Category: Podcast Show Notes

Everyone wants to know how to best scale their sales team. Going from one or two people to a full fledged team of salespeople is surely a good sign of the health of the company but it comes with some growing pains.

As a junior sales manager, at a company heavily invested in activity metrics, sales development leader Jake Biskar figured the key to prospecting was sending as many emails as possible. The more contact you attempt to make, the more contact you will, eventually, make. Right? Not so fast.

Attending a conference (or two or three) is one of the highlights of a salesperson’s year. You get out of the office, often to a cool city, and get some face time with with customers and other sales professionals. What’s not to love?

You have a sales development rep, and they’re consistently booking qualified meetings. Qualified meetings are a critical component of the growth of any company, so hiring more SDRs will bring the company more qualified meetings. Simple, right? Well, not exactly.

Here at Predictable Revenue, we know a thing or two about, well, Predictable Revenue. We know it so well, in fact, we built our company on its principles and tactics to help organizations and sales teams increase revenue and scale their outbound operations.

Behind every good salesperson, whether they be an Account Executive or a Sales Development Rep, there’s a high-functioning marketing team. Sales reps love being armed with persuasive content, automation software and, of course, a never-ending flow of leads to work.

It’s completely understandable. You’ve built a product that you’re extremely proud of. Hour after hour of development work, coding at all hours of the night – finally, you have something that works. It’s time to share it with the world, right? Well, almost. You just need to start selling it.

Let’s face it: making calls, day after day, month after month, quarter after quarter can be a grind for any sales development rep. Even when things are going well – you’re crushing your numbers, prospects are happy to chat, and the leads you’re passing are closing – sometimes it can be challenging to pick up the phone and dial another number.

According to Ryan O’Hara, VP of Growth and Marketing at LeadIQ, sales is an intensely creative job. In fact, he thinks the future of the job lies in sales professionals embracing their creative side to stand out from the crowd.

You have to stand out, there’s just no way around out. Being a part of the crowd – a crowd that is growing by the day – simply isn’t an option. Everyone in sales, especially those grinding away on the prospecting side, know this. I mean, without being different in some way, how is your email going stand out from the hundreds of others filling up your prospect’s inbox?

Current sales culture, for the most part, is entirely concerned with the close. It’s an understandable focal point, of course. Closing a customer means more revenue for the company, and more revenue for the company means growth. Oh, and closing a customer also means a commission cheque to the sales person responsible. And sales people like commission cheques.

It’s a peculiar, and seemingly unique, aspect of the sales industry: the critical role in charge of keeping the sales funnel full of leads and, hopefully, opportunities is almost always given to the most junior person on a given team.