You’re a hot “rocket ship” company that is trying to scale. You’ve doubled your sales team in the last six months, and you have big revenue numbers to hit. You have a good story to tell and have trained your Sales Development Reps well. To maximize the ROI on your SDR investments, you want to make sure that the team is at its maximum efficiency and that it has the most conversations possible. As the marketing ops and sales ops team that support the SDR team, here are five simple hacks you can do to help your SDR achieve maximum efficiency, and they’ll love you for it.
1. Change Your Country and State Data Standard
For the Country and State data fields in your CRM system, make sure you spell out the full country and state names. Don’t use a postal abbreviation for the state (e.g., CA and NY) or an ISO code for the country (e.g., DE and CH). Are you confident that everybody knows that CN = China, CA = Canada, and CH = Switzerland? Why give your SDR a geography test every time they log into the CRM? If your SDRs have to spend any time to look up and confirm the abbreviation, you’ve lost productivity. If the lead gets routed to the wrong SDR, you waste even more valuable SDR time and delay follow-up time. There’s simply no good reason to not spell out the state and country names in your CRM: It avoids confusion and improves productivity. Don’t give your SDRs a geography test every time they log in to their CRM system.
2. Append Time Zone Data
I live in the Pacific Time Zone. At least a few times a month I get sales calls on my cell phone at 5am in the morning. Do you think I’ll be in a good mood to listen to your pitch even if I do pick up your call? This happens frequently enough that I now put my phone on “Do Not Disturb” until my alarm time. Do your SDRs and prospects a favor and append the time zone data to your lead records. Your SDRs shouldn’t risk annoying prospects by calling them at inappropriate times, and you can make that simple for them. Don’t ask your SDRs to waste precious time researching the prospect’s time zone if it’s not blatantly obvious. If you have even minimal address data like country and state, you can easily append time zone data.
Your SDRs should know what time it is at the destination they’re calling, and by appending the time zone to your lead records you can help.
3. Append Metro and Urban Area Data
It’s always good to know roughly where a prospect is located. Either because you’re doing a call campaign for a local event, or simply giving the SDRs something they can potentially have small talk on around the weather or sports teams. Most people know about the big metropolitan areas like San Francisco and Atlanta, but are unlikely to be familiar with the suburbs and adjacent areas that make up these metro and urban areas. For example, folks living outside of the San Francisco Bay Area probably couldn’t tell you that San Mateo, Cupertino, Fremont, and Morgan Hills are all part of the San Francisco Bay Area. The good news is that the Census Bureau has already defined metro and urban areas for you. As long as you have ZIP code or city data, you can easily append metro and urban area information to your database. With this appended data, your SDRs can quickly get a sense where a prospect is located, and this will make your list building efforts for local campaigns much easier.
The more your SDRs know about the prospect they’re calling on, the more success they’ll have. So, equip them with metro and urban area information.
4. Use Both International and National Phone Formats
For your SDRs making international calls, the phone number format can be one of their biggest time sucks. If your SDR team is using a dialer and a phone number is incorrectly formatted for the dialer, it’s just a waste of money, time, and resources. When it comes to what format to standardize your phone number data to, the choice is usually international or national. International is the format to use when dialing across country borders, e.g., +1 (650) 555-1212. National is the format to use when dialing within a country, e.g., (650) 555-1212. For countries like the U.S., the difference between the two formats is small and straightforward. But for some other countries, these variations can happen:
- National format may contain additional local code that isn’t in the international format, such as additional leading zeros in the city code
- Mobile and landline number may be formatted differently
Additionally, while your SDRs may be calling internationally, your AEs may be calling locally. You may even have different SDR teams with some having local coverage while others having international coverage. Do them a favor and just provide them with phone numbers in both international and national formats.
5. Translate Job Titles into English
Another challenge for your SDR team that’s calling internationally is job title, which is often provided in a local language that your SDR isn’t fluent in. While every sales and marketing database should have structured segments like job function and job level, it’s still important to have a job title in a language that your SDR and AE can read. Knowing the person’s job title provides your sales reps with the necessary background information to have a more engaging conversation. Without it, your SDRs have to waste time looking up a prospect in LinkedIn or other third-party databases. With services like Google Translate, it’s simple to automate the process of translating job titles into English or whatever the appropriate language is for your SDR team.
Your SDR team may be talented, but it’s unlikely they can all speak multiple languages. Give them a hand by translating job titles into a language they can read.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can further improve data quality in an automated way, register for the Openprise webcast, 10 Best Practices to Improve Sales Data Quality.