A BDR or business development representative is someone within the sales team responsible for creating new business opportunities. They deploy various methods such as cold calling, networking, emailing, etc., to connect and engage with potential customers. For an organization, business development is a key arena where strategic opportunities are created to drive growth and partnerships.

Enhancing a BDR’s capacity with AI

Not surprisingly, sales planning meetings are mostly focused on BDR capacity. A productive team of top-level BDRs is crucial to getting closer to the company’s overall goals, like grabbing more clients, getting higher engagement, or more potential and relevant leads. However, one issue that often recurs to limit BDR capacity is solely relying on the traditional approach. You can and need to rethink your strategies to properly reconfigure the current outputs of the company.

Here are different ways to create an optimal and worthwhile BDR output:

• Enhance the quality of your leads

To ensure your BDRs are dealing with quality leads means you need better lead scoring. You can use different tools to assess visitors coming to your website and score them based on details like title, company name, or other info included in the CRM. Thus, you can easily find out who can be a relevant prospect and who can’t.

• Get more leads in the BDR pipeline:

Indeed, hiring more people takes a lot of time and is expensive, so you can consider doling out more work to the BDRs you already have. You can do this by effectively increasing the BDR pipeline’s number of leads. As you get more leads, your ad spends with Google or Facebook will increase, depending upon the lead and demand generation procedures you follow in your company. This is risky and expensive too. In addition to lead quality, call-to-connect ratio and the count of attended or scheduled or attended meetings also matter. Fortunately, there is a way to improve it.

• Hire more BDRs to boost capacity:

Theoretically, the more BDRs you have in your company, the better your results would be. Nonetheless, you get a different picture as you begin to draft a hiring plan based on past performances. Onboarding more people is not an instant fix. You need to regard your ramp rate. Remember that the average annual churn rate for newly hired BDRs is 40%. Although hiring can seem the easiest and most obvious option, it’s also the most costly. Thus, hiring BDRs should be the last option you should consider to enhance the capacity of the BDR team.

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Best Practices for BDR Teams in the B2B Tech Sector

Running a BDR team successfully is anything but straightforward. It is challenging to recruit and retain team members; they are detracted from performing other tasks, often systems might be outdated, and all in all, it can get overwhelming to scale the organization. These issues with BDR teams impede businesses from achieving operational excellence, process excellence, and generating satisfactory sales.

However, with the following best practices, you enjoy higher chances of success in your BDR teams and sales performance. Read on!

1. Invest in the right tech:

No doubt, BDRs are often burdened by legacy systems like basic telephony, CRM software, and suboptimal list services. Consider intent data, predictive analytics and metrics, social prospecting tools, and the latest calling tech. About 40% of BDRs say that they face most of the channels due to the absence of the right technology.

2. Create links between marketing & sales:

It’s time to shun the “oil and water” view of marketing and sales divisions. New account-based marketing regards seeing the prospect or customer through a mutual lens, so teams need to work for hand in hand instead of working alone.

3. Avoid churn with recruitment, team motivation, & training:

Not only is it hard to find and recruit talented people, but it is hard to retain them as well. Robust HCM, leadership, gamification, and listening are crucial to understanding the force that drives the employees and what they expect from you.

 4. Consider the gap between MQLs & action:

Provide needed resources to your teams to avoid letting opportunities go cold. Under-resourced teams mean you are missing out on many opportunities. Just focusing on the BDR team output can help you capitalize on openings to sell.

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BDRs are a key part of your business and sales team. They get all the leg work done right from the first meeting with the prospect to handing it off to the sales team. BDR teams research the company and identify the direct sales teams should go while talking to the lead. When handled right, the BDR department can generate easily converted and better leads and grow ROI, and in turn, your business.