It’s not about you, it’s about your buyer. And, your BDR & SDR roles are the tip of the spear in figuring out why your buyer is talking to you.

Rethinking the Role

The future of the SDR and BDR roles is going to change, and change a lot. The traditional paradigms of these roles are being reimagined. 

Here’s the new reality: 

• We have to know and be aligned on our Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP)
• We have to build and nurture awareness in those ICPs consistently over time
• We have to know when an ICP is entering the buying window, using intent signals and scoring systems that trigger a certain set of activities
• We have to know when an ICP is ready for a sales conversation, and remember that they are 60%-80% of the way through their evaluations when they get there
• We have to add value and differentiate our products from the get go, right up through the negotiation, close, and handoff
• Buyers don’t want to be handed off 3 or 4 times in our complex organizational chain in order to get what they need from us

This means our teams need to be experts in data analytics, personalized messaging, automation, AI, and have business acumen in the industries we sell into.

And yet, most SDRs and BDRs are the least tenured, lowest paid, highest churn roles in the organization. Many (most) sales orgs are entrusting the buyer journey and the first human sales interaction to the people least equipped to excite and delight the customer.

This, dear readers, makes no sense. 

We need a new hybrid role, one that combines BDR, SDR, and AE. We expect that this will become commonplace and that this role will demand higher compensation. 

We also expect that the number of sales jobs overall will decrease. 

This is not only because of the enhanced efficiency of tech-enabled salespeople. It’s also because our buyers will expect us to address their wants and needs with fewer frictional hand-offs. 

Organizations responding to these changes are investing more in training and compensating a smaller, more elite group of hybrid sales people that combine the roles of SDR, BDR, and AE. These teams will be equipped to manage complexity at each step of the buyer journey.

Embracing the Future

The future of B2B sales is unequivocally intent-based. The winners will focus on being the “first to add value.” This buyer-led era will be characterized by a transition towards more technically sophisticated, highly skilled positions that command higher salaries, and will require greater investments in ongoing learning. 

What are you doing to respond to the buyer-led era?