For Sales Development Reps

Role of SDRs and why do you need them?

Sales Development Reps (SDRs) typically tend to be professionals in their early-career stage whose primary focus is to build a healthy and consistent revenue pipeline for the organization. They typically acquire or qualify opportunities and schedule meetings for Account Executives (AEs) who demo the product to these qualified prospects and eventually close the deal.

There are several debates and schools of thought regarding the SDR role. However, here is a couple we often come across most often:

• Should SDRs qualify the inbound opportunities? Or should they primarily focus on creating opportunities by going outbound?
• Who should do the discovery? Is that the role of SDR, or should it be done by an AE?

And we at Avoma have a point of view on this debate.

SDRs can start inbound and transition to outbound

Many growing companies don’t necessarily have the budget or scope to hire sales and business development teams separately. So they start by forming a sales development team that starts with inbound prospecting and gradually moves upstream to focus on outbound opportunities as the company’s requirements for new opportunities grow.

At Avoma, we are still at the former stage. Of course, your mileage may vary. But for the scope of keeping things simple, let’s talk about SDRs as a team that owns the inbound and outbound sales efforts both.

But let’s be clear about one thing—being a product-led organization doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go outbound.

We need to understand that every opportunity created goes through an acquisition phase and a conversion phase.

So, we strongly believe that the role of an SDR isn’t about the typical BANT qualification of the trial signups and scheduled demos but rather offering sales assistance.

Here’s what a product-led and sales-assisted journey looks like:

When someone is trialing your product, people like to be left alone to experience the product (without the feeling of someone breathing behind their neck). At the same time, it’s important to have someone ready to assist them whenever the prospect needs help.

Why? It’s because some of them are hand-raisers who will reach out to your support team when they hit a wall, whereas others will leave without talking to anyone on your team.

This is where an SDR can reach out to those prospects and understand what they’re going through and (i) educate them to make the most of their trial, and (ii) Remove any possible friction in their journey.

Handling the inbound opportunities created and offering sales assistance is a great way to help your newly-hired SDRs understand your customer ecosystem and the problems your product solves for. This helps you ensure that you’re not dropping the ball on any prospect while giving them a great experience.

As your SDRs get into this process and understand your customer ecosystem, they can transition into going upstream and building the pipeline by going outbound.

The survey done by Bridegroup shows that as companies mature, they move from being heavy inbound organizations to heavily outbound. And that makes a lot of sense because going outbound gives you better control over the ticket size of deals coming into your pipeline.

Who should do the discovery? Should discovery and demo be separate?

From the prospects’ point of view, qualification-only calls offer a bad experience. If you look at it from the lens of modern SaaS—the prospect just expressed their interest and is eager to know about your product. They probably clicked on a call-to-action button that said: “Schedule a Demo.”

The prospects expect a demo to be scheduled and not an intermediary step where they are interrogated and then qualified.

While there is merit to running discovery and demo separately, it makes sense to do that only if you get a lot of junk leads. But in reality, the problem that most SaaS companies struggle with is—not having enough opportunities in their pipeline. So adding more friction in such cases is a self-sabotaging move that hurts your pipeline and, thereby, your conversions.

As long as your marketing and SDRs consistently generate the right kind of demand, i.e., accounts that fit your ideal customer profile, the conversion rates (signups/demos booked -> qualified opportunities -> closed-won deals) keep improving even as the pipeline continues to increase. So let the AEs do the discovery and demo as a show-and-tell conversation.

With that, let’s look at the process of hiring SDRs.

How to hire a Sales Development Rep (SDR)

The hiring process is the most important step in building a kick-ass SDR team. It starts with clarity on what you’re looking for in the person you hire. At Avoma, our hiring principles and processes continue to evolve as we onboard more new SDRs.

Our general hiring criteria

We at Avoma set a high standard when it comes to hiring. And that means we have a stringent process. We’re quite particular about the kind of people we want on our team. So while we have a clear process to assess the qualities we’re looking for, it is also important to realize that you cannot codify everything.

We are always looking for candidates willing to go above and beyond to ensure a great customer experience—be it the meticulousness of crafting an extra email, how the SDR follows up after their call and more.

The SDR hiring process at Avoma

As you can imagine, it all begins with clarity on the expectations of the role. We try to very clearly list the expectations from the role. For instance, we clearly list the roles and responsibilities and, more importantly, the kind of techstack experience we are looking for in a new hire.

Here’s an example of our job description:

It gets posted on all key job boards such as AngelList, LinkedIn, etc., which obviously brings in a flood of qualified and unqualified candidates.

And keep in mind, we at Avoma are 100% remote, so none of our interviews happen in person. Our process comes from a remote-first mindset. Our Sales Development Manager (SDM) gets involved right from the screening stage, helping our recruitment team make selections, build observations, and help them develop the eye to spot the kind of candidates that fit our bill.

At the same time, we also strongly believe and encourage the candidates to qualify us, our values, workstyle, and the organization’s overall culture. We have a six-step interview process and here’s how it looks:

1. Phone screening with the recruiter

First, our recruiter reaches out to the shortlisted candidates to have an exploratory phone conversation and identify if they’re interested. If they are, it becomes a two-way conversation where the recruiter looks to identify whether or not the SDR candidate has the qualities that we look for in a sales role and the candidate tries to evaluate their fit with us from their perspective. The candidates in this stage must exhibit creativity and a customer-first mentality.

2. Interview with the SDM

This conversation happens over a web conference tool—Zoom or Google Meet. Avoma joins the conversation to record, transcribe, analyze and offer interview intelligence for the rest of the hiring panel. It helps the hiring managers, recruiters and everyone involved in the interview panel to gain deeper visibility into the interview process, create smooth feedback loops between the panelists, and improve the overall recruitment process.

In this interview round, the SDM tries to get to know the candidate personally and learn what motivates them, inspires them, and how they think as a person. We believe that every candidate is more than the conversation that happens in a typical interview. So we’re trying to truly understand if both the hiring manager and the candidate are excited about the opportunity. A few key things we look for at this stage include:

• Their grit, i.e., how structured they are, how hard they might be willing to work, etc.
• Their current abilities and coachability
• Ability to think strategically
• Their tech stack experience
• Their IQ and EQ
• Ability to articulate
• If they ask meaningful questions, and more

Those who qualify and fit the criteria are greenlighted to the next level, where we share a take-home assignment with them.

3. SDR take-home assignment

Our take-home assignment typically includes:

• Writing a cold call script
• Writing a personalized email
• Building a prospecting list
• Doing a mock prospecting call with us

At this stage, we’re not expecting the candidate to get everything 100% right, but rather looking for the amount of effort the candidate puts into understanding the context, how much they take customer experience into consideration at each stage, etc.

All these conversations are recorded and transcribed in Avoma and our VP of Sales watches the recording to get enough context as part of the preparation for the next round interview with them.

4. Interview with the VP of Sales

Nathan Hymas, VP of Sales at Avoma is a treasure trove of sales knowledge and an amazing sales leader that people across the board enjoy working with. Before joining Avoma, Nathan was a customer of Avoma. With his 20+ years of experience in sales, what he looks for in the SDR candidates at this stage is:

• Whether they fit the culture, strike a balance between confident, assertive, and yet polite
• Can they grow within and with the company (by understanding the growth they want to take)
• If they have the right combination of mindset, skill, and knowledge

Once Nathan approves, it’s time for a conversation with Aditya Kothadiya, the CEO at Avoma.

5. Interview with the CEO

We love that Aditya, our CEO, is still involved in the SDR hiring process. As we build the core team, we need to be aligned in terms of the expectations from the candidate and the standards we set as a company in terms of every external-facing touch point. It’s tough to say the direction this interview round will take, but overall, Aditya is always looking for three fundamental aspects:

• Ability to create a great customer experience
• Value additions the candidate can make at each step of the prospecting process
• Tech stack and SaaS experience

But these are only a dipstick of the things he tends to look for. So, in case you stumbled on this article as part of your interview preparation for the round with Aditya, my guess on how the conversation would go is as good as yours. And once our CEO gives a thumbs up—you’re almost in!

6. Finally, a meeting with the HR and then offer roll out

This is the final stage, where the candidate meets Kelly Loudermilk, Head of HR at Avoma. Because we record every conversation, everyone across the board, including Kelly, has enough context about the candidate, which helps in the discussions from an HR perspective. Once that’s through, they have the last-mile discussions on the joining date, salary, and a few other logistical details. Finally, Kelly stamps her approval and releases the offer.

Remember, always hire two or more SDRs at a time

Given the investment and commitment that goes into building an SDR team, companies often hire one SDR and try to establish a working model before hiring a full-fledged SDR team. But in our experience, we’ve seen that hiring a minimum of two SDRs makes more sense as you create an opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Like marketing campaigns, you want a point of comparison to understand what works, what KPIs to optimize for, and what kind of quotas to set. We’ve noticed that when you hire in tandem, SDRs support and push each other at each stage of their development.

Set up leader boards and dashboards for performance—but don’t reward and celebrate the numbers alone. Instead, celebrate and encourage the right habits.

We prioritize building the right habits over the emphasis on numbers because:

• Predictable revenue happens when you have a predictable pipeline.
• A predictable pipeline happens when you have a predictable and reliable SDR.
• Predictable SDRs have a predictable day/ calendar.
• A predictable day happens when you have a predictable routine/habits.

Have an onboarding roadmap to make your SDRs successful

Brandon Lawson, our Sales Development Manager, is a master of building processes. And, we can say with confidence that the sooner you build an onboarding map and a 90-day playbook, the better it is for your SDRs.

At Avoma, the onboarding process is almost waiting on the newly hired SDR’s desk to be kickstarted on the first day. It includes everything from scheduling introductory and overview meetings with stakeholders across the board to software access, weekly goals, and more.

In the next post, we will cover the details of how to onboard and accelerate the ramp-up of newly hired SDRs.

Finally, there’s always room for improvement

Through this post, we shared our hiring process and our point of view on how important we consider the SDR role. Our process works for us because it stems from our mistakes, experiences, and learnings along the way.

Though this process may inspire you, we highly recommend you tweak the SDR hiring process based on your needs.

Test our process and keep iterating it because there’s always something to improve.

On that note, we hope this was helpful. Feel free to reach out to any of us at Avoma; we’ll be happy to help in any way we can.

Building predictable revenue – taking a scientific approach

A scientific experiment always needs five things to begin: observations, questions, hypotheses, methods, and results.

In our case:

Building a truly predictable revenue engine boils down to what processes you have and how much control you have over these processes. The more predictable your processes are—the better your chances to achieve revenue predictability. In addition, greater control over these processes ensures a high likelihood of success.

Let’s look at all the methods that your SaaS businesses will need to achieve predictable revenue.

Step 1: Use ‘backcasting’ to benchmark a predictable revenue

As one of the fundamental principles in strategic business planning, backcasting is also a popular mental model for moonshot thinking. It is a concept that great minds like Elon Musk or the team at Google apply to their mindset to achieve goals that are assumed impossible to achieve.

In simple terms, ‘backcasting’ is a planning method that clearly defines a desirable future (goal) and then works backward to identify policies and programs that will lead to achieving the desired goal.

If you zoom out and picture a SaaS company’s growth, revenue is almost always its most important north star metric, which also predicts its long-term success. Sales and marketing are primarily functions that contribute to revenue.

You need to have a clear revenue goal to arrive at your GTM strategy and your sales and marketing plans. Define your revenue goals first and then work backward to hit that number. Once you answer “what” your bigger goal is and why it matters, it’s much easier to figure out “how” to get there.

Backcasting helps you contextualize revenue predictability to your unique business environment. For instance, every company has varying degrees of conversion rate.

You can’t just pick an existing company’s growth playbook and start executing its formula to achieve the same results that they did. Instead, refer back to your historical data and calculate the pipeline coverage you need to achieve your goals.

When you have clarity about your end goal, you can line up your tactics to align with your revenue target. And that leads us to build predictable sales and marketing processes.

Step 2: Build predictable marketing and sales processes

Revenue is not a standalone metric that maps only to the sales function. It is as much attributable to the organic marketing campaigns you run, the processes around account management and customer retention, or the kind of sales coaching programs you invest in. Building predictability around long-enduring GTM processes often contributes directly to building a predictable revenue. Revenue is the income that a SaaS business generates—but only due to investing in long-term play with functions like marketing, sales, and customer success.

You can scientifically break down your revenue goal into a pipeline goal based on your understanding of conversion rates across the stages of your GTM cycle.

The number of prospects interacting with your sales team at any given point indicates the kind of revenue you are looking at in the next month, quarter, or year. Similarly, the number of deals sitting in your sales pipeline or their potential revenue booking size gives you a good idea about forecasting your sales revenue for the foreseeable future.

In other words—predictable revenue happens only when you have a predictable pipeline. 

And having a predictable pipeline is a direct result of creating a predictable prospecting routine.

Also, building a predictable pipeline becomes possible only when you have a well-defined ICP (ideal customer persona). The sharper your ICP is, the better success you will have in building a predictable prospecting routine (both inbound and outbound).

Identifying your ICP and defining their needs and pain points will dictate your product messaging and help you create engaging content that works as an always-on prospecting channel.

Similarly, it gives you clarity on the channels to use for your outbound reach out.

So far, we have arrived at a couple of objectively verifiable inferences:

Predictable revenue comes from a predictable pipeline.
Predictable pipeline comes from predictable and reliable prospecting.

Next, let’s look at building predictability specifically into outbound prospecting.

Step 3: Building predictability into outbound prospecting

Compared to inbound, you typically have more control over your outbound prospecting. While you don’t have much control over the quality of the inbound signups or demo requests, you can certainly control whom you reach out to.

You start with well-defined target account lists when it comes to outbound reach out.

You build your target account list based on a few fundamental questions such as:

(a) Why these accounts? Do we have a history of serving accounts of similar size, industry, and functions well?

(b) Why do we qualify to solve their pain? What’s our specific story that’s relevant to them?

Once the above questions are sorted, it’s all about creating a process playbook and executing it.

Unlike inbound, where you can automate the lead generation process, outbound prospecting requires you to increase your prospecting throughput. It could either mean hiring additional SDRs to increase your team bandwidth, spreading your outbound activities across more channels, or identifying opportunities to enrich your lead pipeline.

Predictable prospecting involves assigning specific outbound sales processes to your sales development reps (SDRs), channels, leads, and demos. For instance, outbound prospecting often comes down to making the most out of your time in a day to reach out to x number of prospects.

And that boils down to making x number of calls, sending x number of emails, following up with x number of prospects, and booking x number of demos or discovery calls every week.

It saves a lot of their time and energy if your SDRs can understand how each channel works and attribute revenue numbers or the pipeline they are driving from them.

The best sales leaders know that predictable revenue comes down to building predictable habits. Therefore, they train their sales reps to build predictable routines.

Step 4: Train your GTM teams to build predictable habits

The entire philosophy behind building a predictable revenue model rests on top of your GTM teams’ discipline and habits. Their daily routines and internal workflows are the alpha and omega of the predictable revenue cycle—it begins and ends with them.

Building a predictable revenue depends on how predictable (read: dependable) the individuals in your GTM teams are. If everyone in your GTM team—be it an SDR, an AE (account executive), or a CSM (customer success manager)—has defined habits and routines around how they will run their day-to-day business, they can contribute to building a predictable revenue.

In scientific terms, your GTM teams are like hydrogen and oxygen atoms. If the variables behave unpredictably, the result is different every time you run the experiment. But by nature, their consistent behavior generates a water molecule every time the two parts of hydrogen bond with one part of oxygen.

A predictable person is essentially a dependable person. But what does a predictable person mean? And how can someone learn to be a predictable person?

A predictable person knows how to build a predictable day—such as carrying out a list of specific things they do in a particular manner every day. Over time, these become repeatable processes that they can go over in a short amount of time without thinking twice.

Predictable people ruthlessly block specific times on their calendars to carry out a set of activities that they can repeat every day—or at regular time intervals.

Let’s take an example of an AE who carves out an hour every other day to research a prospect who has booked a demo session thoroughly. Or it could be a CSM who blocks 30 minutes every day to review all the customer interactions they had on that particular day and spends another 15 minutes planning their next day.

A predictable day results from building a set of predictable routines and habits. At a glance, being a predictable person and building predictable habits might sound boring. However, nobody wants to be predictable—like a droid specifically programmed to move on autopilot from one activity to another.

But as it turns out, having predictable habits is a superpower for efficiency. It helps us become consistent, decisive, and develop quick reflexes under specific circumstances.

In professional setups—it’s far more rewarding to be predictable than unpredictable because the people around us expect us to deliver predictable outcomes and no unpleasant surprises.

You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
‍
‍– Will Durant, author & philosopher

Let’s say you are an SDR who needs to book 30 qualified demos a month. And let’s say your outreach to demo booking conversion rate is 10%.

That means you need to reach out to 300 prospects in a month. And that boils down to reaching out to 75 prospects a week (including calls, social media, emails, etc.) And that, in turn, translates to 15 prospects a day.

To reach out to 15 prospects per day, you need to block a specific number of hours on your calendar. And to improve your odds of relevance and thereby conversion, you need to block at least a couple of hours for your research on those 15 prospects every day.

The lesson here is that if you don’t block time for what’s important on your calendar, it will never happen. Measurable efforts always lead to measurable outcomes—and their impact grows multifold when you do them in a predictable manner.

Building a predictable routine also applies to collaborative processes between two individuals or teams. For instance, every time an AE shares rich context about a customer account to their CSM counterpart during a sales-to-customer handoff process, it helps you create a consistent customer experience. The more predictable your customer handoff process is, the lesser the chances of customer churn because the whole process is optimized for a better customer experience.

Repetition trumps uncertainty

Like in a scientific experiment, building predictable revenue is all about taking the right variables, bonding them together in a petri dish, and waiting for it to turn green.

In essence, the science behind building a predictable revenue can be summarized in the following points:

• Predictable revenue happens when you have a predictable pipeline.
• Predictable pipeline happens when you have a predictable salesperson.
• Predictable salesperson is someone who has a predictable calendar.
• Predictable calendar is a result of building predictable habits.

If you can get these things in the proverbial business lab, getting to a predictable revenue is just a matter of when—not how.

1. Don’t compromise on customer experience for efficiency

Dropping your calendar link to someone’s email for them to book a time slot that’s available in your schedule is, indeed, an efficient way to manage your meeting booking. It certainly saves you time from exchanging emails back and forth to agree on a mutually convenient time and gives you the control to book meetings at a time that’s available for you.

But does it offer the best experience for the person booking a time on your calendar? Hardly so—especially if they are your prospects.

It’s perhaps the reason why this tweet from Sam stirred up a storm a while back:

The thing is—the gesture of sending out a calendar invite is not just about what you do but also about how you do it.

It’s even more crucial for you to think—if you are in a customer-facing role—about what kind of experience you are giving to your prospects when you merely drop your calendar link for them to book a time.

From a business point of view, it’s cold and inconsiderate to make your customers pick a time slot from your calendar. It might imply that you are on a higher pedestal and that your time is more important than theirs when you offer an automated experience devoid of human interaction.

When a sales rep sends a calendar link to a prospect asking them to book a time: who is requesting the time—the salesperson or the prospect? At a surface level, it looks like the prospect is asking for the salesperson’s time.

But behind all the scheduling interface and workflow, it’s the sales reps seeking the customers’ time to explore their interest in your product, show them the product, or establish a relationship. The stakes are always high on the seller side—not the buyer side.

Therefore, the sales reps should put some thought into the process of sharing their calendar link. Ideally, the sales rep should first ask if the prospects have free time on their calendar to set up a meeting before dropping their calendar link.

They should first ask something like:

How does your availability look in the next few days or next week?

Once they respond in the affirmative, you can go ahead and share your link for them to book a time on your calendar.

Alternatively, you can also ask them to share their calendar link (if they have one) for you to book a time.

This way, you not only come across as polite but also mindful about giving your customers the respect they deserve. At the same time, you still have the scope to optimize your calendar time by sharing the link rather than playing email ping-pong with your prospects.

Offering this experience puts the customer first and makes a great first impression on them. Building thoughtful scheduling habits is all about setting up a culture of respecting each other’s time. The same principle applies to scheduling meetings when booking them internally with colleagues from another department.

The next step in the scheduling workflow usually includes sharing the invite link and other details pertinent to the meeting.

2. Tailor your invite link’s metadata to improve meeting experience

Sharing a calendar invite with your prospects is an important extension of the whole meeting scheduling experience. Therefore, it deserves some thoughtfulness in terms of how to offer a better experience.

To make sure you don’t give a sloppy customer experience, don’t just copy-paste the calendar link to your prospect’s email. The aim of sharing a meeting invite should be to establish absolute clarity on what everyone should expect from the meeting.

Historically speaking, meeting invites before the automated solutions had two primary sections:

A dedicated title

a. The reason you have planned the meeting

b. Request for something (e.g., interview, demo, RSVP, etc.)

An agenda outline

a. The breakdown of activities or talking points expected to take place in the meeting

Here’s an example of an old-school meeting invite before scheduling tools became all the rage:

When automation became a norm for scheduling meetings, we made the process extremely efficient but the specificity and attention to detail got lost in the process.

The problem with automated meeting links is that people only have one calendar link and they send that to all different kinds of events: for scheduling demos, follow-up meetings, customer check-in calls, support calls, or job interviews.

None of the automated scheduling apps offer a feature that dynamically defines the type of meeting you are scheduling or its agenda.

Besides failing to communicate the meeting’s purpose to your prospects, this is a problem for you personally. For instance, you will have a hard time recalling what the last four meetings in January 2022 were all about when you look back at your calendar because they all have the same generic meeting title and link.

As a person who’s in the habit of scheduling meetings day in and day out, you lack visibility into your weekly/monthly calendar. It’s a blind spot that doesn’t serve you well in the long run because you don’t know what’s most frequent (e.g., how many meetings were demos vs job interviews vs discovery) in your schedule or where did you waste a lot of your time (e.g., 13 job interviews that led to zero hiring might imply that you need to fix the process).

There’s a modern approach to fix this that’s efficient to you and offers a better experience to your prospects—i.e., to create different scheduling links for different kinds of events.

At Avoma, we host a variety of meeting events for a range of interactions that take place with customers and other stakeholders. But we are mindful about assigning a different calendar link for demo purposes versus for a follow-up meeting. Similarly, the meeting title of a discovery call looks very different from the title of an employee onboarding meeting to match the nature of the event.

We also leverage Avoma’s Smart Templates feature to create a predefined agenda template based on the meeting type so that we can pull it up instantly when preparing for a similar type of meeting in the future.

Customizing your meeting’s metadata helps the guests immediately know that we have invited them for a demo call or perhaps a support call that they had requested. This is way better than putting a generic title like Avoma<>Acme Sync-up Meeting.

Thoughtfully-created meeting invites go the extra mile in ensuring that you are establishing a meeting’s purpose clearly and setting the right expectations for the event. This helps the prospects get a better understanding of an upcoming event and gives them the right context to come prepared for the meeting.

It also helps you stand out from the crowd of generic meeting invites that clearly don’t put any effort into communicating the event’s purpose. Eventually, adding a thoughtful flavor to a seemingly small experience of sending a customized meeting invite adds a fresh breath of air to your prospects’ buying experience.

3. Reduce no-shows by automating reminders

No-shows are very common in the business world—especially in customer-facing functions like sales and customer success. But you can’t really blame prospects for not turning up in a scheduled meeting. Life happens, there are plenty of things that are more important in people’s lives than attending a sales call.

At Avoma, we don’t let this small percentage of no-shows upset us. And yet, we constantly debate among ourselves—how can we reduce (if not completely eliminate) the number of no-shows?

A tried and tested way to reduce no-shows is to send a couple of email reminders—either manually or using a tool like Avoma—ahead of time. (For context, Avoma lets you automatically send email reminders to participants so they show up on time or request to reschedule. It saves you a lot of time and avoids last-minute surprises.)

As a rule of thumb, set up an automation to trigger a reminder to go out to meeting participants 24 hours before the event. Don’t send a reminder 15 minutes before the meeting since it might be too late for people to leave everything they are doing and attend the meeting.

When you don’t give people enough time to decide, the worst thing that they can do is to reschedule the meeting at the last minute—which is a fairly common scenario than we would like to admit. It’s far worse than canceling the entire event because you have to go through the same scheduling experience all over again, not knowing if it can happen again.

On the other hand, sending them a reminder much ahead in time gives them the time to re-prioritize their to-do lists, and allows them to change or reschedule the meeting, or cancel it entirely so that you don’t have to wait for them anymore.

I’d recommend automating no-show reminders in a way that reaches the participants from multiple channels (e.g., email, text message, in-app notification) and at evenly spaced intervals (e.g., two days, 24 hours, or two hours ahead).

Many scheduling apps allow you to add cancellation or rescheduling links that you can include right within the meeting invite. When you send a reminder notification reasonably ahead of time, people can choose to cancel or reschedule the event which saves you a lot of time and frustration. Giving people the control to change or cancel the meeting schedule offers a good experience for the customers while letting you take control of your time.

The problem of last-minute no-shows is much more nuanced than can be solved by a few automated reminders. Let’s take a look at some of the most common scenarios.

When you are joining late

If it’s you (the host) who’s late, there are a couple of things you can do to soften the blow for your meeting participants.

Ideally, if you’re running late—you should send an email or text message to other participants letting them know (ahead of time) that you will be late by a couple of minutes. If you’re going to be more than 10 minutes late, you’re better off rescheduling the event. It’s unreasonable for you to expect people to wait for you for more than 10 minutes—even if it’s employees within your company.

It’s okay to be completely honest with people and tell them that something happened and you will have to reschedule the entire event. People will respect that because most of them know that urgent things have a way to throw cold water on our plans.

In an event where you’re rescheduling the event, resend the new calendar link along with an apology so that they can RSVP to the event right then and there.

When you are late to join a meeting that has multiple participants

Many times, you have Zoom meetings where there are multiple people from your organization participating in the meeting. By default, participants can’t join the meeting until the host joins the event.

This is a bad experience because it forces all participants to wait idly in the waiting room not knowing the status of the meeting. They can’t even interact with each other until the host joins.

If Zoom is your go-to meeting conferencing tool, there’s a setup in the software where you as the host can enable participants to join the event 5–15 minutes before the meeting kicks off.

You can enable this setting by signing in to your Zoom account (you should have the admin privilege) and following the below steps:

• In the navigation menu, click Account Management then Account Settings.
• In the Meeting Options section, select “Allow participants to join before host”.
• To allow custom “Join Before Host” time limits, check the “Participants can join

[x] minutes before start time option.

When you enable this setup, you allow other participants to interact with each other while they wait for you to show up. They can chit-chat, introduce each other, and warm up to the core agenda of the meeting. It buys you time and you improve the experience by compensating for the delayed schedule.

When the guest is late to join

What do you do when a person is intentional about joining a meeting but is late by a few minutes?

Many people say that you have to give your prospects at least 15 minutes to see if they show up.

Yes, customers are important to your business—but so is your time. If you are just waiting, not doing anything productive, you’re devaluing your time. And you need to indicate that to your prospects as well.

Give them 3–4 minutes of time, and if they don’t join within that time, send them another email as a follow-up reminder. Here’s how I do it:

Hi Jeff,

I’m waiting for you to join the Zoom call that we scheduled for today. I’m checking to see if you’re joining the call?

If you’re running late—I totally understand. I’ll wait for another 5 minutes to see if you can make it.

In case you can’t make it today, here’s the link to my calendar to reschedule the meeting.

Talk soon,

Aditya

By sending an email, you’re essentially telling your prospects that you trust their intentions but you’re also signaling that you’ve a finite time window. It’s a respectable and empathetic thing to do.

When the guest can’t join at all

Sometimes the prospect will respond immediately, apologizing and saying they will show up. Other times, I’ll hang up after the 10 minutes mark because it’s clear that something more urgent held them back from joining the call.

So I’ll send up another follow-up email that says something along the lines of:

Hi Tom,

I waited for you for 10 minutes in the Zoom room. Looks like you couldn’t make it. Here’s the link to my calendar to reschedule the call if you are free in the next couple of days.

Talk soon,

Aditya

By doing this, you make your prospects feel at ease with you—not making them feel guilty about the no-show—while prioritizing your time.

When you can’t join the call

Now let’s say you can’t join at all. In situations when you can’t avoid last-minute cancellations (like I said earlier, it’s fairly common for this to happen), there are a few things you can do.

If it’s the customers canceling the meeting at the last minute, give them the benefit of doubt and offer an option to reschedule the meeting again. If it’s you—the host—who can’t avoid the meeting, you can always reschedule the meeting. But it might jeopardize all the hard work that you put in to score a time on a prospect’s calendar. The stakes are higher when it’s an important client who means a lot to your business and getting their time is really hard.

In such cases, you should be in a position to delegate the meeting to a co-owner who can run the show in your absence.

This works best if it’s a first-time meeting with a prospect or a meeting where the co-owner was copied in the earlier conversation or has enough context about the interaction. If the new host wasn’t part of the original conversation preceding the event—or if the prospects have no knowledge of the person brought in at the last minute—this sudden change in plan might come across as a rude shock.

That’s because you can’t throw someone entirely new to host the meeting and expect them to run it smoothly. It’s a bad experience on both sides. In the interest of giving a good experience to the prospects, delegate the meeting’s ownership to someone else only when everyone is in the loop all along.

This helps you have a fallback option to avoid deals from slipping through the cracks and show respect to your prospects’ time who planned for days to block this time for the call.

Small things make a big difference

Modern SaaS companies are driven by human experiences. Words have power—therefore, using each word thoughtfully when communicating with prospects in the context of scheduling meetings can have a lasting impact on their customer experience. The sad reality is that most people often skip the “thoughtful” part in the process of scheduling meetings because they depend heavily on using automation, which can create a lukewarm customer experience.

It might look like a trivial matter, but handling micro-interactions like scheduling meetings constitute a holistic buyer experience. At the end of the day, it’s small things like these that help you build a customer-centric culture and that you can scale despite your company’s growth.

Take, for example, the buyer experience. Selling to prospects starts when you can offer the right interactions at the micro-level, one after the other. And when it’s time for a customer to buy, they would have already made a positive perception about your brand because of the likable experience they had with you.

Next time you are about to shoot a calendar link to your prospects through an email, read the copy and ask yourself: does the message feel inviting? Or, does it sound like you treat all of your customers in the same flat, generic way?

Research each prospect as deeply as possible

Most SDRs mistakenly believe that their job is just to find as many prospects as possible and pass them on to the AEs. Researching a prospect doesn’t naturally feature in their minds because it’s the AEs’ job to figure things out in detail. And nothing in prospecting is further from the truth.

You see, there are three main ingredients to booking more meetings with the ideal prospect:

• Not being afraid to pick up the phone
• Personalizing your outreach with relevance
• Becoming a pro at handling objections

And guess what weaves all of these three things together? Extensive research about the prospect. Research is the first step to an SDR workflow without which, it feels like shooting arrows in the dark.

Researching your prospects helps you get over your cold call heebie-jeebies. It allows you to familiarize yourself with prospects you have never talked to before and gives you the confidence to speak to them with ease.

Research builds relevance. What’s the point of getting a ton of cold leads in your pipeline if most of them are going to say no to your product after the demo? Looking up your prospects (and their company) gives you good insights that you can leverage in your outreach to connect with them.

Becoming an expert researcher helps you become a pro in objection handling. Good research lets you understand your prospects (and their problems) better, pitch your solution differently in the competitive landscape, and answer your prospects’ skepticism with hard data.

Researching both a prospect and their company before reaching out to them helps you find any triggers or priorities they might have so that you can tailor your pitch to get their attention.

The significance of researching is double when you are reaching out to a closed lost opportunity. For instance, we at Avoma review previous calls with a closed lost prospect to understand what went wrong during the earlier interaction and top it up with additional research to understand what could make them click.

Analyzing the previous calls not only helps us revive old prospect conversations and turn them into potential leads but also gives us opportunities to see patterns in our outreach communication (and the customer behavior) and refine our SDR strategy.

Of course, the AEs will also carry out their own research about the prospect as part of their pre-call sales routine. But SDRs are the foot soldiers in the sales team—so it’s your responsibility to initiate the research from day one.

Personalize your outreach, but be relevant

Personalization is a competitive advantage in sales and all other go-to-market (GTM) functions. It especially works like a charm for SDR because we are trying to reach out to strangers who don’t even know you or your product.

The internet is a noisy place and every prospect you reach out to probably hears from a dozen of sales reps every day trying to pitch them something or the other. A well-crafted pitch tailored to a prospect’s liking helps you break through the noise and gets them to sign up for your product trial/demo.

Forget sales outreach, most B2B brands these days tailor their product experiences to their buyers’ tastes because more and more customers buy from brands that offer a personalized experience.

Good personalization is the reason why account-based selling works so well, businesses exceed their revenue goals, and tools like Clear bit are such a rage among sales teams. Over the last few years, personalization has come a long way from being a novel software capability to becoming an expected table stake.

But most of us have started taking personalization for granted—and that’s where personalization fails. For instance, some automation tools limit the scope of personalization to pick up a customer’s first and last name. That’s not the kind of personalization I recommend you to apply to your prospecting.

In sales, personalization is all about being relevant. Customizing your outreach with relevance ties back to the point about researching your prospect. With so many great tools for prospecting at a sales rep’s disposal these days, almost everyone can figure out a customer’s basic details such as their name, email, company name, industry, etc. But making your prospects believe that your product can save their time and money—that’s going the extra mile to tailor your sales interaction.

Understand your prospects, their motivations, their company background, their pain points, and offer your solution as a natural fit in their lives. That’s a much better way to personalize your outreach than crafting your pitch to greet your prospect as “Jane” or “Joe” in your cold call script.

My suggestion: don’t sacrifice relevance for the sake of personalization. Personally, I would be more inclined to respond to one relevant LinkedIn message over 10 hyper-personalized emails—if the latter doesn’t promise me anything about solving one of my problems. I’m sure you would do the same.

Craft a near-perfect sales pitch

I say “near-perfect” because there’s no such thing as a perfect pitch. A sales pitch that works wonders for nine prospects usually fails with the tenth prospect because pitches are different strokes for different folks.

It’s even more challenging for SDRs because we have a small window of opportunity to crisply communicate to a prospect how our solution can help them. Most of us usually have less than a minute to deliver what we call the “elevator pitch” to quickly tell the prospect about who we are, what our product or service does, and how it will benefit them.

And unless you have a silver tongue (or have extensively researched your prospect), the answer is usually “I’m busy right now,” “who gave you my number?” or “Thanks, but I don’t need it.”

By now, I’d be preaching to the choir if I said researching makes your prospecting so much better. But it’s a fact that’s worth repeating over and over, especially when you look at data that complements it—a LinkedIn survey done a few years ago found that 52% of people respond positively to a personalized sales pitch based on research.

Apart from researching your prospect inside-out, there are two essential ingredients to a great sales pitch:

1. Communicating your product’s value proposition

2. Map it to your customer’s pain points

When you incorporate these two ingredients into your sales pitch, you get prospects to pay attention to what you are saying. Someone calling me out of the blue to say that there exists a solution that can help me save thousands—if not millions—of dollars? That would surely perk up my ears.

Value prop statements are highlights about your product that appeals to your prospects. For example, you have to deliver a clear and simple pitch that explains what your product can do for a prospect in 1–2 lines, such as:

Avoma helps customer-facing teams like yours analyze customer conversations and derive actionable insights out of each of them.

Value prop statements are free from jargon, buzzwords, or anything that the prospect might have difficulty processing. The point of value prop statements is to get your prospects’ attention so that you can intrigue them—not confuse them.

If you can map your product’s value prop to solving your prospects’ pain points—you can strike gold! But how can you pull it off? Let’s discuss it in the next section.

Don’t feature-bomb your prospects

To understand an idea better, sometimes we have to contrast it against an opposite idea. In this case, we first need to understand what not to do in our sales pitch to understand how to effectively map your product’s value prop to a prospect’s problems.

The worst thing you can do in your sales pitch—or any sales conversation in general—is to dump a list of features that your product offers. It’s an absolutely bad idea to list out all of the product features to prospects in a cold outreach—especially without establishing their relevance in their business environment.

Trust me, nobody is interested in hearing what your product can do, how affordable it is, or how impressive its integrations are. Customers are interested in knowing what a product can do for them, not what it can do in general.

Feature-bombing your sales pitch is like mentioning all the ingredients you would need in a recipe without saying what is it you are cooking. It’s random and doesn’t interest the prospect because they don’t know what to expect. But mentioning all the ingredients makes sense after you tell them that you can make a delicious apple pie—assuming they like apple pies.

The more you know about the prospect, the better your chances of tailoring your sales pitch to their existing needs—instead of overwhelming them with all the features in your product. Once again, researching your prospects beforehand lets you map your product’s value prop to what prospects need.

One smart way to marry your product’s benefits to the prospects’ pain points is to translate the features into benefits that they will find useful in their daily lives. For example, we at Avoma don’t tell our prospects that the product can help them record and transcribe calls.

We first try to establish which function they belong to (e.g., sales, customer success, product) and what might be the existing issues in their processes (e.g., not being able to coach new reps efficiently, losing customer context during account handoff from sales, or not having a direct feedback loop with customers).

We then incorporate important data points in our sales pitch while reaching out to prospects to make sure it speaks to them personally. Here’s an example of a cold email I recently sent to a Director of Sales in a B2B SaaS company in Maryland:

Did you notice how the above script combines everything that we have talked about so far: good research on the prospect and the company, a personal touch, and a value prop that ties directly to the prospect’s business challenges?

The only thing that’s missing from the picture is the mention of features—actually, there’s no mention of Avoma throughout the email copy. That’s intentional. The prospects are smart enough to figure that out on their own and if what I’m offering is of high relevance to them, they will also do their own homework before responding.

And I’m happy to report that I was able to set up a meeting with the prospect after he responded to my email. ????

There’s one more way to notch up the effectiveness of your sales outreach, i.e. being multi-pronged in your outreach efforts.

Be multi-threaded in your outreach

It’s important to multi-thread when reaching out to new customers to make sure you are leaving no stone unturned in your prospecting effort. This means strategically reaching out to a prospect over email, phone, and LinkedIn—most preferably in a paced-out manner.

Sometimes, it requires you to reach out to multiple people in an account at once—or in a consecutive order if you don’t get lucky with the first few ones. B2B customers seldom make major buying decisions alone; rather, they orchestrate the evaluation and buying process across different individuals and departments.

So assume that there are multiple decision-makers on the buyers’ side and devise a multi-threaded strategy to connect with all of them in your outreach plan.

Being multi-threaded helps you stay persistent across all channels while setting you apart from your competition. For instance, using LinkedIn videos has been a game-changer for me in my cold outreach efforts. I don’t see a lot of SDRs working for rival brands leveraging LinkedIn videos as efficiently—which gives me an edge over them.

Here’s how I use LinkedIn videos: after connecting with a prospect on LinkedIn for the first time, I record a less-than-a-minute-long video within LinkedIn Messaging (you can find the video icon on the top-right of a message thread) introducing myself and explaining why I connected with them. I also tailor my pitch to their unique requirements to build relevance.

Leveraging LinkedIn consistently over the years has improved my prospecting outcomes and helped me book a lot of meetings. Yes, it’s hard if you have never done it before. But you will get a hang of it in no time if you apply this technique to a few prospects.

The point is, figure out ways to do whatever it takes to get a prospect’s attention. Either increase the surface area of your prospecting by multi-threading your outreach across different channels and individuals or find unconventional ways to draw your client’s attention.

If video isn’t your thing, perhaps you can build a rapport with them by frequently engaging with them on their LinkedIn posts or referencing a high pain point in your outreach. No idea is too wild in sales prospecting—just ask Jeremiah Griffin (Head of Sales at The Sales Rebellion) who sent crumpled letters written by his kid to C-suite execs to get them to respond to him.

What if they slam the door on your face?

Two words—move on.

Rejection is part and parcel of a salesperson’s professional life. Don’t be too hard on yourself when you get turned down back to back by prospects—rejection happens to the best of us and you have to grow a thick skin if you want to be a pro at sales.

If you are easily affected by prospecting hanging up on you or not replying to your well-crafted emails, you’re taking yourself too seriously. You can be the best salesperson in your company and you still will be rejected left and right by prospects for reasons that are outside of your control.

For example, there are a number of reasons why a prospect might turn you down such as:

• The timing is not right
• They can’t afford your product
• They are not the right person to talk to
• They are already using a similar product

It’s important to remember that your job as a sales rep is not to sell to anyone and everyone—that’s a recipe for failure. Your job is to find customers who genuinely need a product that can improve their lives and who are an ideal fit for your product.

If a prospect has concerns about using your solution, perhaps you can apply one of the many objection handling techniques to convince them otherwise and find a common ground. But if a prospect tells you flat out “no”—it’s important to respectfully distance yourself from them and move on with other potential customers in your pipeline.

I have had plenty of prospects reject my pitch even when I had the best outreach strategy. Looking back, I realize that most of them didn’t work out for a good reason—they weren’t the ideal buyers for our brand and we both saved ourselves a lot of time and headache by not getting into a messy arrangement.

Bad-fit customers are a liability to you and your business. It’s best to dodge them in your prospecting and focus on attracting the right buyer persona for your product. But when you find them, hold them dear to your heart.

Pick up the right gauntlet to ace your prospecting game

Parting thoughts: if you are not listening to and reviewing your customer calls, you are stagnating your potential as an SDR. A prospecting process that’s left unexamined routinely is not worth it at all.

How else are you going to fill the gaps in your current prospecting techniques? Sales is an ever-changing landscape and the only thing that can help you stay ahead in the game is looking back and improving your performance.

To that end, Avoma is one of the best tools in any sales rep’s arsenal. I use Avoma to go back and listen to cold calls I have made previously (or repeat sometimes) to see how I could have handled the conversation.

Avoma integrates with several different diallers which means it automatically records and transcribes every sales call in the background while you are focused on having a meaningful conversation with the customer.

Since you have several prospecting and discovery calls scheduled every day, you won’t be able to remember everything that the prospects say in those calls. But Avoma does; it picks up critical details from the transcript such as any mention of the competitor, team size, the tools they are using currently, and action items that you can review from the summary Notes—without having to go through the entire transcript.

In addition, the notes automatically get updated in your CRM without you having to do it manually.

9 recommended tools for sales prospecting

Here’s an overview of all the tools we have compiled in this blog:

1. Loom
2. Lavender.ai
3. Hunter.io
4. Apollo.io
5. Sales Navigator
6. Pidgi
7. Aircall
8. Outreach
9. ZoomInfo

Let’s look at each of them in more detail.

1. Loom

Who says videos are only for demos? While the goal of most SDRs is to build the pipeline for AEs by getting prospects to schedule a product demo with them, forward-thinking sales reps can take advantage of Loom’s video creation platform to create guided demo experiences to get them to book a meeting.

It’s an excellent tool for product-led companies that want to showcase their product functionalities as part of their sales process.

For instance, let’s say you have been reaching out to a potential buyer through email multiple times, but sadly, they are not responding to your emails. If you are convinced that your product is highly compatible with their use cases, you can use Loom to record a virtual, customized demo and send it to them in your follow-up email sequence.

If it piques their curiosity, the prospect will want to know more about your product, pricing, and integrations based on what they saw in the demo video.

Loom is free to use for recording 25 five-minute videos per person. Its paid tiers start from $8/creator/month, but you can try the paid plans for free for 14 days.

2. Lavender.ai

If you have outgrown Grammarly to polish your email copies, Lavender can offer advanced functionalities you can use to write error-free, impactful emails. Lavender is a sales assistant tool that helps you optimize your cold email messages to get more replies, personalize your email copy, and improve your email outreach campaigns.

For instance, its Email Assistant functionality helps you with:

• Email analysis and scoring
• Fix problems in your copy, templates, etc.
• Mobile preview and optimization
• Open tracking

Its personalization features allow you to research your email recipients, find their bio and social data, understand their personality insights, and verify their email addresses.

Lavender employs an AI assistant to help you improve your email copy—starting one from scratch or finishing it based on your copy prompt. Lavender claims that it makes your email messaging more impactful by helping you find and fix anything that lowers your reply rate.

That’s a tall promise, but you need to see it to believe it.

Lavender also offers coaching and analytics insights to help you understand what kind of email copies work best for you. The coaching dashboard, for instance, highlights the best practices and trends that show what’s working in your favor so that you can double down on that. Meanwhile, it also recommends improvements to make your future email more effective.

Lavender has a free forever plan with limited features. Its paid plans start at $29/month/user and go up to $49/month/user.

3. Hunter.io

You might argue that Hunter is another people finder tool like Swordfish, Linked Helper, or Pidgi. But here’s how Hunter is different from the rest—it helps you find a prospect’s contact information and email addresses based on the domain address.

For instance, let’s say you want to reach out to John Doe, an IT Manager at Acme IT Solutions. With Hunter.io, you can type the company’s domain, e.g., “acmeIT.com,” in Hunter’s search box, and—voila!—it would give you a list of all potential prospects working there.

It’s super helpful for account-based sales prospecting teams that are focussed on reaching out to specific people in specific companies and building predictable revenue streams.

Like every other software that helps you extract business contact information, Hunter also has a Chrome extension browser that lets you find email addresses with a single click. But unlike other contact information products, Hunter enables you to design and launch sales-specific email campaigns.

Hunter’s cold email campaigns also let you schedule, track and templatize emails and follow-ups with a good mix of automation and personalization.

Hunter has a free forever plan, while its paid plans start at $49/month.

4. Apollo.io

If you want to take your prospecting to the moon, you might want to hop on Apollo.io. But is it just another people-finder software? It’s a bit more nuanced since it helps you improve your overall go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

Apollo is an all-in-one sales engagement platform that helps you discover new customers, re-engage with existing contacts, and identify profitable revenue opportunities. It lets you collect verified emails and contact numbers directly from LinkedIn, shows you 200+ data points to build the perfect prospect lists, and creates a series of measurable customer touchpoints.

However, Apollo’s all-in-one capabilities make it a strategically important solution for SDR teams since your sales reps can use its Intelligence Engine feature to refine your GTM based on the real-time analytics in the platform.

Apollo has data on over 220 million contacts and 30 million businesses that rival the biggest incumbents in the space in terms of accuracy and robust data quality.

Apollo has a free plan with 50 credits and a copious amount of useful features that lets you test drive the software without any commitments. Its paid plans start at $49/user/month.

5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

If you prefer hanging out on LinkedIn to find your ideal prospects, LinkedIn has a home-brewed prospecting solution for you—LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It’s essentially a sales management tool that helps outreach teams target the right prospects, understand critical insights, and design personalized outreach.

Since LinkedIn is the biggest social media platform for B2B buyers and sellers, the company has the upper hand in leveraging its user data to make Sales Navigator an irresistible prospecting tool.

The only downside to Sales Navigator is that it doesn’t let you export your lead data to other software platforms like a third-party CRM. You may sync your lead information between Sales Navigator and select CRMs, but you can’t download the data as CSV or XLS files.

You might think it’s table stakes for any lead gen enabling software to offer the data export capability, but this is LinkedIn’s way to force its users to stick around.

You can use Sales Navigator for a lot of different things, including:

• Customized lead suggestions
• Access to InMail Messages to reach 500 million LinkedIn members
• Real-time updates on your leads and accounts (e.g., job changes)
• Notes and tags to organize lead lists and CRM update
• One-click integration with third-party CRM software
• Sales content sharing and tracking

Sales Navigator helps you improve your prospecting—better than most CRM, but at a premium cost. It offers a free trial only to customers who pass their eligibility criteria. The paid plans start at $79.99/month/user, billed annually.

6. Pidgi

Pidgi is a prospecting tool with a nice twist. Launched in 2021, Pidgi is a one-of-its-kind sales intelligence tool that helps you identify past users of your product and increase the likelihood of better sales engagement.

With Pidgi, you can improve your company’s sales efficiency by focusing on prospects who you know are knowledgeable of your product and can help you open new doors of opportunities.

Pidgi’s other unique features include:

– Contact monitoring for job changes

– CRM integration

– Monthly data refresh

– Unlimited user seats

– Validated LinkedIn profiles

Pidgi is invaluable in helping you skip the painfully laborious research on your prospects, generate qualified sales opportunities, and gain an edge in your prospecting by reaching out to prospects who already have a context of your product.

It even sends you an email notification when a prospect leaves, joins or changes roles in one of your target accounts.

According to software review platforms, Pidgi reportedly has a free trial but doesn’t have that information on its website. So you might have to contact their sales teams to take Pidgi for a spin.

7. Aircall

Before you object, Aircall is not just a call center software for help desk teams. It’s also a dialer system that offers features to help sales teams (and even IT and Operations) to help them automate their workflows, manage call activities directly within the CRM, and improve sales productivity.

With Aircall’s sales solution, your SDRs can do away with the heavy lifting, like logging calls manually into the CRMs, and focus more on researching and preparing for client outreach.

Aircall also automates the post-call workflows to help you minimize downtime between your outreach calls. Same with its click-to-dial capability that lets sales reps maximize their output and reduce the time from research to outreach.

Aircall also offers features that allow you to tag prospect calls, organize campaigns, and set up proper follow-ups.

You can make the most of Aircall by integrating it with a powerful conversation intelligence tool like Avoma. Integrating Aircall with Avoma helps you record, transcribe, analyze your sales conversations, and get actionable insights to help your reps crush their quota.

Doing this can help your team refine their outreach over time.

“Avoma has been instrumental to the growth and success of our team. From analyzing and reviewing call patterns live with SDRs that we can turn into actionable feedback; to identifying objection trends and acting as a resource to quickly ramp up new hires, Avoma enables us to provide the best prospecting experience for our prospects and team.”
‍
– Brandon Lawson, Sales Development Manager at Avoma

If you want to test the Avoma-Aircall integration for your prospecting process, head over to Avoma, sign up for a free trial, and see how it can improve your prospecting efficiency.

And if you are wondering how much is Aircall priced—that would be $30/user/month when billed annually. No free trials or free plans—sorry.

8. Outreach

As an all-in-one product company, we love fellow all-in-one products. And when it comes to sales prospecting, Outreach is one of the best all-in-one sales engagement tools that pack a punch.

It offers powerful functionalities for prospecting that can help you with outbound, inbound, and account-based sales. But the software also offers capabilities beyond prospecting use cases such as deal closing, account retention, revenue expansion, or even hiring.

Outreach offers deep customer insights automation features for prospecting that can help your SDR teams book more meetings, improve your pipeline, and exceed revenue goals.

The platform gives you an integrated view and actionable data intelligence on all your target prospects. So whether you are using cold calling or email as your preferred means of Outreach, you can use Outreach to track your prospecting campaign and improve the process for better impact.

Sales development managers can leverage Outreach to review the performance of their SDRs and offer personalized coaching.

But how much is it priced? Outreach doesn’t make its pricing info public. ????‍♂️

9. ZoomInfo

We have critiqued ZoomInfo’s offerings in another blog where we compare ZoomInfo with Lusha.

ZoomInfo gives you access to comprehensive business contact information about your target audience combined with accurate, real-time analytics on buyer intent. This information can help you improve the quantity and quality of sales leads.

ZoomInfo offers advanced sales intelligence capabilities like CRM integration, lead capturing, market intelligence, and sourcing accurate buyer intent data at a more advanced level. Additionally, with business contact data of 130 million users, ZoomInfo boasts of an extensive database in the B2B space.

Compared to other sales intelligence tools, ZoomInfo offers buyer intent analytics that improves lead data accuracy and quality, giving teams looking to source high-quality lead information a massive advantage.

Point solutions such as Apollo.io don’t provide intent data in the same depth as ZoomInfo—requiring your sales team to manually sort through a massive amount of information to qualify leads.

ZoomInfo doesn’t have flat pricing plans available on its website. Instead, you need to get personalized pricing quotes from their sales team. ZoomInfo also doesn’t communicate that it doesn’t have monthly plans but requires customers to sign annual contracts.

But because we have done extensive research on the product, we know that ZoomInfo’s annual contracts start roughly at $15K a year. I know—that’s insane.

Bonus: Best books on prospecting

If you are just starting your career in an SDR role, there are some books that can help you sharpen your outreach skills. Here are a few of our favorites.

1. Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling

Many revere Fanatical Prospecting as a holy book of sales prospecting. It’s written by Jeb Blount, serial author and CEO of Sales Gravy—a leading sales training organization that he founded in 2006.

2. High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

Written by Mark Hunter CSP who began his sales career from the lowest rungs, High-Profit Prospecting teaches you everything ranging from the basic truths about prospecting, preparing for prospecting success to tips, tools, and techniques for effective prospecting.

3. Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline

The book is a collaboration between author duo Marylou Tyler and Jeremey Donovan—both of whom have an extensive history of being in the sales trenches.

Predictable prospecting is actually a great way to build a predictable pipeline and thereby generate predictable revenue.

In fact, our CEO Aditya talks at depth about how you can build a predictable prospecting routine to generate revenue predictable.

Best of luck for your prospecting success

Prospecting is the start of many good things, like discovery calls, demo calls, and closing a deal. When you do prospecting well, it creates a domino effect across all stages of your sales process and helps you bag a new paying customer in your revenue pipeline.

Make sure you have the right tools to help strike the right chords in your prospecting process. But don’t over-anchor too much on tools. Use the above-mentioned tools to improve your efficiency and harness your sales acumen. Beyond a point, tools are enablers for your processes. Nothing beats developing your strategic thinking abilities—that’s the skill you should be gunning for to have a fulfilling career in sales.

Do you really need a LinkedIn content strategy?

As an SDR, it’s part of your role to identify potential prospects, reach out to them, and explore an opportunity to see if your product can help solve their needs and pain points.

But first things first, we all know that no one likes to be pitched. We all receive sales pitches daily, and we almost instantly tune out the moment we sense a pitch coming.

And yet, when we receive a LinkedIn DM (direct message) from someone we know, we always respond to them. In fact, we often naturally gravitate towards people we trust, even if we didn’t have prior interaction with them.

Why does that happen?

It is because trust is already built. It’s already there in the form of content they create on LinkedIn—it could be posts where they express their point of view towards a topic, comments on posts where they contribute valuable inputs, and more.

When you’re in an outbound role like SDR, where you’re reaching out to prospects daily, it’s all the more important to have a LinkedIn content strategy whereby you build trust for yourself and the brand you represent.

The more you and your brand become familiar with your target audience, the easier it is to build conversations and relationships with them.

Great! What does a LinkedIn content strategy mean?

Keeping it simple and in first principles, having a LinkedIn content strategy means having clarity on the topics you’ll be discussing on LinkedIn in the form of posts, comments, 1:1 conversations, etc. These topics then extend to the tactical aspect of how you make those discussions engaging and effective.

Optimize your LinkedIn profile for your target audience

Your LinkedIn content  needs to have a trustworthy face. The LinkedIn profile page is like the clothes you wear to a networking event. Start by window dressing your profile page to make a great first impression.

If you search for “SDR” or “sales development representative” on LinkedIn, you will come across several profiles that don’t even have a profile picture. They have other details missing, such as no description text in the ‘About’ section, lacking text or image on the banner, or a total lack of featured posts.

How can you, as an SDR, expect prospects to accept your connection request or engage with you when you don’t even have basic, verifiable information about yourself?

Every small detail matters in the world of social media—from your profile pics to the endorsements you have earned from your colleagues. Use your LinkedIn profile page like a valuable real estate to communicate everything you want your prospects to know before you say “hi” to them.

So put up a smiling, confident-looking profile picture, complement it with a banner image (preferably about the brand you represent), and fill in all the important details that prospects can read when they skim through your profile page.

LinkedIn has one more underutilized area you can leverage to improve your prospecting. For instance, did you know you can create a customized CTA link right below your contact info?

Here’s how Carl Ferreira, Director of Sales at Refine Labs, uses the space to link to his company’s podcast.

You can use the section to link to your company website, signup page, demo page, pricing page, or calendar booking page.

The moral of the story—leave no stone unturned on your LinkedIn profile page to start your sales prospecting on a high note.

How to choose content themes for your LinkedIn strategy

Most SDRs don’t put in enough effort to build their LinkedIn presence because they don’t know what content to create. Creating content on LinkedIn isn’t about creating content on a single topic/theme or format, such as text or videos.

In real life, none of us speak about the same topic all the time. Our online presence needs to be an extension of who we are.

One way to approach this is to create content themes and extend them to specific topics that you are comfortable talking about or  that represent your brand.

Here’s an example of how to arrive at identifying the right topics to write about:

Now, if I add bullets by expanding on these themes making it relevant to me, here’s how it looks:

By doing this, I now have multiple topics on which I can create content. In fact, I can go with one theme daily every week and never run out of topics to discuss.

For example, let’s say my theme for today is “Skills,” and the selected sub-topic is “Ability to simplify,” all I need to do now is pick up a marketing topic that’s often misunderstood and simplify it based on my past observations and experience.

And here’s what I came up with:

Here’s another example, this time representing the PoV theme.

We at Avoma believe that all-in-one solutions are the future of SaaS buying. So a lot of us—including our CEO—take a strong stance in spreading that idea to our network on LinkedIn or have strong opinions when that topic comes up in our feed.

Having a point of view doesn’t just help you stand out, but it attracts genuine engagement and meaningful criticism from people who might not agree with you. And that’s a good thing—you position yourself as an original thinker who doesn’t conform to the same thoughts around them and can earn top mindshare among prospects who align with your point of view.

The only caveat—it’s good if your perspectives match the values of the product or the brand you represent. Otherwise, you will row the boat in a different direction than your company.

Remember some of these tips before you make your next post:

i. Relatability and relevance > your expertise.

ii. Focus on one core message per post, don’t try to say too many things at one go.

iii. Be open to different levels of engagement, agreements, and disagreements.

iv. Don’t waste your energy trying to beat the LinkedIn algorithm. Your energy is better spent on building relationships using your content.

v. Keep it conversational.

Identify what kind of content works for you

Once you’re settled on the topics and themes to discuss on LinkedIn, the next step is to figure out what content resonates with your audience. In short, you need identify the topics that result in:

• Better engagement on the post (i.e. gets more comments)
• 1:1 conversations and discussions on DMs
• Sign ups or demos scheduled, and more.

As you start testing our content based on your daily themes, you’ll start seeing patterns over time. You’ll notice certain topics in certain formats that resonate with your audience the most.

In general, a lot of people on LinkedIn believe that the platform favors text-only posts. And then there was also a period where the LinkedIn walls were flooded with polls as it resulted in getting lots of views and engagement.

The truth is—you need a good mix of text-based posts, native videos, images with descriptive captions, infographics, opinion polls, carousels, memes, and a lot more.

As an SDR, you can start with text posts because:

• It takes less time for you to create text posts between your busy schedule of managing lead lists, cold calling prospects, attending meetings, and following up with warm leads.
• Most SDRs are naturally good at writing—thanks to their cold emailing skills. If you can deliver a solid elevator pitch, you certainly can wax eloquent via LinkedIn posts.
• The production complexity of writing text-based content is way lower than creating videos, photos, infographics, or carousels.

Whatever content topics and formats (video, memes, etc.) you choose, make sure you build strong story narratives around them—because stories are what differentiates your content from the gazillion of other LinkedIn posts. Tell the stories in a way that strikes a chord with your audience.

If you can map them to your target audience’s problems, you’ll hit a jackpot!

A common issue with most of the LinkedIn content that doesn’t work is—it’s too meta. What’s the point of posting vague content that doesn’t give you any takeaways or doesn’t talk to anyone in particular?

From my experience, I would highly recommend you to start with commenting usefully on the posts of your target audience before starting to post yourself.

LinkedIn content strategy: The 10-3-1 framework

Being active and engaging on LinkedIn doesn’t just mean just posting content several times a day. It’s also about connecting with the right people, following the right accounts, building conversations with your target audience and thereby building trustworthy relationships.

For instance, even if you can’t create a new post every day, you can engage with the right handles. Anybody can take out at least 10 minutes in a day to do that—no matter how busy you are.

To that end, the 10-3-1 framework is a way to structure your LinkedIn activity without spending a lot of time on LinkedIn everyday, and focusing on your core activities.

What is the 10-3-1 framework?

It simply means sending out 10 targeted connection requests, commenting meaningfully on 3 posts, and making one 1 post on LinkedIn everyday.

Increasing the number of targeted connections everyday without making a sales pitch, and commenting meaningfully (example: sharing a solution based on your experience, as a response to the problem shared on a linkedin post by someone in your target audience) – are two of the most underrated ways to increase your prospecting surface area.

It not only increases the size of your prospect list, but also helps you become a recognized face in the community over time. And if more members of your team can do this on a daily basis, it improves the overall awareness of the brand you represent.

In the beginning, you might feel a bit awkward or might find it tough to find the right people to send connection requests to. It’s okay to feel that way when you are starting—you will overcome the mental hurdle pretty quickly. And connecting with the right people is easier than you think.

Here are a few ways to find people to connect with:

• Search for a company page, select “People,” and send connection requests to the ideal people from the list.
• Go to the “My Network” tab. LinkedIn will recommend new connections under the “People you may know with similar roles” section based on your recent LinkedIn connections.
• When you are viewing someone’s LinkedIn page, find potential connections from the “People also viewed” section in the right panel.
• Find people to connect to under the “People you may know” section.

Don’t just connect with anyone and everyone for the sake of growing your network. Make sure they are prospects you want to nurture or people who you can learn from.

Deepen relationships with your first-degree connections, find new second-degree connections to turn them into first-degree connections.

The next step is relevant-commenting. When you comment, make sure your comments add depth and elicit meaningful responses. Steer away from making superficial comments like “Love this!” or “Thanks for sharing” or “Always great reading your posts” that make you sound like a bot. Leave it to members of LinkedIn pods.

In addition to adding new connections and making 3 comments per day, start making one post per day based on the themes identified above—which gives you an opportunity to establish your credibility and PoV.

All it takes is 20–30 minutes of your time everyday to follow this framework and you will see the cumulative impact. The impact isn’t just in terms of your LinkedIn engagement, but also in terms of people recognizing you and your organization when you reach out to them as part of your prospecting.

Lastly, as much as it is important to add new connections, it’s equally important to prune your connections from time to time to ensure relevance.

For example, some of my first-degree connections on LinkedIn were people whom I went to college with, people whom I hadn’t spoken to in 10 years. I cleaned up those connections because I wanted to make sure that I’m connected only with my target audience to maximize the impact of my posts and engagement on LinkedIn.

Always play long-term games with long-term people

It’s easy to give up on LinkedIn when your content doesn’t perform well. But it’s short-sighted to blame LinkedIn’s algorithm or feel that you are too late to the party if everybody except you is crushing it on LinkedIn.

Succeeding on LinkedIn, like any other business strategy, takes time and patience. Don’t expect an overnight victory by posting on LinkedIn twice a day for a week. Instead, focus on the following things:

• Follow a proper strategy and apply it consistently
• Treat your time on LinkedIn like a long-term campaign
• Be nimble and course-correct your strategy when applicable
• Learn from your experience and the people around you

Initially, you might feel rejected, ignored, and frustrated—but you already know that’s how prospecting is. LinkedIn is no different as it all comes down to having enough touches with your ideal prospects before you take the relationship to the next level.

Invest your time on LinkedIn to build relationships and thereby a personal brand. Over time, your investment will pay off good dividends and lead to a compound effect of good results. E.g., it can help you build a steady pipeline of inbound interests that automatically come to you.

Let me name-drop some people who invested heavily in their LinkedIn content strategy and created undeniable clout in their respective niche. I highly recommend you to look up the following people on LinkedIn:

• Chris Walker
• Nick Bennett
• Dave Gerhardt
• Andreas Jonsson
• Gaetano DiNardi

They all offer value-packed advice for people in their network which is why their personal brand has skyrocketed over the past couple of years.

And they didn’t have it all right out of the gates. If you go to their individual profiles and look at the posts from 2019, you would see that the quality of their content wasn’t that great and they had paltry engagements.

That’s the thing about LinkedIn—or life in general. If you keep at it consistently, don’t shy away from being judged publicly, and articulate your thoughts and ideas—you will soon attract an audience that finds value in what you have to say.

Naturally, being better at expressing yourself will also help you become better at your craft. In that sense, writing is selling at scale. It helps you network across the globe and better package your ideas to the world.

As an SDR, your job on LinkedIn is to turn outbound sales efforts into enough inbound interests to fill your lead pipeline. So instead of seeking instant-gratification for your efforts, it’s far more rewarding to treat LinkedIn as a side gig to make hay with social selling.

Using LinkedIn analytics tools like SHIELD can further help you understand what’s working and what’s not in your LinkedIn content playbook.

We will see you at the top

At the outset, it might be a bit too much to imagine yourself applying all of the above tips, especially if you don’t spend too much time on LinkedIn. It’s understandable—there’s certainly a tiny learning curve that you need to overcome to build a habit of being a regular on LinkedIn.

But don’t let it overwhelm you—breaking out on LinkedIn is much easier than you think. You just have to fall in love with the process, which happens once you start blocking out time to be present on LinkedIn.

A fair word of warning: like other social media platforms, LinkedIn can be pretty addictive—especially when you start seeing success with your strategy.

Don’t let LinkedIn’s viral reach get into your head.

Keep in mind that your end goal with social selling is prospecting and LinkedIn is just a tool to help you do that. If you spend 6–8 hours every day in other prospecting activities, dedicate about 30 minutes of your time daily to apply the above tips.

Did you find this article useful? Let us know. And since we are talking about LinkedIn, it would be amazing if you can follow Avoma.

All the best with your LinkedIn content strategy!