The Sales Development Playbook: Build Repeatable Pipeline and Accelerate Growth with Inside Sales

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years you're aware that the biggest trend in sales is the growth of inside sales and sales development roles within organizations. My company is currently revisiting our sales development strategy so Trish Bertuzzi’s new book: The Sales Development Playbook couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.What I love about this work is that it comes straight from the streets and the school of hard knocks. If you aren’t familiar with Trish Bertuzzi, she is President of The Bridge Group where they have developed hundreds of inside sales and sales development teams. Trish’s experience is evident by the many pitfalls she describes throughout the work as she outlines her recommendations. These rang especially true to me as we had fallen into several of these pitfalls already.Trish outlines six elements of sales development success in the book which are:1. Strategy2. Specialization3. Recruiting4. Retention5. Execution6. LeadershipThese are the framework for the book and Trish drills down on each of these areas in excellent detail. I was surprised how concise the entire work is. There is zero fluff – just pure actionable material. For example:The 5 Why’s – Right out of the shoot we learn the 5 why’s (Why Listen, Why Care, Why Change, Why You, Why Now) that prospects ask in the context of the buyers journey and how that affects the objectives of sales development reps (SDRs). This will help you decide where to divide the line between your SDRs and your field staff. There is no one right answer. The answer depends on your situation and objectives.Sales-Marketing Alignment – Discussion is given to the criticality of sales-marketing alignment and who it is to best manage the SDR team for best results. Further into the work she revisits this area by contrasting and discussing six areas where the skill sets differ between these two areas.Specialization – Trish gives a highly practical and pragmatic treatment of the hotly debated topic of inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing and how to specialize your company’s resources appropriately.Target Lists – Trish uses “The ABCDs” to define priority to the lists your SDRs should be calling on. These include: The A-List, Bread & Butter, Compelling Events and Dead Ends. Again she gives this her highly practical and pragmatic treatment.Team Structure – How should you structure your teams? There are pitfalls to avoid here and also more than one way to succeed depending on your situation. Trish provides some very insightful stuff here that can only come from someone who has been there in the trenches.Research – How important is it to have researched our prospective client before reaching out? How much research is enough? How much is too much? These questions are answered and then followed up with a discussion of a new potential role that may be appropriate for some companies.Recruiting – If the biggest trend in sales is the growth of inside sales and SDR positions, then the biggest challenge is recruiting this same talent. This has proven to be the top challenge in AA-ISP surveys for a few years running now. This section is just oozing with practical advice. It includes: where hiring fits in the manager’s priority stack, the value of hiring in groups, how to identify top candidates, sample interview questions, and advice on making job descriptions exciting and appealing. Discussion is given on where to source candidates and how to find experience candidates in a highly competitive market.Compensation – How much should you pay your SDRs? How much of their compensation should be base salary and how much should be variable, performance-based pay? The answers here may surprise you. I first met Trish at the InsideSales Sales Acceleration Summit in Park City a few years back and this was the question du jour for everyone in Ken Krogue’s workshop. In my opinion, the recruiting and compensation part alone is worth the investment of this book.Retention – Some practical discussion around rep tenure is provided along with some outstanding advice on how to maximize retention. This is an outstanding section for real-world managers and really showcases Trish’s experience with developing sales development teams. There is candid discussion around onboarding (there’s even a sample plan), rep development, career paths, something she calls “micro-promotions” and how to keep things fun. There is excellent content here on the value of coaching and what the return on investment is for it. Trish touches on many pitfalls here that I personally found very valuable.In the Execution part of the book Trish addresses the topic I imagine many purchasing this book will find of key interest – messaging. Here we get examples of both good and bad phone and email conversations along with scripts and some very helpful formulas. There is also some discussion of personas and how the buyer persona affects messaging for the SDR.Pre-call planning is important and Trish specifically addresses what the appropriate amount of research actually is using the “3-C”sources which are: Company, Contact, Conversation Starter. The treatment of this subject is useful because I find that reps tend to fall somewhere along the a spectrum of “over-preparer” at one extreme where they never feel they have enough research to call, to “action-Jackson” on the other extreme where they just go for it and call without any preparation whatsoever. Knowing where the bull’s eye is on research and having a practical framework to train it is extremely useful for the manager and a huge time-savings for the SDR.Execution is also the section where we discuss cadence (contact frequency) and the various channels that SDRs might use to reach out. Trish spends some time here debunking some myths about which channels are most useful using her own metrics and research. If you haven’t already determined your own ideal cadence you will find this section very valuable.The final section discusses leadership functions. This includes how to set quotas, pipeline expectations, managing handoff procedures, and measuring results. Faithful to the pragmatic theme throughout the entire work, Trish cautions managers from going metric crazy by measuring too many things. She reminds us that only a small subset of metrics are actually actionable and then places those into three categories:Activity Metrics (there are 4)Objective Metrics (there are 4)Results Metrics (there are 7)After some practical discussion she offers up an example of a dashboard that incorporates all of these. She also treats you to a link from her website where you can download the latest averages for these metrics so you can compare your own results.Trish wraps up the leadership section with a discussion of technology and sales enablement tools. These are plotted along a 2 x 2 matrix with four quadrants labeled: Toys, Tools, Burdens & Mutiny-Makers. Without naming any vendors Trish tells you from her own personal experience what technologies empirically produce the best results for SDRs.I suppose it is impossible not to compare this work to the book by Aaron Ross - Predictable Revenue. My opinion is that they are both excellent. You should get them both. Where Arron’s book tells you the strategies you should employ when creating your sales development department, Trish’s book tells you how to operationalize it.Because this book was just what I needed at just the right time I couldn’t recommend this book more highly. The whole work is just so tight. I feel like I have a complete picture now on how to succeed in our sales development department.At the moment, this information is rare and in high demand. If you manage or supervise inside sales or sales development reps you will find this book invaluable as I have.

I have read scores of sales books and this is easily in the top 5. It is filled with immediately actionable insight rather than same-old, same-old self-promoting fluff). Here are my top 15 take-aways (in order presented in book):1. A major advantage of building in-house sales development is creating a “farm team” of future account executives2. Establish organizational agreement around your ideal customer profile (ICP)3. Put the highest possible emphasis on improving data quality4. Separate people who source/update data (“lead researchers”) from people who make calls.5. For hiring, ensure job description leave candidates with sense that this is a place to advance your career by staring with “why work here” rather than “what you will do day-to-day”6. SDRs expect a learning culture to builds functional and professional skills7. Establish micro-promotions such as associate SDR (appointment setting) to senior SDR (generating qualified appointments) based on achievement not tenure8. It takes 3 to 4 months to ramp a new SDR to full productivity9. Use 3-C pre-call planning by developing a couple bullet points on each of Company, Contact, and Conversation Starter; conversation starter might reference something relevant about industry, role, or company.10. Voicemails should start with value (not reps name & number), have a strong call to action, last no longer than 40 seconds11. Prospecting email structure: authentic subject; opening line addressing relevant problem (perhaps framed as provocative question); personalized value prop from prospect’s perspective (I noticed…); call to action (separately try: “How can I get 10 minutes on your calendar to share more?” or link to valuable content)12. When a lower level contact engages, concurrently or subsequently reach out to a higher-level contact too13. Do not just promote your best rep since SDR management is a totally different job; figure out who the other reps go to for answers14. Develop and maintain an “SDR Toolkit”/playbook that includes: (1) information about target markets and prospects (2) processes for inbound lead qualification and outbound prospecting including pre-call planning, etc. (3) Multi-touch, multi-media cadences (4) email and voicemail messaging samples (5) objection handling guidance (6) technology & tools guidance15. Set goals so that 65% of reps hit quota; make use of ramped quotas for new reps

This is a must read for folks that carry budgetary or first line responsibility for sales development reps (SDRs); which includes both marketing and sales leaders. For those of you that aspire to be successful leaders in this role – this will be your “reference” text.I have 15+ years of successfully deploying this function and found the book very valuable and plan on referring to it periodically for the foreseeable future. I got a lot of validation of my current knowledge, learned new perspectives on familiar problems, and insight into newer problems that I will likely come across in the future.I loved the fact that Trish Bertuzzi (the author) did not proclaim her paradigm, in addressing certain challenges, was the best solution out there - but did a solid job of showing examples of where her concepts were applied successfully and cautioned that some modification would be required in your own environment to achieve similar results (credibility!).Speaking of examples, there were a lot of them and they were communicated with Trish’s dynamic personality and humor (I laughed out loud at least once a chapter)! The book has plenty of comprehensive charts and graphs that do a great job of supporting the entertaining narrative. I also liked the access to supplemental nuggets in the form of links to her website (hence, my earlier “reference” remark).I highly recommend this book for those of you that want to rapidly deploy a new SDR team or improve the results of your existing one.