In recent years, many sales organizations have found success by switching to a model where sales staff are divided into different teams carrying out specific roles. Yet, where this occurs, a huge focus is often placed on the salespeople who close deals, leaving those who specialize in the front end of the sales cycle somewhat neglected.

However, getting a prospect to the stage where a deal can be closed takes a huge amount of work and the job of identifying, qualifying and connecting with leads falls to your sales development team. Unfortunately, unless they adopt the right approach, your ‘deal closers’ may never even get the chance to put their skills to use.

Establishing a Strategy

When trying to find the right approach for your business, it is important to remember that there is no 'one size fits all' solution. To succeed, you must have a clear vision and that vision must be tailored to fit with the nature of your business and its unique market conditions.

One of the best ways to establish a strategy is to create a framework for the buyer's journey. Trish Bertuzzi, CEO of The Bridge Group, Inc. advocates using a five-step framework called The Five Whys: 

• Why listen?

• Why care?

• Why change?

• Why you?

• Why now?

Essentially, what this means is that your SDRs need to be able to explain to potential customers why they should listen, why they should care what your business has to say to them, why they should change their ways, why it is you they should turn to for a solution, and why this is the right time to do so.

Defining Success

Once you have discussed a specific strategy and every rep can answer the above questions, the next step is to define what success looks like. Again, this will differ from one business to the next, but it may also vary from one rep to another, based on their experience, as well as individual strengths and weaknesses.

Giving your reps clear and measurable goals to work towards can help to keep people on-task and motivated. Monitoring the performance of not only your team, but your individual team members can also help to tackle any issues that are arising, with regular one-to-one meetings helping with this aspect of workforce development.

Embracing Specialization

Finally, the entire concept of a sales team in charge of development requires you to embrace the idea of specialization and allow them to focus on their own task. Remember, the job of your SDRs is to handle the front end of the sales cycle. If they do their job well, other salespeople who are specialists in closing can handle the rest.

"The sales development team should not close deals. They should not act as part-time telemarketers, gaining leads for the marketing team that's hosting an event," says Kyle Porter, writing for Salesforce. "[They] should prospect and prospect only. All the time."

While it is important to articulate how SDRs are contributing to the wider aims of your organization, embracing specialization also means providing them with specialist training, coaching them to exhibit specialist behaviors and judging their overall performance on their own specific team and individual goals.

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Monika Götzmann is the EMEA Marketing Director of Miller Heiman Group, a global sales training and customer experience company. It specialises in providing exceptional sales training and consulting to help organisations design effective sales development strategies. Monika enjoys sharing her insight and thoughts to provide better sales and leadership development training. Follow her on twitter.