Mastering the Sales Development Representative Game: Key Insights

Sales development representatives (SDRs) are the engine room of any lead generation agency.

They’re the folks who track down high-value prospects, engage them through cold outreach, and book sales meetings.

But what are their specific responsibilities? What skills do they need to thrive in the role? And what tools can they use to smash their targets?

Read on to find out…

What Is a Sales Development Representative?

A sales development representative is a front-line sales rep tasked with identifying and connecting with potential customers — typically at the start of their buying journey.

In the context of a lead gen agency, they find and engage prospects who are likely to be interested in their clients’ products or services, with the goal of building the client’s sales pipeline. To do this, they use a range of cold outreach tactics, including:

• Cold email

• Cold calling

• LinkedIn messaging

• SMS

SDRs don’t actually close the deal themselves. Instead, when they’ve struck up a rapport with a prospect, qualified them as a lead, and booked a sales meeting, they pass the details onto their client.

What Does an SDR Do? 5 Responsibilities

Now that we understand the purpose of SDRs, let’s drill down into their core responsibilities:

1. Generate Prospect Lists

Prospecting is at the heart of the SDR role.

Specifically, they have to generate lists of prospects that align with their client’s ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas.

Given that sales development reps at lead gen agencies handle multiple clients simultaneously, they must be highly adaptable — capable of constantly switching from one ICP to the next at short notice. 

We’ll talk more about the key skills and traits of successful SDRs in the next section.

2. Book Sales Meetings

Once they’ve identified the perfect prospect, the SDR’s next task is to reach out to them via one or more cold outreach channels. They might pick up the phone, send them an email, and connect with them on LinkedIn — all with the ultimate goal of securing a sales meeting for their client.

3. Follow Up With Prospects

Of course, not all prospects will respond to that initial email or cold call.

In fact, QuickMail’s own cold email statistics — collected by analyzing 1.7 million emails sent through our platform — discovered that 55% of cold email campaign replies come from a follow-up email.

And with the optimal campaign comprising three follow-up emails, SDRs must be persistent to achieve the desired results.

4. Share Relevant Sales Collateral

Okay, so we know that sales development representatives spend a bunch of time speaking to prospects.

But what, exactly, do they say?

Even the best SDR can’t do all the selling themselves. Instead, they rely on sharing persuasive, targeted sales collateral like:

• Case studies

• Client testimonials

• Industry news and reports

• Unique research

• Blog posts

This content is designed to educate their prospects and/or demonstrate the value of their clients’ products or services.

5. Share Results

Even when a company outsources lead generation to an external agency, they still need a clear picture of their sales pipeline.

That’s why reporting is another key SDR task. Typically, this involves sharing the results of their prospecting and outreach efforts — either with an agency-side account manager or directly with the client.

Pro tip: With QuickMail, agencies can invite clients as guests (at no extra cost) and build analytics dashboards providing a real-time view of activity and performance.

So SDRs don’t need to worry about generating manual reports — freeing them up to spend more time on revenue-generating tasks.

5 Key SDR Skills

A survey of hundreds of B2B SDRs identified the top five skills and traits that sales development representatives need for success. Let’s take a look at the results:

1. Adaptability: Not only do SDRs at lead gen agencies need to juggle multiple clients, but they also have to be comfortable reaching prospects via a range of channels. 

2. Positive attitude: SDRs have to believe that their next meeting booking is just around the corner, even if they’ve faced a string of rejections.

3. Resilience: Realistically, every sales development representative will hear “no” far more often than “yes”. Top-performing reps don’t let these setbacks derail them.

4. Curiosity: If you’re going to be prospecting for hours a day, it helps to have a natural desire to learn more about industries, companies, and people.

5. Sociability: Let’s be honest — if you’re no good at speaking to people and making them feel at ease, you’re unlikely to make it as an SDR.

That’s not to say every sales development representative has each of those skills. But they’re a good indicator of likely success.

12 Essential Tools for SDRs

Once upon a time, sales was all about cold calling and door knocking. The only technical skills they needed were the ability to dial a phone number and read a map.

It’s fair to say things have changed. Today, SDRs rely on multiple tools to accomplish a wide range of day-to-day tasks. We’ve rounded up 12 of the most important SDR tools across four key categories:

• Sales prospecting

• Sales enablement

• Sales productivity

• Sales analytics

Here are our top picks:

Sales Prospecting Tools

1. QuickMail

• Pricing: $49 – $129 per month

QuickMail’s range of outreach functionality makes it the #1 choice for lead generation agencies searching for a prospecting solution. Key features include:

• Omnichannel outreach campaigns incorporating cold email, calls, SMS, and LinkedIn steps.

• Dedicated agency dashboard to manage all clients from a single hub and switch between clients with a single click.

• Give each client unique integrations, prospects, exclude lists, and more.

• Advanced analytics based on the day an email was sent — taking the guesswork out of campaign optimization and deliverability monitoring.

• Deliverability AI automatically sends email messages from your top-performing accounts, generating better results without extra effort.

Read more: How LevelUp Leads Served 120+ Clients in 3 Years with QuickMail

2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

• Pricing: $99 – $1,600+ per user/seat per month

Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s dedicated tool for prospecting and insights, containing data on approximately one billion LinkedIn members and over 61 million accounts across 200+ countries and territories.

The platform helps SDRs find exactly the right opportunities for their clients by leveraging more than a dozen search filters. And because all the data is self-reported by LinkedIn users, there’s less chance of it being out of date.

Sales Navigator also helps reps save time. Save your top searches to receive automatic notifications when a new prospect matches your criteria.

3. PartnerTap

Pricing: Available on request

PartnerTap is a co-selling platform, which makes it perfect for clients with ecosystem partners.

By syncing with the client’s CRM, PartnerTap allows SDRs to reach out to partners and ask them to connect — providing a real-time view of overlapping prospects, opportunities, and customers.

The platform has native integrations with most major CRMs, including Close, HubSpot, and Salesforce.

Sales Enablement Tools

4. Highspot

Pricing: Available on request

Highspot is a sales enablement solution used by big names like HSBC, Fedex, and Siemens.

Our favorite Highspot feature is the AI-driven sales content hub, which makes it quick and easy for SDRs to track down relevant sales collateral to share with prospects.

It also helps sales leaders build effective onboarding and training programs to ensure reps have all the necessary knowledge and skills to deliver results for their clients.

5. Seismic

Pricing: Available on request

Seismic describes itself as a unified sales enablement tool encompassing content management, automation, planning, coaching, and more.

The platform doesn’t just help SDRs locate sales collateral via in-app searches and recommendations — it allows them to personalize content to align with the prospect’s goals and pain points. And, as we all know, personalization is key to boosting reply rates.

It also acts as a centralized hub for onboarding, learning, and coaching activities. That way, whenever a rep needs to find a piece of information or refresh their knowledge, they know where to go.

6. Mindtickle

Pricing: Available on request

Mindtickle is a self-proclaimed “sales enablement and revenue productivity platform” with a bunch of enterprise-grade customers, including Cisco and LinkedIn.

It promises to help sales leaders build enablement programs that feel relevant and personalized to individual sellers while ensuring skills learned in training sessions are used “IRL” through AI-driven reinforcement and practice exercises.

The platform also provides a single, searchable source of truth for marketing collateral, training materials, and competitive intelligence.

Sales Productivity Software

7. SalesScreen

• Pricing: $20+ per user per month

SalesScreen uses gamification to boost productivity by motivating front-line sales reps. Customers can choose from over a dozen different competition formats, including brackets, leaderboards, and team vs team contests. 

Reps battle it out for coins, social clout, and badges of honor to display alongside their profile pictures. Badges can be customized to align with the agency’s goals, such as celebrating subject-matter expertise or key milestones. The platform also encourages a consistent approach by tracking the length of each salesperson’s streak.

All of which encourages the types of sales behaviors that are most likely to deliver positive client results.

8. Lavender

• Pricing: $0 – $45 per month for individuals; team plans start at $8,500 per year

Lavender is an AI-powered tool that helps salespeople write better emails, faster.

To be clear, this isn’t just another generative AI platform. Lavender makes it easier for SDRs to personalize outreach messages by displaying prospect data — like work history, recent news, and even personality — within the email inbox.

Other useful features include an optimization and scoring tool that rates email templates out of 100, based on criteria like estimated reading time, clarity, and tone of voice. Emails scoring 90+ stand the best chance of generating replies.

9. Toggl

• Pricing: $0 – $18+ per user per month

For a different approach to sales productivity, consider Toggl, a time-tracking solution designed to keep employees focused without forcing them to add a bunch of extra admin to their workload.

Toggle makes it easier for team members to track their time by integrating with 100+ apps via its browser extensions. The platform also has a native calendar that bolts onto popular project management tools like Asana, Notion, and Trello.

Sales Analytics Tools

10. QuickMail

Pricing: $49 – $129 per month

That’s right — we made the list twice. That’s because we offer one of the most advanced sales analytics suites of any cold outreach solution.

Unlike other platforms, QuickMail’s analytics data is based on when an email was sent, not when it was opened, clicked, or replied to. Not only does this ensure your reports are more accurate by weeding out older emails, but it’s also vital in keeping on top of deliverability.

(For a more detailed discussion of why this matters, check out our guide: Why We’re All Wrong About Open Rates: QuickMail’s Deliverability-Based Perspective.)

Our dashboards are totally customizable, too. So if you want to visualize positive replies in the first week of outreach or the number of leads who’ll be contacted next week, you can make it happen in just two clicks. Plus you can invite your clients free of charge.

11. Zendesk 

Pricing: $19 – $115 per agent per month

Zendesk is a sales CRM that gives organizations an accurate, real-time view of their sales pipeline.

The platform’s reporting solution gathers data from all your channels — email, social, phone, and chat — so you can effectively measure outreach performance from a single view.

Zendesk is also highly customizable, offering thousands of options for tracking metrics, personalizing dashboards, and displaying data.

12. Copper

Pricing: $9 – $99 per seat per month

Like Zendesk, Copper is a sales CRM with built-in analytics and intelligence features. 

Its analytics tool — Copper Reports — makes it easy to get started with pre-built dashboards and templates that can be customized to meet the specific needs of your team and/or clients.

Copper also saves time through automation by allowing users to schedule and send reports to team members and clients (even if they don’t have a Copper account).

Level Up SDR Performance With QuickMail

Sales development representatives must master a variety of prospecting techniques and strategies.

QuickMail gives SDRs the tools and insights to succeed.

Reach prospects via their favored communications channels. Build personalized, automated sequences that update on-the-fly based on how prospects respond. Experiment with different messaging through A/Z testing. And maximize deliverability to ensure more cold emails hit the main inbox.

See it all for yourself by signing up for your free QuickMail trial.