Attracting, Developing, and Retaining BDRs
With CROs being tasked to do more with less, they have to ask what a top-performing BDR can do for them and what they can do for the BDR. Even in a down market, newly empowered young talent have no shortage of career options with eye-popping starting salaries to entice them. In addition to the fierce competition to attract new BDRs, companies are also dealing with a high turnover of existing workers who are leaving in droves as victims of RIFs or for jobs that offer better pay and flexibility.
Unlike their predecessors, these emerging professionals are motivated by more than just employment. They seek well-defined development trajectories, equitable compensation, and exceptional leadership from their managers. As the preferences and demands of this younger workforce continue to reshape the talent landscape, organizations must adapt their strategies for attracting and retaining BDRs to remain competitive in a market.
Trajectory and leadership
“Don’t give me foosball tables. Give me fair compensation and a growth plan.”
The new workforce generation has been pretty explicit about what it wants in exchange for spending the majority of their waking hours at work. Unfortunately, the youngest employees aren’t always on senior leadership’s radar due to their age or tenure. This is a missed opportunity.
It’s easy to say you hire for abstract concepts such as hunger or grit but harder to qualify. While these characteristics are essential, CROs should think more strategically when it comes to BDRs. They represent the next generation of high-performing AEs. As such, CROs should work with internal recruiters to develop a growth plan for incoming talent.
Salary and total comp plans are important, but where CROs can truly stand out is with their leadership.
An eager recruit won’t be satisfied with checking off the same boxes 12 months into their tenure. CROs benefit from high-performing BDRs, so taking the time to recruit BDRs by providing personal growth plans can produce an incredible return on investment.
As for spotting talent? One head of revenue we spoke with filled in open spots by directing their attention to employees already in the organization who matched the skills profile of BDR. These people included:
Internal recruiters well-practiced in pitching the company, coordinating paperwork, and dealing with rejection daily
Product marketers who know how to write persuasive copy and know the ins and outs of the go-to-market pitch for their products and services
Employee referrals. When the broader organization has a strong culture for talent development, existing talent won’t hesitate to invite their friends to join them. And it’s hard to beat a talent bench that expands itself.
Developing BDRs
Most sales organizations are structured in a quid-pro-quo manner: give a dollar to the company in closed-won deals, get a dime in commission. It’s transactional, and the seller must prove value before seeing a return. This system may make sense in a commission system, but it’s a poor practice with regard to employee development opportunities.
Some revenue leaders hold BDRs’ development hostage until they hit a number. Getting rejected a hundred times on cold calls can build a BDR's resistance to rejection, but this muscle is just one part of becoming an effective seller. In a research report conducted by 6sense, the team asked over 400 BDRs about the details and sentiments of their job. According to 6sense CEO Jason Zintak, the data gives a succinct answer: “When BDRs are equipped with the right tools and feel supported by leadership, they meet their goals.” And BDRs who are enabled to hit their goals are much more likely to stay and potentially invite their friends to join their company.
CROs who view the BDR team as a bolt-on to their tenured sales organization instead of a talent bench are doing everyone a disservice. Arguably, young talent needs more attention from leadership than more tenured reps.
According to 6sense’s research, BDRs who feel supported by leadership:
Spend 12% more time contacting prospects
Earn 22% more quota than BDRs that don't feel supported
Best-in-class CROs understand how to articulate what they need from a BDR, how that fits into the total sales ecosystem, and what steps the BDR needs to take to get there.
Preventing Talent Churn
Every CRO is well aware of the negative impact of customer churn rates on a company's financial health. However, another type of churn rate can be equally detrimental and costly: seller churn.
When nurturing and developing talent within the organization, it's not enough to merely focus on helping BDRs improve their daily job performance. Retaining these talented individuals is equally crucial by providing them with strategic opportunities to expand their skills beyond their routine responsibilities.
For this retention strategy to be effective, leadership across all levels of the organization, from the CRO down to frontline managers, recognize the significance of investing time in getting to know their team members on a personal level. One CRO, for example, shared their practice of conducting 30-minute one-on-one meetings with every member of the revenue team every quarter. This proactive approach not only affords the CRO, often removed from the day-to-day operations, a valuable glimpse into the frontline activities but also presents an opportunity to identify and address potential issues or deal setbacks before they escalate, ultimately bolstering the team's performance and minimizing seller churn.
Here are five tactical initiatives CROs can implement right now to engage and preserve their BDR talent bench:
1. Get to Know Them
Knowing how a BDR works best and what makes them tick is the first step in understanding how to coach them. CROs can use this knowledge to give frontline managers insight into the BDR’s inherent talent, how to document it, how to have conversations with the BDR, and how to act upon those conversations.
Sharp-eyed CROs will also know when a BDR’s potential career trajectory may not be in sales but better suited in another part of the organization, such as marketing, ops, or enablement.
2. Create a BDR-to-AE Buddy System
Beyond simply matching up a few BDRs to support an AE, think of how an AE can give back to their BDRs. When AEs set clear expectations of their needs and demonstrate how to progress and close a sales cycle, BDRs can visualize where they need to focus their attention and see how their contributions can lead to actual revenue results.
3. Define the Parameters for Promotions
Doing the job right is what everyone gets paid for, but not everyone realizes that’s not enough to earn a promotion. Don’t make your team guess how to get promoted. Instead, establish an obvious, easy-to-understand calculus for advancing up the career ladder.
One great example is from LinkedIn’s internal playbook: results + leadership + leverage. Is the BDR producing solid results, leading by taking on more responsibility, and leveraging their results and commitments to move the business forward?
4. Give Them Opportunities to Grow
Nothing is more demoralizing than doing a good job and being eager to take on more responsibility only to be bereft of opportunities. One way to prepare a BDR for an AE role is to give them a small, low-risk deal to take through the sales cycle to close. If they’re a more tenured BDR, let them train a recruit to be their replacement before they can move up to an AE.
5. Use Technology to Refine Their Craft
Leaders shouldn’t withhold positive feedback until the next review cycle, and good tech shouldn’t be saved only for the more experienced sales team. BDR frontline managers, or the AEs mentoring them, can use technologies such as Gong or Chorus to listen to BDR calls and provide feedback on how they can improve. For AEs, this activity also helps prepare them to be a frontline sales manager.
Showing a BDR where and how they can move up through an organization can be equally as valuable to them as their comp plan.
Return on investment
Few would disagree that we can do more collectively to build, develop, retain, and promote our most promising people.
Viewing the opportunity to build a robust BDR team isn’t too different from a sales cycle: secure buy-in, have a strong enablement program to power success, provide a clear path to expand within the relationship, and remember referrals are worth their weight in gold.
What is the Numentum CRO Playbook?
A community-sourced guide that enables new and existing revenue professionals to quickly get up and going, optimize existing processes, and win in the Age of Buyer Experience. These aren’t theoretical insights: all information sourced herein has been provided by experienced Chief Revenue Officers from different industry verticals and company maturity stages.
See something you’d like to comment on or contribute to? We’d love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at info[at]numentum.com with the subject line CRO Playbook. You can also contact us here.
