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 Account management and post-sales customer success, if you do not understand your customer and why they are purchasing your product how can you effectively have the correct development strategy to be successful? Ultimately success is measured by performance, this could be YOY growth, opening up new markets or moving from a direct to indirect sales model and utilising the power of the reseller model to drive growth and success.

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 between effort and reward. A good model is to look at cost of acquisition, what is the cost for us to convert this lead to a sale and how long is the sales cycle, this way you can filter and apply the correct resource to support, a tier 1 lead could be a dedicated contact from a rep vs a tier 3 lead is loaded into a nurture program until they reach a point in time to have a person contact them. Understand the cost of each stage of the sales process and how effective that stage is. This way you can build a book of business that has a high propensity to buy based of data and past sales. 

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 difficult to build in quarter pipeline and this generally turns into a fire sale and high discount to meet in quarter targets. You should go into each quarter with at least 3x pipeline to quota depending on your win rate. 

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 not a SQL and not just " happy ears " 

My advice is to keep it simple, leadership has a habit of introducing multiple tools, and worksheets ( excel or google ) try and have a single source of the truth that everybody use's, I think its key to have a structured CRM solution with the correct data and workflows/gates in place to manage the sale process. I often see this as the number one complaint from reps is they are not sure where to input the data and what information is required, make it simple clear and easy to update. 

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 so some people will require additional support. 

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 agencies on best practices. 

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, this is the biggest mistake and also the area that isn't communicated well, so dedicate time at the start of the month to be clear on the expectations and then retro back at the end of the month or quarter.