15 Skills an SDR needs to master to contact prospects

To hit your targets as an SDR, you have to pull out all the stops. The best SDR knows how to structure their sales teams and fetch out the right profiles. To achieve this goal, let’s take a closer look at the profile of SDRs.They master critical skills and so they can fulfill sales pipelines with extremely qualified prospects to make revenue grow.

What is a Sales Development Representative (SDR)?

A Sales Development Rep is a professional who gets quality leads. Their ultimate goal is to find out whether an interested lead is a viable customer or not.

SDR professionals use their skills in research and for communication to gather valuable firmographic data, better understand the needs of a particular lead, and handle common objections. Because of their work, your sales representatives can focus on closing deals with viable customers, instead of wasting their time on uninterested or unrealistic leads.

Here are very basic habits that every level of SDR must develop:

• Own your time.
• Learn to report on time.
• Define activity goals.
• Understand how your company helps people.
• Become a master communicator.
• Develop a curious and patient mindset.

Role & Contribution of an SDR

Since SDR’s have such clear functions, their day-to-day duties are usually preplanned.

• Establish contact with leads
• Qualify leads
• Educate leads
• Provide general sales support

Also depending on your business and sales team, you should also decide to give your SDRs additional responsibilities.

The Important Skills of Sales Development Representatives

Like every other sales role, you will always want your SDRs to hold the skills they need to grab success and improve your revenues.

Here’s a closer look at the key skills your SDRs will need to bring to the table and cultivate as they keep growing and getting results for your business.

SDRs help you to:

• Introduce your ideal prospects to your organization through B2B Lead Generation
• Qualify them
• Move them through their journey until a dedicated closer takes over

For being an excellent SDR you need to have great skill and passion for hard work. So if you’re an SDR, here are the top 15 skills to focus on gaining in you.

Video prospecting

SDRs don’t need to be technical masters to form useful videos. You just need to be comfortable on screen. You should try to practice making short, engaging clips in which you introduce yourself, deliver value with a quick tip, and ask for a call that to be scheduled.

1) Highly customized outreach

It becomes a bit difficult for SDRs to balance quantity and quality when prospecting. As per our experience the balance is the most important thing that successful reps are actually slowing down and are spending more time on outreaching their prospect.

2) Active Listening and Adaptability

Considering a cold call, you need a prospect to be doing 70% of the talking. But SDRs should only be talking for 30%. That means you need to be a better listener than a guide at the initial stage. The best SDRs listen carefully. To respond to them accordingly.

3) Great Voicemails

It’s ideal to leave a good voicemail which is a very essential skill for an SDR, and thus requires practice. You should be available on the phone, but sometimes you will have to leave a voicemail.

4) Resilience

There’s no doubt in saying that the job of SDR is a bit tough. Unlike closing salespeople, they don’t get much glory. They also generally spend all day sending emails and making calls. It can be really exhausting. Flexibility is important to keep your head in the game. Thriving this ability now will also be valuable to recover from losing a big deal without skipping a beat.

5) Coachability

One of the most important skill sets one should evaluate when interviewing SDR candidates is coachability. Confidence is important, but being egoistic can wrap up  SDR’s ability to receive great feedback. The best SDRs keenly seek out practice from high-performing peers and try to get honest feedback from their managers.

6) Self-awareness

Self-awareness comes up with resilience and coachability. SDRs should know their strengths and weaknesses. This will help them form new strategies for dealing with an inferior call or rejection.

7) Organization

To be a prime SDR, organizational skills play a very important role. It may be the most appealing and notable part of the sales process.  Your complete teamwork should really be strong.

8) Curious learner

To be an excellent SDR, you should always know and learn more and more about this basic thing like:

• Your product
• Your industry
• Your competition

9) Relationship-building

Effective SDR’s build genuine relationships with prospects to bring up trust. To be a successful relationship-builder, you must be able to interact with a wide range of people across multiple channels.

10) Passion

Everyone needs to have a passion for what they do for being successful. For SDR’s, that deeply means to be a sales digger. SDR should seek perfection within the most difficult constraints. They should go through all the relevant content out there including books, articles, webinars and more so that they can own the process of getting better.

11) Creativity

Being an SDR you should keep track of the number of cold calls, emails, LinkedIn messages and everything else a prospect receives every single day, the best SDRs find a way to shine in the crowd being unique in their own way.

12) Thirst for knowledge

SDRs need to know a lot. In sales, inadequate product and service knowledge is an immediate deal-breaker. Almost 75% of customers say that product knowledge is what they need most from sales professionals. And when SDRs are well-versed, results are real.

13) Customization

Sales Development Reps cannot qualify leads if they are just script readers and writers. We understand that they find themselves so busy in reaching many prospects via phone and email as possible, so quantity matters. But more than that quality rules. SDRs should spend most of their time on customizing their outreach, researching prospects, so they send personalized messages that speak directly to them about prospects’ businesses and current conditions.

14) Time Management

The best Sales Development Reps make the most of their time. They can find leads that aren’t going anywhere early, so they don’t waste time on them. Good time management happens over time. SDRs want to log their time. Then they can start to eliminate or reduce the low-value activities and increase those that pay off, moving the high priority activities into their most productive part of the day. In sales, creativity hinges heavily on personalization. If you’re an SDR, you should be looking to master these skills. When you are genuinely curious about your prospect and how you can help them, you will definitely succeed. Are you looking for sdr services with all the above traits? VSynergize has a team of experienced SDRs that are AA-ISP trained and can deliver great value to your organization. Reach us now on +1-732-481-9424 or email at info@vsynergize.com