The Modern Business Development Representative Playbook: Agency-Tested Strategies

Business development representatives (BDRs) have long been the workhorses of any lead gen agency.

They’re responsible for much of the leg work required to meet your clients’ sales goals, from finding the perfect prospects to driving interest and engagement through personalized outreach messaging. But the BDR role has evolved significantly in recent years, thanks largely to increased adoption of AI and digital tools.

Read on to learn how the job has changed – and what steps agencies should take to build future-proofed business development teams.

How Has the BDR Role Evolved?

Let’s start by looking at the main ways that technology has changed the role of business development representatives:

Mastering an Extended Tech Stack

Just a few years ago, BDRs predominantly relied on outbound calls and emails to generate leads.

Those are still key tools of the trade – but they’ve been massively enhanced by various technology developments. Today, BDRs must be comfortable using a wealth of tools, from increasingly sophisticated cold email software to automation and AI.

On one hand, these innovations make business development reps more efficient, helping them spend less time on low-value manual tasks like data entry and email deliverability monitoring. But on the other, each tool has a learning curve. Getting up to speed fast is essential to succeed in the role.

Leveraging New Communications Channels & Tactics

The days of sales reps relying solely on cold calling and cold email are over. 

Advanced sales enablement platforms now allow BDRs to reach prospects through multiple channels as part of the same campaign. Plus they can personalize outreach at scale to create more engaging sales sequences that speak to the specific goals and pain points of individual prospects.

Again, this is definitely a good thing. The more channels you can leverage, and the more personalized your messaging, the more replies and leads you’ll generate.

But it’s not as easy as simply picking up the phone and dialing a prospect’s office.

Shifting From Transactional To Consultative

Traditionally, business development representatives had minimal opportunity to build meaningful relationships with prospects. Their whole focus was to secure a meeting (most likely a call), then pass the opportunity along to a more senior member of the sales team.

But now that so many of their mundane tasks have been automated, BDRs are freed up to provide real value. They have the time to:

• Hone in on customer needs and pain points

• Use their industry knowledge to share meaningful insights

• Provide solutions that align with the prospect’s needs

All of which means that a talented BDR can practically close the deal before anyone else gets involved.

Nurturing Throughout the Sales Cycle

Similarly, now that they don’t have to spend hours every week updating customer relationship management (CRM) tools and filling in spreadsheets, BDRs have the bandwidth to keep nurturing prospects way beyond the initial point of contact.

This is a big win for lead gen agencies, allowing them to maintain a consistent relationship with prospects throughout the sales process. But, again, it requires BDRs to develop a more advanced skillset than “just” meeting their daily activity targets.

6 Practical Strategies for Building & Managing High-Performing BDR Teams

Clearly, the BDR role has become less about sending massive volumes of emails and making a ton of cold calls, and more about tailoring their approach to individual prospect’s needs.

This requires a shakeup to the way BDR teams have traditionally been managed. To help you out, we’ve shared six tried-and-trusted strategies to level up the performance of your business development representatives.

(Plus, as an added bonus, we’ll share practical tips on how to implement these strategies with QuickMail.)

1. Prioritize (Human-Sounding) Multichannel Campaigns

Fact is, business development representatives aren’t the only people having to adapt to new tools and platforms – so are your prospects.

Once upon a time, they might have spent hours every day in their email inbox. But now, they’re just as likely to communicate through instant messaging software, project management apps, and social media platforms.

All of which means you can no longer afford to rely on one or two outreach channels.

It’s not just about sending the same old messaging through additional comms channels, though. In an age of sophisticated spam filters and savvy prospects, your outreach needs to be natural and human-sounding. This can be tough to achieve throughout a whole outreach sequence spanning multiple channels.

How QuickMail Can Help

Whereas some cold outreach solutions are email-only, QuickMail allows your reps to reach prospects through cold email, cold calling, and LinkedIn.

That means there’s more chance of reaching, and getting a response from, the people you’re targeting.

But it’s not just about giving you more channels – QuickMail also makes it easy to bring them together into a seamless sales funnel. Add multiple steps to every campaign, with custom delays between each, and even test multiple variations at every step:

This opens up a whole world of advanced cold outreach strategies.

For instance, one of our favorite approaches is to:

• Generate an automated LinkedIn profile view

• Follow it up with a custom LinkedIn connection request

• Wait ~15 minutes, then send the first cold email in your sequence

• Wait another two hours, then send a follow-up email containing more information

It all feels natural, like it’s coming from a real human – yet it’s totally automated and takes barely any time to set up. Smart stuff, huh?

Here’s a short video where we go into a little more depth on this approach (and the results we’ve generated from it):

2. Build More Personalized Outreach Sequences

Personalization goes hand-in-hand with crafting human-sounding outreach.

Because there’s no point carefully tailoring your wait steps and ensuring each message in your sequence blends seamlessly with the last if the whole thing reads like it was written by a disinterested robot.

How QuickMail Can Help

Scaling personalization doesn’t have to involve sending 100% unique emails and LinkedIn messages to every prospect.

Instead, it’s about starting with solid building blocks (AKA a cold email template) and fine-tuning key elements like:

• The prospect’s name

• Their company name

• The “ice-breaker” you use to hook them into your message

Doing this effectively requires a sophisticated cold outreach tool like QuickMail.

With QuickMail, you can easily add custom preview lines to emails, mention or CC your prospect’s colleagues, personalize messages with liquid syntax, and adjust wait steps down to the minute.

So every email you send will read like it was written specifically for the recipient.

3. Automate Time-Consuming Email Deliverability Tasks

Maintaining high email deliverability is essential to creating a high-performing cold outreach program.

Traditionally, this involved a ton of time-consuming (and boring) manual work – much of which fell on the BDR team. Stuff like warming up new email inboxes, measuring the performance of individual inboxes, and swapping out those with the lowest email deliverability rates.

But the good news is that many of these tasks can now be automated.

How QuickMail Can Help

QuickMail gives you access to a whole world of email deliverability tools (like blacklist monitoring, MX bounce protection, and text-only messages).

We take email deliverability so seriously that we developed our own automated inbox rotation tool. Called Deliverability AI, it automatically switches low-performing inboxes for those with higher deliverability ratings.

So you get to hit more main inboxes without spending hours monitoring each sending account.

Another recent innovation is Reword with AI, which automatically rephrases all outbound emails – ensuring you never actually send the same email twice. That way, they’re less likely to be marked as spam.

4. Prioritize Clients That Need Most Attention

If you have more than a handful of clients, it can be tough for BDRs to decide where to focus their attention.

That’s a big problem. If you fail to spot a drop in deliverability across a client’s campaigns, their results will tank – and it might be too late to course-correct.

All of which means they’re at serious risk of cancelling.

How QuickMail Can Help

Some cold outreach solutions bury all your essential client data across multiple pages, making it near-impossible to see who needs instant attention.

Fortunately, that’s not a problem with QuickMail. Our agency dashboard gives you a quick view of performance across all your clients and email campaigns, so you can instantly identify those that require immediate action:

5. Streamline Reply-Handling

Having multiple sending inboxes is an effective way to scale your campaigns without sacrificing deliverability.

But there’s a problem: running all those inboxes makes managing prospect replies a real headache.

And the last thing you want is for a hot lead to be overlooked because your reps forgot to check every individual inbox.

How QuickMail Can Help

QuickMail brings together all your replies in a unified inbox that all your reps can access, ensuring you never miss a response.

But it’s not just about creating a central hub for all your replies – our unified inbox also gives you a bunch of tools to save your BDRs time. For instance, QuickMail can:

• Detect the sentiment of responses

• Automatically handle unsubscribe requests 

• Detect out-of-office emails and follow up once the prospect returns to work

• Enrol prospects in follow-up campaigns based on their reply

Plus it provides oversight for sales leaders, such as displaying timestamps for how long each prospect has been waiting for a response from your reps, and allowing them to assign replies to the most appropriate rep.

6. Share Real-Time Metrics With Zero Legwork

Sharing results with clients is an essential task for any lead gen agency – but it can be super time-consuming.

Gathering the necessary data is often a heavy lift. And then you need to analyze it to understand the specific impact of any campaign optimizations.

This is a problem, because the longer you spend on reporting, the less time you have for your “day job” (generating leads for clients).

How QuickMail Can Help

QuickMail’s client portals allow you to share real-time results with zero effort for your team, potentially saving you hours a month on manual reporting tasks.

What’s more, QuickMail is the only cold outreach solution that uses time attribution at every level:

• Across your agency

• For every client

• Per individual campaign (including every step and A/B variable)

This massively reduces the time taken to compare week-on-week results, helping you unlock a whole world of insights for your clients.

Essential Hard & Soft Skills for Modern BDRs

Their evolving role means business development representatives now need more rounded skill sets. Let’s look at the makeup of a modern BDR, segmented into hard and soft skills:

Drive BDR Performance With QuickMail

BDRs can’t do it all alone.

For your agency to keep generating results for clients, you need to choose the right outreach solution. One that lets you:

• Automate low-value BDR tasks

• Build multichannel outreach campaigns

• Create human-sounding sales sequences

• Write personalized messaging

• See all your client data in one place

QuickMail does all that (and much more besides).

Find out what we can do for your lead gen agency by booking your QuickMail demo call.

FAQs

What is a business development representative (BDR)?

A business development representative (BDR) is a sales professional responsible for generating new business opportunities by identifying qualified leads, then connecting those leads with the right person in the sales team and/or sending them to a client to close the deal.

BDR vs SDR: What's the difference?

Business development representatives (BDRs) focus on outbound prospecting and cold outreach, whereas sales development representatives (SDRs) qualify inbound leads generated by the marketing team's inbound strategies.

What does a business development representative do?

Common BDR tasks include:

• Finding potential leads through prospecting

• Qualifying outbound opportunities to determine which are most promising

• Reaching out to potential buyers and nurturing them until they’re ready for a sales call/meeting

• Schedule meetings for clients/senior sales team members

• Engaging potential customers via social selling