Reasonably Enable Your BDRs with Buyer Intelligence

In this video, taken at TechTarget’s 2018 ROI Summit in London, panelists discussed how intent data enables alignment between Marketing and Sales organizations, which leads to more wins in the pipeline.

Panelists Colin Mann, then-Global Campaigns Manager at Mitel, and Tom Campbell, Global Marketing Operations Manager at Yellowfin BI, shared their use cases and explored the evolution of the BDR role (business development representative, or telemarketer, depending on your locale) with respect to intent data.

Organizational challenges

Yellowfin BI, a business intelligence and analytics vendor, competes against big names in their space, such as Microsoft, SAP, and IBM. Campbell said the company has roughly 120 seats globally, so Yellowfin relies on the insights gleaned from intent data to differentiate their marketing tactics from those of the massive enterprises.

B2B telecommunications provider Mitel faced a pivot at the time of filming; the industry was moving away from traditional communications setups and migrating toward the Cloud, service-based solutions, software, and voice-over-IP technology. Intent data intelligence helped Mitel segment their audience around those emerging cloud-based themes.

Both panelists attributed newfound speediness and quicker reaction times to the alignment of Sales and Marketing.

Campbell said though his organization did not yet have SLAs established between Marketing and Sales, it was certainly a goal, because such alignment leads to faster followups on engagements such as website registration forms or demo requests.

Mann said his organization has established four levels of SLAs for their four tiers of leads.

Tier one leads, he said, are tied to “contact us now” or “request a demo” engagements on the website, and the SLA for that tier mandates Sales reps to call those users within five minutes, “theoretically,” he added.

A five-minute turnaround is required, he said, because “when you’re transitioning to a cloud-based industry, if people are buying cloud-based solutions, they just want to go online, stick in how many users they want, how many phones they want, so they need fast follow-up.”

His organization’s second tier of leads requires a 24-hour period before follow up, tier three has a 72-hour wait period, and tier four is a “nurture” stage, Mann said.

When larger enterprise accounts engage with content, or the website, Mann said he sometimes circumvents the BDRs and sends leads directly to Sales.

The BDR’s changing role

An audience member asked about the additional effort BDRs are asked to put into each lead; he said, whereas beforehand, leads were more concretely indicative of a need or intent to buy, leads now require much more “homework” using purchase intent and other contextual information about the prospect.

“You’re asking them to do a lot more thinking before they pick up the phone to the customer. Has that been a struggle in terms of what you’re passing them, and the intelligence and the thought you’re asking them to apply?”

Campbell said he’s found the key to get the BDRs engaged early in the process of finding an intent data provider:  involve them in the meetings and trainings, so they know about the tool, how to use it, and are exposed to the best practices for followup.

Feedback he’s received from his BDRs is positive; they are excited to work with the additional information they get through intent data, he said, and he feels they’re appreciative and grateful of the additional information with which to optimize their conversations – and conversion rates.

Mann said an easily overlooked consideration for today’s BDR role is the number of leads a rep can actually process. If they’re being asked to use more information and do more verification and qualification, he said, that naturally reduces the number of leads a rep can get through in a workday.

He gave a severe example to explain the very real need to recalculate how many next-gen leads a BDR can process in a day: At the end-of-year prior to filming, his organization had 4,000 not-attempted leads left over, which is purely wasted money.

“It’s also made them more picky, in a good way,” he said. “We get more constructive criticism around the quality of the leads we’re generating.”

What do you think? Can you articulate the impact intent data has had on the role of BDR at your organization?

[Disclosure: Author Amy Koski previously worked at TechTarget.]