How do you identify what’s working and not working in leading to sales qualified leads (SQL’s)?

SDR leaders have a plethora of data to work with, but sometimes it is hard to know where to look. A good starting point is to map out your funnel and ensure you have a metric that measures both quantity and quality to determine which steps of the action are below expectations.

Take cold calling as an example. In general, the key metric to evaluate the success of your cold calls is the number of cold calls required to book a demo or the percent of calls that result in a demo.

Say you are seeing that it takes you 100 calls to book a demo, but you know your industry average is half that. You might be tempted to jump in and do some mock call scenarios, but what if the problem is not your team’s live cold call execution? Your training may not improve your team’s success rate.

You must first map out the steps of successfully sourcing a demo from a cold call. 

1. Place the call

2. Have the prospect answer

3. Have the prospect agree to a demo

4. Have the demo occur
   

Each of these steps will have its own benchmark that you can compare your rate to. Say you see that you have a very low answer rate, but convert one in three answered calls to a demo. In this case, mock call training won’t effectively raise your demo booked rate. Instead, you may want to train your team on how to mark good numbers and avoid multiple calls to known bad numbers, how to call at effective times, or even look at better lead data options.

When looking at any metric, make sure you are gauging both quantity (are you making enough cold calls) and quality (are those calls being answered and are those conversations turning into live deals).