Do You Know Your True Business Development Costs?

Little-to-no knowledge of financing and pricing is often cited as one of the most common reasons why small businesses fail. Obviously you can't expect to maintain a profitable business unless you know how much money is being spent, and how much money is being earned. But not all of the costs associated with running a business are obvious. Some are more discreet, making them to difficult to account for.

It's a good idea for sales managers to go back to the basics when analyzing your business's development costs, beginning with the value of your sales development representatives' (SDRs) time. Some executive management and sales executives assume it's more cost-effective to allow their SDRs to perform multiple steps in the sales process, including initiating contact with prospects, following up with those prospects, and even researching information about prospects and leads. As a result, executive management and sales executives may pay their SDRs a flat per-hour wage, such as $15-$25 per hour.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned model is highly inefficient and will probably end up costing sales managers and sales teams more in the long run. The primary function of an SDR is to generate leads, which will hopefully convert into sales (assuming all goes well). If SDRs are busy juggling dozens of small tasks, they won't be able to focus on what really matters: generating leads. Therefore, sales managers should consider “giving back” some of their sales development reps' time so they can attract more sales leads that ultimately convert into sales. 

Here's some ideas to "give back" a sales development rep's time:

• Implement a marketing automation system, like Hubspot
• Use a predictive dialer, like InsideSales.com
• Provide better targeted leads and higher quality like SalesLeads Inc
• Provide regular sales training, like Sandler Training
• Among others

Now, 3 of the 4 bullet points are great tools to keep in front of the prospect, or learn how to keep in front of the prospect. But there's one bullet that clearly saves the sales development rep or any sales reps time, that's with SalesLeads. 

Sales Managers are being graded on results by the executives. SalesLeads helps you to get to the results...quicker. Here's a couple of ways:

1. Sign up for Project Reports. You can first try it out and once you know what it's all about, sign up to get the sales leads on a regular basis. Project Reports are sales leads that have been uncovered by our research team. These identified projects allow the sales rep or the sales development rep to call right away as the opportunity exists. The sales lead comes fully equipped with the contact name, phone number and email address. 

2. You've received a sales lead from the website or a direct email. The sales rep calls, but the number is wrong...or the sales rep calls and they refer to you another person...but what is this person responsible for? And what's their contact information? The Target Account Sales Intelligence allows you to look up a company, find the target person or persons with phone numbers and email addresses. This takes seconds to do, so more time is spent on calling the prospect.

Simple Math for the Sales Development Rep

When analyzing the value of an SDR, you have to think in terms of return on investment (ROI). If you pay an SDR $20 per hour but he or she only generates $15 per hour worth of sales leads and sales, it's not cost-effective keeping the SDR on board. On the contrary, you'll end losing money with a negative ROI such as this. So, what kind of ROI should you expect from a typical SDR?

There's really no easy way to accurately predict exactly how much revenue a sales development rep will generate. However, some business-to-business (B2B) sales companies report ROIs in the range of 10-20x from their sales development reps.

The bottom line is that an sales managers are under pressure to produce sales from their sales team. Remember, allowing your sales development rep to focus their time and energy towards generating sales leads will usually raise their ROI. With that said, sales managers should monitor their sales development performance with all of the different programs and focus in on what works, like sales leads from SalesLeads, and reduce the time spent on programs that are less fruitful.

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