Sales Development/Prospecting is spam: unconsented marketing solicitations to a buyers private inbox: phone, email, LinkedIn, physical home or work address. How? Via telemarketing, email spam, LinkedIn spam, physical mail spam, and bribery via gift cards.
Sales Development is goaled, measured, and compensated to spam via “monthly meetings booked” and nothing else, regardless of lead quality, costs, profitability, efficiency, or effectiveness. Regardless of turning buyers off and pushing some premature buyers to Sales. Regardless of lower win rates, longer sales cycles, and higher CAC. Regardless of damaging your company reputation and word of mouth. Regardless of handcuffing, preempting, counteracting, and crowding out Marketing.
There is a reason that Sales Development hires young unsuspecting people out of college who are "hungry" and possess "grit" and "resilience".
Garbage marketing in = garbage marketing and sales out.
As Chris Walker describes, “Bang. *gong rings*. ‘We booked 12 meetings yesterday. YAY’. We need to stop glorifying meetings as a metric. Talk to me about revenue. I see companies that celebrate 200 meetings per month. But they only win 2% of those deals & with terribly long sales cycles. So they're actually celebrating doing 196 demos that they lose. That's a lot of wasted time. A lot of wasted resources. A lot of lost opportunity costs. And in my opinion, not worthy of celebration. When this happens, the leads are most often the problem, not the sales process. The leads, and how they are sourced, primarily through [prospecting] are the problem. Mainly because the people booking the meetings are incentivized on the meeting, not the actual outcome. The problem isn’t the sellers because they close [Marketing’s website demo requests] at 35% not 2%. *How* you get the meeting is the most important factor whether or not you win the deal. It’s not the seller’s fault when they lose meetings that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Companies would be smarter to figure out how to get more [Marketing’s website demo requests] than hire 6 more people to dial & send cold messages all day”.
Companies like Saleswhale and Cognism have analyzed their Sales Development vs. Marketing and have repurposed resources from Sales Development to Marketing, or have liberated Marketing from Sales Development--to great success.
Get started on implementing The Buyer Centric Revenue Model by making the business case for the experiments to prove it and achieve a gradual transition.
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If you want to learn more about the model and these topics, check out my book “The Death of the SDR: And the Birth of the Buyer Centric Revenue Model”. It’s available on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and audiobook.
