployed rightly.
But, what are these roles? And how exactly do they work? And why so many small businesses outsource their lead generation to companies that specialize in attracting and turning prospective customers into paying clients. In the modern landscape we currently live in, we may find a vast number of companies claiming to hold the answer to our problems regarding this challenge called lead generation. But, a huge role is played by SDRs and an overall B2B lead generation agency.
In this article, we’ll go over the elements of these two job roles, their differences, and how they might ultimately help your company to grow.
So, How Do B2B Lead Generation Agencies Work?
What is the process of generating leads? Can it help business owners? What is the relevance of this? These are some of the frequently asked questions by today’s executives and young entrepreneurs. Lead generation is a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive procedure. In most cases, there is no promise of getting immediate results because this aspect of the work must be thorough and detailed. As a result, many beginner entrepreneurs stop the process halfway through due to dissatisfaction.
That’s where a lead generation company steps in. A lead-generating agency tries to act as a bridge between a company’s sales and marketing teams. Many people outsource lead generation to some of the top lead generation companies. They handle the difficult aspects of lead creation for your company and deliver a well-defined prospect list that you can leverage to boost your sales.
They should be using both the old and current lead generation strategies. While traditional approaches rely on cold calling, the more recent techniques emphasize emailing and social media marketing. This provides effective lead generation with higher conversion rates. Lead generating companies may even focus on customized campaigns for your company to bring in more effective impact. They have access to people you would not have been able to reach on your own.
They collect this information from many sources in order to generate leads that will help your business concentrate on raising brand awareness while driving traffic to your website. This means businesses can quickly and readily identify leads with intent.
Another way a lead generation company might attract leads is through content syndication, where they increase brand awareness by sharing relevant content across different channels. This would boost the reach of your content describing your goods or services. It also raises awareness of your company, which leads to more traffic to your website.
Here are some popular methods for pushing website content over the web to attract prospective leads:
- Create company-specific blogs. This results in an increase in the number of viewers that are interested in that specific topic.
- Your content can also be distributed through an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, which allows readers to be alerted to fresh content whenever your website is updated.
- Email can also be used to distribute content to a large network audience. Email marketing allows you to reach a large audience as well as specialized sectors interested in your business.
- Cold-calling is another classic yet mostly outdated means of distributing content. Though this strategy is no more effective than the others stated, it does work for some audiences.
Moreover, lead generation businesses develop new leads using unique yet modern lead generation tactics. Some examples are as follows:
- Marketing using different social media platforms
- Ads on several sites and channels
- Landing page optimization to make it more enticing to visitors
- Boosting and advertising the company website in order to collect and monitor leads using specific strategies.
What Are the Roles of an SDR & Why Do You Need Them?
To begin, what exactly is an SDR, and why should you care? A Sales Development Employee (SDR) is an internal sales representative who primarily works on prospecting and pushing leads through the marketing funnel. Once a lead has been qualified by the company objectives, it is sent to a sales executive or B2B salesperson responsible for closing deals. Basically, an SDR’s role is to move a prospect through the initial phases of the sales pipeline. And this sales enablement is a vital business development strategy that allows you to construct a sales pipeline and create steady growth.
Moreover, SDRs are the entry-level position in a sales department; they contact every lead and screen out those who aren’t a suitable fit. SDRs plan a few vital actions with salespeople higher in the organization including a demonstration, strategy call, consultation, fair assessment, and technical call. An SDR’s role is to schedule quality follow-up appointments so that executive sales representatives can focus a good deal of time on engaging with highly qualified prospects.
Here are a few examples of having an SDR in your sales team,
- Collaboration With BDRs: SDRs may also collaborate with business development representatives (BDRs) in certain larger sales companies. BDRs are often responsible for outbound lead generation and qualification, whereas SDRs are responsible for inbound leads.
- Immediate Follow Up: SDRs approach prospective leads or immediately follow up with people who have asked about your business and its offers. The three key channels they mostly employ are phone, email, and social networking sites—in essence, SDRs target leads in every way so that prospects know what they are like and what the brand is all about.
- Listen To Your Prospect Carefully: An SDR’s role is similar to that of an advisor in that they listen carefully to prospects and propose a suitable solution. SDRs study the prospect’s business model, determine if your product is a suitable fit, and educate prospects on how your solution can effectively solve and enhance their business.
Therefore, any developing organization should have specialized SDRs in addition to sales where you will be assisted in arranging qualified appointments by a dedicated SDR staff member. Now that we’ve clarified what an SDR is and its role in sales organizations, let’s consider why you should have an SDR department.
- They Arrange Suitable Appointments: The ability to arrange suitable sales appointments is perhaps the most critical service that an SDR team gives a sales organization. Since SDRs are highly trained and committed to developing strong relationships with quality prospects, your salespeople have higher quality appointments, better organizations to present to, and generate more income from the deals they close.
- It Provides a Superior Funnel: Having a specialized SDR team not only improves your sales process but also provides a superior funnel. When you have an entire team that is entirely focused on prospecting, your pipeline is much less filled with unqualified prospects and dead deals, leading to more possibilities and closed deals. The process of having SDRs regularly reach out to the best prospects you want to do business with leaves you with a constant flow of qualified leads time after time.
- Grow Your Business to Its Fullest: By relieving your sales executives of prospecting and lead nurturing, they can focus on what they do best i.e. selling and closing. This will lead to more deals, which will boost your company’s growth. You’ll begin collecting nurturing deals to contribute to your sales objective if you have a separate team of SDRs and build up the whole process of nurturing leads.
What Are The Differences Between The Two?
We understand that the distinctions between the two might be challenging. Separating these two highly different responsibilities is critical for developing an effective sales team since they involve not just separate duties but also separate skills. But, in the end, both contribute equally to the organization’s success.
Moreover, SDRs are part of a well-developed lead generation agency. The desirable result is achieved when all of them work in coordination within a lead generation agency. Startups or small businesses generally merge both BDRs’ and SDRs’ responsibilities into one. However, SDRs and BDRs serve different purposes. A business development representative is mostly in charge of outbound prospecting for leads. A sales development person, on the other hand, is in charge of lead qualification inbound, as we have mentioned above. Both professions involve unique yet necessary skills and expertise. And, it’s indeed needed for an organization’s overall growth.
Responsibilities of a BDR For B2B Sales
You may wonder why we’ve mentioned BDRs in the above section. Well, the role of a BDR is undeniable while developing a rock-solid sales team in B2B organizations. So, let’s take a quick look at the role of a BDR in your B2B sales,
- Research the target audience for relevant companies and entrepreneurs who might profit from the business offering.
- Upkeep and management of CRM platforms and other marketing and prospecting tools.
- Create cold-calling scripts for the sales staff as well as other marketing materials to generate leads.
- Generate a high number of sales-qualified leads from partners along with assisting them.
- Organize possible events and give content to pique the interest of key business decision-makers.
- Create quotation templates for possible leads.
- Report to the business development executive for the company.
- For smaller companies or startups, all SDR activities should be combined with BDR activities.
Outbound lead generation requires a different strategy than inbound lead qualification and relationship management; therefore, it’s important to understand the differences. It’s not just that, but it’s a big enough difference that enterprise-level organizations may require independent SDRs and BDRs, and may well have a staff of each if they grow large enough. However, some people believe that the difference appears to be significantly minor in the broad sense of the word.
Both of these roles are viewed as junior-level and may be given to entry-level individuals based on their sales background and experience. In either situation, it’s critical that the BDRs and SDRs you are hiring are organized, persistent, and committed to achieving the results your company requires from lead generation. They collaborate to design a dynamic solution that can transform the way your company manages acquiring new business and nurturing prospects.
So, is it a good idea to merge these two different roles for your lead generation strategy? Let’s find out.
The Ultimate Power of a Well-Developed Sales Team
Most organizations have different roles when it comes to building a sales team because a single person cannot achieve the same results and, most importantly, they shouldn’t. You should focus on expanding your sales and marketing team, significantly if your business is growing. Your sales team must collaborate, with everyone assigned specific tasks and responsibilities. If your BDRs are bringing in the leads, then your SDRs must make sure to get those leads through the sales funnel until it’s closed.
As we all know, without a perfect sales team, running a successful business is as good as not running it in the first place. Because in the end, it’s all about making sales and your lead generation team must bring in prospective customers for that. This is the sole reason why it is important to have both BDRs and SDRs for your lead generation strategy.
If you aren’t willing to commit to a comprehensive sales team at present, these are the two roles you should have at least. Even if you merge them initially, make sure that each aspect of the work has a specific role and that anyone you hire is capable of fulfilling that responsibility.
Conclusion
To properly leverage each function, businesses must have a better understanding of their customer’s journey. Without knowing how your customers make their purchasing decisions, focusing excessively on over-qualifying inbound marketing leads or increasing outbound lead prospecting is a waste of time and resources. Now that you know what each role should be focused on, make sure you’re creating a team that will offer the best value to your business every step of the way.