4 Things You Learn in Your First 4 Months As a Sales Development Representative

Every Sales Development Representative (SDR) role looks slightly different depending upon the company and the role of sales within their mission. But the end goal of SDRs is typically the same – engaging target buyers and getting them to understand how your product provides a solution to their problem.

In my role, I’m not selling to a buyer in exchange for revenue. Instead, I’m “selling” an opportunity to help the “buyer” do their job better while earning more money. Namely, paying doctors to provide better treatments for their patients. Easy as sales gets, right? Not exactly. My leads have been convinced for years that the service I’m selling is costly, time-consuming, and never worth it in the end, so every day I have to convince them that such is no longer the case. Sometimes the hardest part of this sale is gaining access to the targets in the first place – let alone convincing them of the product’s value – because their gatekeepers don’t care for “reps.”

In sales, you always hear of the ABCs (always be closing) but what about strategy, craft, and resilience? In your first few months working in sales, you’ll unlock your scrappiness potential as you navigate through cold-calling, emailing, social media, and other strategies in order to gain access and capture the attention of the person you’re selling to. This will sharpen and cultivate skills that you thought you’ve already mastered to those that you didn’t even know you possessed. There’s a sharp learning curve as a sales development representative, but here are four things that stand out about my first four months on the job.

Understanding: The Importance of Knowing The Ins and Outs of Your “Product”

Before you start pitching to anyone, you’ll want to thoroughly investigate the product you are selling and how it fits within the greater company. Ask questions, take notes – get the big picture and all the details in between. Pro tip: To test your knowledge, create a list of any questions you can anticipate a “buyer” asking and get thorough answers for each.

Whether you’re talking to a lead in person, over the phone, or through email, you’re providing a high-level pitch of your product. The object of your communication is to set up a meeting with the Account Executive, who meets with the lead for 30-45 minutes, filling in the rest of the picture. However, it’s not uncommon for the person you’re pitching to have more specific questions before they get to an Account Executive, so you have to be prepared. In my case, I had to make sure I learned the ins and outs of the healthcare industry to speak confidently about the product during my short pitch.

Understanding the industry, company, and product builds an essential credibility and confidence. Ignorance hinders sales, knowledge enables them. You’ll learn this quickly if you fail to do your homework.

Social Awareness: The Importance of Personalized Communication

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to communication. While your buyer persona will remain consistent with your sales, it’s still essential to tailor your pitch and communication to the individual person you’re communicating with.

Research is essential. If you can pull any interesting and relevant information about a lead, it can really help to cater your pitch and gain their respect/interest. However, you won’t always have the opportunity, and will often have to learn to read your audience on a rolling basis. This will be critical in your personalization of conversations.

First, pay attention to pace. Be mindful of people’s time – look for signs that indicate whether or not this will be a no-nonsense call (i.e cutting you off). Similarly, try to read their tone. As you gain experience, you’ll better understand personality types and how to lead/redirect conversations. I’ve found that leads often fall into one of two buckets: busy-body-with-no- time-to-spare versus still-busy-but-in-for-a- good-conversation types. Even though I had a loose script to follow, these variables would dictate the speed and nature of the conversation in real-time. Fortunately and unfortunately, you’ll really only derive this from experience, so the best way to learn is to dive in and be attentive.

Communication: Understanding What Nurtures Great Interactions

Precision of language can make or break you in this role. Language tackles the subconscious on all levels: logos, ethos and pathos. Misusing words can reflect emotions and meanings that get lost or misinterpreted in translation, so your word choice is your only ammunition. On top of that, you don’t have very long to make your point. Whether you’re curating a concise email or talking to your lead over the phone, communicating your value quickly and concisely becomes essential.

Framing is also critical. If a buyer doesn’t understand that a problem or its implications exist, then they have no need to buy a solution. There’s no science to the balance between too much and too little, but rule of thumb: concisely show your buyer that you understand and empathize with their problem, and organically arrive at and propose your solution.

Resilience: Learning How To Always Bounce Back

Arguably the most worrisome part of any sales role: rejection. You’ll deal with a lot of “no’s” (and honestly, worse). Unfortunately, this too is something that you’ll adapt to primarily from experience. What’s always helped me is remembering that these conversations are just a part of a workflow. No matter how rude and how personal a rejection might feel, remember that your lead has no idea who you really are and that not everyone is going to want what you’re selling, and that’s fine.

I’ll caveat rejection with pushing back. Granted, you’ll never close 100% of the deals you work on, but some people just don’t know that they want/need what you’re selling yet. Don’t be afraid to ask why – it just might save your sale.

The skills that you’ll extract from a role in Sales are ones that you’ll only attain by throwing yourself to the wolves – but these are skills that will stick with you throughout any career.