Five proven skills for sales reps

Now that you have the traits of a strong candidate, let us take a look at the sales development representative skills they should possess so they can hit the ground running when it comes to your sales development strategy.

Time Management

For SDRs to perform at their peak, they need to be very organised. They are typically familiar with what exists in the pipeline and where their leads are. They should also have a great sense of time management because they need to set reminders on when to follow up with leads and how they should go about doing it. If your candidate blocks out time slots to do specific sales activities in a day, then you know you are interviewing someone suitable for the SDR role.

Tip: Keep a lookout for candidates who carve out a Power Hour in their daily activities. A Power Hour is one hour in a day when all sales teams are entirely focused on contacting the best prospects.

The best SDRs are always on top of things. This is how you can ensure your prospecting will also be at the best that it can be with such SDRs on your sales team.

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Active Listening

This is a very important skill in prospecting, but not many SDRs can do this well. Your candidates must be able to qualify prospects during conversations to understand if they could benefit from your product or service. Going through a qualification checklist is not enough — an SDR must focus on the conversation to gather additional nuggets of information that you would only get from actively listening to a prospect’s phrases or words.

There will be moments where opportunities to dig deeper will present themselves, but an SDR must be able to recognise that and grab it when they appear. They must be present and have real conversations with prospects.

“Does this make sense?”

Great Communication Skills

While active listening is very crucial, having great communication skills (both verbal and written) is also extremely vital to the success of your rep. You want SDRs who are able to articulate their ideas clearly and able to respond to questions well on paper and face-to-face.

The sales development representative position is definitely not for someone who is unable to formulate succinct answers and provides rambling answers. Having a lot of filler words in their sentences is also a big red flag to take note of.

Tip: Test a candidate by asking them to share a new concept they learned recently. If they are not able to share this clearly with you, they probably are not a good fit for what you need in an SDR role.

Research Skills

Having great lead research skills is also vital to an SDR’s success at your company. For you to get quality lead research, an SDR must be able to provide highly-targeted prospects that are of great potential to your sales team.

Not every lead will exist in a database, so he or she will need to find the best lead sources and database for lead generation to get the best prospects. Some popular tools that your SDR should be proficient with are LinkedIn Sales Navigator, FindThatLead, Seamless.ai, Google, and so much more. It all depends on the verticals that you need help with.

What is the one thing you do for account executives to make the sales easier to close?

Ability to Conduct Highly Customised Outreach

Anyone can buy a list or build a list and simply burn leads up through general email outreach campaigns or cold calling with standard scripts. The end result though? No wins.

SDRs today have to strive for quality instead of quantity simply because your competition is most probably doing the same thing.

How do you stand out to make sure prospects listen?

Highly customised outreach. You need to know what prospects love, what content they interact with, maybe their favorite color, their role models, or perhaps the events they have been to. When an SDR is able to create that deep level of personalisation during their outreach campaigns, you know that these prospects will respond.

Your sales reps should be able to dive into a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, business website, maybe even his or her interactions with your company, and create an outreach campaign that covers those touch points in a natural manner so prospects do not find them forced in the outreach.

If your candidate has experience or the skill sets to perform highly customised outreach, you know you have a winner on your hands.

Hire SDRs Who Act Out of Love, not Fear

When you find sales development representatives who possess the proven skills and traits listed above, you will also need to check if they embody one core value that is so important in sales development today.

Do they act out of love and not fear?

• If they tackle sales activities with passion and love for the process, that is a win.

• If they engage and offer solutions they know will truly benefit their prospects, that is a win.

• If they create value in everything they do, acting out of love for the role and not out of fear simply to get things done — you have a strong sales development representative to hire.

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