Optimize Your Sales Development Process for Insurance Industry

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- Hey everybody, it's Patrick Dang here. Now in this video, we're gonna talk about Sales Development Reps also known as an SDR and a Business Development Rep also known as a BDR. So we're gonna talk about exactly what these roles are, how they work and what the work life is like on a day-to-day basis. And what the different career advancement opportunities are after you do these jobs. And my goal for you at the end of this video is for you to get a deep insight on exactly what these roles are and if it's something you should actually be interested. (upbeat music) Now, before we get started make sure to give this video a like, subscribe and turn on notifications. Now, for those of you who may not be familiar with my background, I actually started my sales career in Silicon Valley working at Oracle. So I got to see the world of, what exactly an SDR is and the Business Development Rep and Account Executive and all these different things, right. So this is coming from a place of personal experience being at the hotspot of sales in Silicon Valley. Diving right into it what I wanna do first is kind of describe exactly what a SDR is and the BDR is and what role they play in the overall sales team, right. Because there's many different people, there's many different many different roles in sales so this is a very specific role. Now, SDR, BDR Sales Development Rep, Business Development Rep they have different names. And if you Google it and you look online, you ask different people a lot of people have different definitions, but for the most part and what I found they're pretty much the same thing. And a lot of companies actually use these terms interchangeably. So some person might call this one SDR another person might be calling this one BDR, but they might be doing the exact same thing. So no matter what you're calling it, the basic job description is it's basically a junior sales role where your job is to generate leads for other people to close, right. So it's a lead generation role and they're gonna be many different ways to generate leads. But let me talk about the strategies when it comes to an SDR and a BDR. So essentially when it comes to a sales process, right, the first step in any company is you have to do some kind of prospecting or lead generation. Meaning you've got to find people who are interested in potentially buying your product or service. And step number two, is once you find these people you have to get a meeting with them and then someone will actually get on the phone or meet this person in-person to convince them to understand their problems and then see if whether or not they're a good fit and then they'll close the deal. After that, once the person closes then there's account management and that's just really taking care of the customer making sure they're happy continuing to renew them and have them spend more money with you over time. So when it comes to with the BDR or SDR, right, your role is gonna be step one which is the prospecting and lead generation side. So whether it's BDR, SDR a lot of times you may not be closing right away and your only job might be to set up appointments for someone like an Account Executive to actually close the deal. An Account Executive is pretty much just a sales person who closes deals. So the reason why this is a junior entry level job is because there's not much high risk, all you're really doing is reaching out to people and trying to see whether or not they wanna take a meeting with your company and you set up that meeting for another person who closes the deal. And because you're setting up these meetings which will potentially result in revenue for the company a lot of times you may get a commission based on how many meetings you set, or you might get a commission based on how much revenue is closed. So now you've got an understanding of what a BDR is an SDR, let's go ahead and talk about the day-to-day life of these roles. Essentially, there's gonna be two different types of prospecting, there's gonna be outbound and inbound. Let me talk about outbound first, right. Outbound means you're reaching out to people who might be a good fit for your product or service. A lot of times they may have no idea who you are, so you're reaching out to them cold. So you would do activities like cold calling, sending cold emails or connecting with them and sending cold messages on LinkedIn. So a lot of times for these roles, most of your time I will say like 90% of your time is just doing this. Coming out with ideas and trying to see, who will be a good fit for your product or service. So you might say, okay, "Today I'm gonna find all the companies "who are in the business "and there are this size company "and they have this specific situation. "So let's find all these people, "let's find all the people that work at this company "who might be relevant "and we want it to get a meeting with them "and we make this big old list." So if you're SDR BDR, you're just going down making those huge lists of maybe hundreds of thousands of people over the span of time. And once you make a large list, you can then start sending out your campaigns and that might be again, cold email, LinkedIn messages, or you might even get their phone number and just cold call them. So depending on the company you're working at, what product services they're selling and what industry you're in they might have different activities. Some companies are really strong when it comes to cold calling, so 90% of your time is on the phones. Other companies hate cold calling and they don't think it works for them and they're just gonna send cold emails all day, every day. So depending on where you're working all these different strategies can work but it just has to work for that specific product or service. So when you're applying for different jobs you're looking at this opportunity to become a BDR or an SDR. You have to ask yourself and ask the company, how exactly are you generating leads? And you have to make sure that whatever method you're using, you're okay with that. If you wanna to be on the phones, make sure they're doing cold calls. But if you don't wanna be on the phones and that's not your thing, then make sure they're not doing cold calls and they're doing cold email or LinkedIn. And as you would have guessed, day-to-day is a little bit of a grind because it's kind of repetitive you're doing the same thing over and over, but at the same time it's an extremely valuable skillset and it brings a lot of value to the company because, if you think about sales, if you cannot generate any leads then literally that company will not make any money because they're not getting new meetings with potential customers. So again, it is a grind, yes, but at the same time extremely critical and it pays really well because if you are able to get the meetings with the perfect dream customers every time, every day, then people are gonna pay you a lot of money to do that job and in forms of commission. So it's a grind, but you get paid a lot if you do well. Now that you understand the role of the BDR and SDR, let's go ahead and talk about the career opportunities once you step out of this row and you level up and you wanna do more advanced sales roles. So here's some natural transitions that a lot of people have, so after they're an SDR or a BDR, they might become an Account Executive. So I'm just gonna use SDR, so I don't have to keep saying SDR and BDR. An SDR generates a meeting for an Account Executive and then Account Executive will take the meeting and try to close the customer. So the natural next step for an SDR is to become an Account Executive where they're on the phones, closing deals. And this is kind of nice because you have another person generating all your meetings all you gotta do is get on the meeting and close the deal. So that's one option you could potentially go other options might include you might want to become an Account Manager. So instead of being the one that closes a deal, you might be the person that works with customers after they have already been closing and you just renew them and get them to continually spend with the company. This role is lot more stress free because the customer is well already a customer and just trying to get more money out of them, so that's another option. You might also wanna be a Sales Development Rep manager, instead of being on the closing side, you can handle or manage a team of SDRs and help them become more successful by reaching out to the right people and generating more meetings. So you don't have to be an Account Executive to be a manager for SDRs. You can become SDR then you can become a manager for SDRs. You see so it's a whole different career path and it's more of a managerial role. And lastly, you can do things like sales operations, like working in Salesforce or a different CRM and just managing all the data, understanding like why customers are buying and how to optimize your sales funnel and things like that. So that is more of a technical role you're not really selling anymore you're just helping sellers do a better job. So those are a couple examples of different opportunities you can explore and go into, after becoming an SDR or a BDR. And from my personal experience and what I've seen, a lot of people are SDRs or BDR for maybe a year and then they'll advance to another role. Sometimes it could be faster depending if you're good it really just depends on that company. And lot of times, a company may not even have a SDR role, they might just have an account executive that has to close deals and they have to produce their own leads. Really you've just have to ask the company what roles exactly do they have to get an understanding of exactly what you can do there. In a nutshell, that's gonna be my perspective on SDRs and BDRs. Hopefully you got a great understanding of how it works, and if you enjoyed this video make sure to give it a like. Subscribe if you wanna see more videos like this and make sure you turn on notifications because I'm gonna be dropping new fire videos every single week. And if you wanna get more advanced sales training make sure you click the link in the description where I have an advanced sales training on how to sell anything to anyone especially if you're just starting out your sales career, it's gonna give you the full breakdown of how everything works. And if you wanna learn more about sales and business development, I actually created another video about the difference between sales and business development because they are not the same thing. So if you wanna check it out, click the link on this screen and it's going to take you there. So with that said, my name is Patrick Dang, I hope you guys enjoyed this video and I'm gonna see you guys in the next one.