AMA: Dropbox Director of Sales and Channel Central Europe, Tim Britt on Sales Development

The key to success is having the correct building blocks in place starting with a company-wide sales methodology that is followed from rep level through to management and linked to your CRM systems. Being able to forecast on correct sales stages backed by data and conversion rates for pipeline management, is core to understanding where the gaps are in sales performance.  Build regular solution learning sessions weekly monthly and quarterly across all supporting business units from pre-sales to A ...Read More

It's extremely important to build a network across the sales industry either by joining user groups or reaching out to your peers at other companies and asking for a " coffee chat " to understand how they are tackling the challenges and where they see opportunity. I also belief in asking new starters what they liked from there previous company in reference to sales development  You could set up an RFI and have various companies come and present to you or commission a report via sales enablement ...Read More

Working closely with field marketing and product marketing teams to evaluate whether we are currently relevant to the market conditions plus are we using the correct sales plays to support your messaging. To be effective you need to review monthly / quarterly so you can understand the success of each sale's play and how long it takes to convert an MQL to SQL to a sales stage 2 lead to closed won, if your sales cycle is 3 months you always need to be thinking two quarters ahead as it's very diffi ...Read More

Invest in data science to understand the type of customers that are purchasing your solution, look at why you are winning and more importantly where you are losing. Then start to apply this logic to your inbound leads, I ask my reps to have several leading indicators for success, for example, is this customer in the right vertical, who is contacting us and why, and how have they contacted us via a marketing campaign or inbound chat lead. You need to build a scoring system to find the balance bet ...Read More

Results should be the main measurement but also listen to your reps and internal employee surveys. Have a dedicated sales development team or leader that's sole job is to build best practices, you should be hiring experienced talent so review each quarter how effective your sales development is but more importantly are they utilising the new skills you are teaching them? It's key as a leader to review in your 1:1's and set time for coaching and feedback, not everybody will be at the same level s ...Read More

Be clear on your sales methodology and discovery best practices, there is several simple tools to use from BANT ( Budget Authority Need and Time ) to Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, and Decision. Generally, a sales rep needs to have a conversation with the customer to move the lead from an MQL to SQL and should have identified Pain points to be able to sell them a solution, identify the criteria for a effective discovery call and use training tools to review with your reps if this is no ...Read More

First of all have a clear strategy that people can understand and make relevant to their own business unit, try and set clear goals and KPIs you are focusing on for the short term plus the long term outlook over the next 3 years. The next step is to spend time discussing this and answering any questions, don't just send them a power point and expect them to understand it, and you may need to do this multiple times across various stakeholders.  Define what an SQL is and make sure you are aligned, ...Read More