Anyone leading a sales team today knows that churn in entry-level sales positions, or what is commonly referred to as Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) or Business Development Representatives (BDRs), has become a massive roadblock to building an effective internal sales team. A 2021 study from HubSpot found that sales rep churn has risen as high as 69.2% in the professional services industry. With churn rates so high and the talent market as competitive as it is today, the cost of building an internal sales team is skyrocketing when you factor in the resources required for the constant recruiting, training, and onboarding of new reps. In this blog, we’ll outline how outsourcing your SDR function can solve your organization’s ever-present and ever-intensifying churn problem.
Employee Turnover Stops Being Your Problem
There are two truths about your SDR layer - Your company will always need SDRs, and your SDRs will never want to stay SDRs for long. This creates the inevitable cycle of promotion, hiring, training, and onboarding, and it's mastering that cycle that creates operational growth. The problem with churn is that organizations that rely on fully in-house teams have to invest in a robust HR process to deal with this turnover and continually find and train top talent to keep the demand generation engine churning. Outsourced sales organizations have a tremendous amount of experience hiring salespeople, and know what to look for in talent, a skill that many regular firms lack. A typical firm not focused on sales won’t have as rigorous an interview process or know what to look for in a potentially great SDR. Part of the cost of hiring SDRs is poor hiring, and if you’re only hiring one at a time, that’s potentially months of having a bad hire waste your time. One of the main appeals of an outsourced SDR team is that when your internal reps churn, it is not your responsibility to recruit, train, and onboard a new rep to replace them. An outsourced partner will be able to recruit, train, and onboard a performing rep faster than a single company due to the never-ending recruiting, ironclad training processes, and access to top sales talent. Additionally, you will not need to invest as much in something like an HR team to bring in new sales team members.
Career Advancement Opportunities
SDR churn was always a problem, but it’s becoming increasingly pervasive now that outsourced SDR agencies such as FullFunnel have come to the forefront. One of the main drivers behind SDR churn is the lack of career advancement opportunities. As alluded to earlier, most SDRs have their sights set on being promoted into a different position after a year or two – most likely into an Account Executive or sales management role. These upper-level roles don’t experience as much churn, which often creates limited advancement opportunities and more ambiguity around promotion processes. In fact, generally, there is rarely a defined promotion point, often lacking certain checkpoints and KPIs that a rep needs to hit to earn a promotion. A vague idea of promotion is not going to attract top sales talent.
However, even if an organization with an internal sales team has a transparent career development path for its entry-level salespeople, what it almost always lacks is diversity of work. By diversity of work, we mean the opportunity for team members to get exposure to a wide variety of tasks while working across several industries and accounts, maximizing the potential for professional growth. Work diversity is especially attractive to salespeople who want to forge a sales career and truly become an expert because it puts them in a position to learn as much as possible in a short period of time. The company with the most potential to help a candidate become a sales expert is going to win the best SDR talent every time, and that is often outsourced sales firms like FullFunnel.
Strong Company Culture
Many organizations looking to build a sales team internally don’t realize that they may need to augment their culture to support entry-level sales talent. Offering things like group training, book clubs, and group issue processing can help build comradery and bring a team closer together, and is this especially important for young hires. Hiring new SDRs isn’t the same as hiring tenured professionals. It’s critically important to keep SDRs incentivized and motivated, which can be hard to do if you don’t have the resources needed to build an engaging, interesting work environment.
Since outsourced sales firms have the best recruiting and training programs in the market for BDRs and offer the best work diversity and career paths, they tend to attract the most ambitious raw sales talent in the talent market. This creates a co-op of like-minded SDRs feeding off of each other's aspirations, energy, and ambitions, training together, sharing knowledge, and ultimately driving their cohort of sales peers farther together. These reps are also managed by experienced SDR managers that can coach them and provide them with the career guidance they need to progress within the organization. While many companies with internal sales teams just use a sales executive’s time to manage their SDRs, our SDRMs are entirely dedicated to their SDRs advancement and success. Having great SDRMs helps SDRs maximize their potential and become productive, which improves retention downstream.
* * *
If your firm is struggling with SDR churn, we can help. FullFunnel has built successful sales programs for hundreds of firms across the globe, and we can help you build the sales team of your dreams. Request a consultation to learn more about our unique and proven approach to successful demand generation.
