Sales development is undergoing a revolution, inspired, in part, by the waning efficacy of traditional strategies: indiscriminately blasting prospects with non-personalized messaging just isn’t cutting it anymore. At the same time, advancements in AI co-pilots are starting to pave the way for increasingly targeted, personalized, and cost-effective outreach. In the face of these rapid changes, we created a framework that balances the elements of the present and where we think things are headed in the future. It focuses on the most important, foundational elements, supplemented with trends we think are here to stay (e.g., signals-based selling, AI copilots).
This framework is broken into four fundamental layers: strategy, operations, people, and execution.
Strategy layer:
- We start all of our frameworks with the target market because it is the cornerstone upon which every other decision is made.
- Additionally, we’ve added messaging to our list of foundational strategic elements. Corporate messaging is the basis for many of the elements of the SDR playbook (see the people layer), including, critically, the SDR messaging framework.
Operations layer:
- Sales development teams have always invested very heavily (often more so than other GTM functions) in operations, often without dedicated operations resources. As a result, we captured as much operational detail as possible in the “SDR Operations” box.
- As part of that detail, we included a specific callout for AI co-pilot strategies. Sales development teams have always been at the bleeding edge of technological innovation, and though many successful sales development teams may lack AI co-pilots today, we strongly believe that they will be a prerequisite for success in the not-too-distant future.
- Strong alignment with marketing is not discussed nearly enough when we think about the defining attributes of successful sales development organizations. In fact, it is one of the most important determinants of overall GTM effectiveness. Consequently, we consider sales development’s access to and utilization of approved marketing content to be a core pillar of healthy sales development operations.
People layer:
- As any sales development leader knows, hiring excellent SDRs and equipping them well is of paramount importance. In an environment as variable and tough as today’s, continually enabling your SDRs and arming them with adaptable playbooks is more critical than it has ever been.
Execution layer:
- In our execution layer, we emphasize the importance of data and signals. For a long time, two primary sources of success in sales development execution were a) selecting the right channel and b) sourcing the right contact information. We believe the focus and effort will shift to identifying, harvesting, and analyzing multiple signals to guide the “when,” “what,” “how,” and “who” of outreach. (This conclusion is informed by our recent GTM flash survey, which can be accessed here.)
We encourage you to print out the framework and tick off any boxes for which your team already has robust processes, resources, and guidance. For any items left unchecked, start to think about how you incorporate them into your plans for this year. Download the framework here. If you think we are missing anything or have a different way of laying out the elements of your sales development organization, we would love to hear from you.
