Russ Hearl, head of Sales Development at DoubleDutch, recently joined App Talks to share how he started and scaled his sales development team from zero to 35 in under 18 months, and helped drive incredible growth for the company.
DoubleDutch is a high-growth tech company that powers private mobile apps for events, tradeshows, and conferences. Though DoubleDutch caters to a $256 billion market with a ton of prospects, there’s little inbound lead flow—so the sales development team has to create opportunities one cold call at a time.
Hearl started at DoubleDutch in January 2013. Before he walked in the door on his first day, he purchased Salesforce CRM and installed PowerDialer from InsideSales.com. PowerDialer is one of 20 business apps from AppExchange that the DoubleDutch team uses to run their business, and a central part of their success story.
Check out the App Talks video to make sure you’re following Hearl’s smart steps to make every call count, and enjoy some great tips for building a stellar sales development team below.
3 Tips for Building a Stellar Sales Development Engine:
1. Focus on efficiencies for maximum throughput.
Hearl applied learning from Eliott Goldratt’s The Goal to apply theory of constraints process modeling to build his entire sales infrastructure.
- DoubleDutch has a team in the Philippines doing research and providing contacts to his sales team.
- Email is left to marketing, because Hearl wants his college-educated salespeople on the phone, making meaningful connections.
- PowerDialer, integrated with Salesforce, is central to the team’s day-to-day. They know they have to make calls and schedule demos in order to succeed. And they always know where they stand with dynamic leaderboards and call conversion reports.
2. Put the right systems in place to manage and motivate.
You have to set and live by clear goals and measurements – that’s how you set your team up for success.
- Hearl meets with each of his 35 sales development reps for 30 minutes each week, and uses reports and dashboards to help him lead with ease. He goes into each of meeting with clarity about where he needs to coach, because his reports and dashboards reveal exactly what’s working and what’s not.
- Because all activity is recorded in Salesforce and PowerDialer, Hearl’s team has analytics at their fingertips. They know optimal times to call certain regions, and even the most successful outreach cadence–it’s three calls, followed by an email, then another call. They also know that implementing LocalPresence technology, which makes calls appear on Caller ID with local area codes, has increased their call-to-connect rate by an incredible 37%.
- All this adds up to greater success and reps reaching their full potential. Hearl’s reps also have the means to motivate themselves, and they certainly do. Reps can create custom “throwdowns” to challenge anyone on the team to a competition. For instance, a rep can issue a throwdown like whoever gets to 60 calls first gets treated to free beers after work.
3. Treat technology as an enabler.
- With the Salesforce1 platform, DoubleDutch has 20+ AppExchange apps installed, and there hasn’t been a single app that Hearl couldn’t have installed himself. He had PowerDialer up and running in less than two hours.
- Using a platform approach has allowed the DoubleDutch team to pick and choose the apps they need and leverage technology as an enabler, which has been a critical component of DoubleDutch’s success.
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