The secret habits of a top-performing BDR

What do Business Development Representatives do?

A BDR’s duties can be broken down simply:

• Finding new leads 

• Qualifying new leads 

• Passing them over to an AE

Seems straightforward enough. Except BDRs are very pivotal to the sales process. If they do their job right, they’re setting the team up for success as prospects navigate the sales cycle. As a lot of trust and rapport is built up in the early stages of the sale, it’s safe to say the role of a BDR is a pretty big deal.

How BDRs add value to a business

• By generating leads (not converting them)

• By finding new, untapped opportunities (not relying on organic leads)

• By discovering prospects who aren’t even aware they need your solution

The next question is simple: How do top BDRs perform so well? 

Scroll down for the breakdown 👇

The Secret Habits of a top-performing BDR

Prioritize the quality of your outreach

It’s not enough to say you’re ‘busy’ reaching out to prospects. “quality over quantity” has stood the test of time for a reason. Instead of throwing every lead that comes your way into the “good list”, be sure to do your due diligence and conduct basic research on the potential customer.

Templates are a must

Have you sent that email 4 or more times? Well it’s about time you turned it into a template. But wait… there are conditions.

For instance, if the emails you’ve been sending have more in common with the contents of your rubbish bin than it does a winning email template, then do some more experimenting: make it shorter; personalize it a bit more; ask more interesting questions.

Once your response rates go up, you can then create your winning template based on the data you’ve collected through trial and error.

Try Harder than Everyone Else

A huge mistake to avoid is believing that all collaborative agreements are 50/50. This isn’t always true. If you have a sales coach (and you should) they have an obligation to impart what they know to you. But you have an obligation to yourself to go above and beyond to improve your skills and ascend the sales ladder.

Your sales coach can’t care more about your commission check than he does his own.

Tap into the Right Tools

Kieran O’Connor, Sales Manager at Hubspot, shared his go-to tools to help BDRs stay productive. Take a page out of the book of top-performing BDRs and add these tools and extensions to your arsenal: 

• Grammarly - free grammar checker 

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator - Find and contact relevant companies 

• Hubspot Sales - track emails, store and send templates, and enroll sequences

• Evernote - organize and store notes 

• Datanyze - create prospect lists for good fit companies

See Kieran’s tips for becoming a successful BDR here.

Play Copy Cat

If you’ve ever spoken to creatives whether songwriters, poets, or whoever, they may have told you they started out imitating their idols.

They eventually figure out their own style and find their own rhythm. In the end, they carve out their own process and identity, showing little traces of the source material that inspired them in the first place.

This is the long way of saying: Shadow a great BDR, copy everything he or she does right, and let the pieces come together as you figure things out.

Sure you may not be writing poetry for your prospects or anything of the sort, but selling is an art in its own right and you’d best start perfecting your craft.

Sales Q&A

About to start my first week as a BDR. Any advice?

Read more here.

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