Sales Roles Specialization for a Scalable Customer-Centric Organization
Sales Roles Specialization is crucial to be able to scale a customer-centric organization. The success of your growing company, and especially if you are a SaaS company, comes from specializing the sales roles very early on. Specialization of sales roles is proven to increase deals won.
Since the sales roles specialization is so important, we will explore today the primary responsibilities of each role, offering you a blueprint for the roles that might need to be created to accelerate growth.
Business Development Representative (BDR)
A business development representative’s primary goal is to book sales appointments and turn the appointments into profitable sales opportunities. Once they book a meeting, the prospect is passed on to an Account Executive. The BDRs in general are a junior role that can grow into an SDR and AE over time.
In general, the BDRs are in charge of prospecting, one of the activities that are vital for a constant flow of leads into the organization, but one activity that AEs do not have the bandwidth to invest a considerable amount of time.
The responsibilities of a BDR include:
- A business development representative is responsible for generating constant new business opportunities. They make calls, send emails and pitch their services to prospects daily.
- They drive sales growth by setting up meetings for account executives.
- They are in charge of producing creative strategies for influencing prospects to book sales appointments and contribute positively to the company’s revenue.
Sales Development Representative (SDR)
SDRs are responsible for the initial qualification of leads that arrived through the marketing channels. The main role of SDR is to turn a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), prospects that are already engaged with the company, into a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).
SDRs do research on prospects, connect with them and educate them before passing them over to the Account Executive.
The responsibilities of an SDR include:
- Engage in intelligent conversations over the phone and/or email.
- Arrange for appointments and demos.
- Partner and work with other team members to develop relationship maps and account intelligence.
- Relate with current users to expand awareness, educate, and identify new opportunities.
The main difference between BDRs and SDRs is that BDRs are engaging cold prospects while SDRs are engaging warm contacts.
Account Executive
An Account Executive (AE) is a salesperson that is in charge of closing deals in other words the person that will create new customers and therefore concrete revenue. They are paid based on the number of sales they close and are given commissions when they sell the company’s product and services. In general, AEs are more senior sales reps that possess solid closing skills. Among the skills required to be a successful AE we can enumerate:
- Problem-solving
- Determination
- Empathy
- Organization
- Goal-oriented and presentation skills.
AEs work with SDRs and BDRs to receive the appointments and SQLs while they hold the call, give the prospects a demo, and successfully close the deal.
We should note that a very detailed workflow and hand offer protocol need to be implemented and agreed on by using and customizing the company CRM. The company CRM will hold all the information each BDR, SDR, and AEs saved in relationship with each prospect and SDRs. While the specialization of sales roles is important, using and adapting the CRM to the company needs is equally important.
Customer Success Representative (CSR)
CSRs are entering the picture after the sale is done. They are tasked with keeping a close but low relationship with users, buyers, and subscribers of the company’s services and products.
They are to ensure increased upsells and referrals by ensuring customers are satisfied with their services.
The Responsibilities of a customer success representative include:
- Being an advocate to customers by responding to their inquiries.
- Resolving any customer account issues with the help of upper management.
- Managing customer’s account.
- Gathering feedback from the customer.
- Managing the communication infrastructure.
Conclusion
Creating a scalable customer-centric sales organization depends on specializing the sales roles as soon as possible. Each role, BDR, SDR, and AE can give also a growth path into the Sales Organization with CSR being orthogonal and making sure that a high Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is reached.