While Kelsey’s friends were graduating from college, she was making close to $70,000 as a part-time sales rep. After seven years at AT&T, she went to Sungevity, selling $4 million in solar over two years.
From there she went on to build XiO’s sales process and playbook. Now she’s the Sales Development Manager at InsideView Technologies, a company that provides businesses with enriched, clean sales and marketing data. She spoke to us about their current challenges, the tech they use, and her plans for 2020.
Top Sales Development challenges
Even though Kelsey has been cold calling
Kelsey is also working to improve the SDR workflow, so they can be as efficient as possible. An improvement of 10% for each SDR would be the equivalent of having an extra person on the team.
Currently, InsideView’s SDR team is measured on accepted opportunities from AEs. This means that when their SDRs are promoted or move on to a new opportunity, they can say that they generated X million dollars of pipeline, rather than that they just booked appointments. It can be subjective though, depending on whether or not the AE accepts that opportunity. It’s important to have the right processes and qualification criteria in place so that the highest quality opportunities are being sent to the AEs every time.
Top tech tools
Along with Salesforce, there are several other tools that Kelsey and her team heavily rely on.
- InsideView – Using Target to build sales and marketing target lists, and Apex to uncover new opportunities.
- Outreach – “We use it an incredible amount daily, putting customers into sequences, personalizing templates, and setting cadences.”
- Gong – To compare and monitor call quality.
- Qualified – A chatbot that enables the sales team to talk to customers in real-time.
At the same time, there are tools that, although useful in the past, are no longer necessary. The team previously used Drift, but replaced it with Qualified as it allowed them to identify who was visiting their site. Similarly, they used LeadIQ and LinkedIn Sales Navigator before, but now they find InsideView itself can provide all the data they need.
The future for Sales Development at InsideView
As part of their strategy, InsideView relies on both ABM and demand generation. In particular, their demand generation is allowing them to showcase who they are, that they’re competitors in the market, and that they’re winning: “We’re the right company; we haven’t laid anyone off and don’t plan to.”
Looking forward, Kelsey’s next goal is to do $10 million of pipeline in a quarter. They’ve come close before, but Kelsey’s now looking to break that milestone with a new team. To achieve this, she’s working on scaling the SDR function.
By creating an SDR playbook and centralizing everything, Kelsey plans that, by the end of the year, an SDR could come in and have everything that they need to learn and be successful, whether it’s content, frameworks, training or anything else.
If you’re looking for ways to improve your Sales Development program and overcome similar challenges, contact us at Tenbound today for a no-obligation exploratory call.
