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If you're thinking of building a team of business development representatives (BDRs) but are having difficulty justifying paying someone who doesn't close sales, read on. You might need a new perspective along with a program designed to get the most of your business development reps. BDRs are essential because they free your salespeople of many burdensome tasks that take them away from selling.

As your sales reps take on the front lines of selling, who’s doing your lead qualification? Think about this when you sign up for a live transfer service. Inbound “sales” calls potentially can convert ten times better than clicks, but are you sure that you’re getting highly qualified leads that your reps can act on? Or are you buying a glorified answering service?

If you’re like most B2B companies, your inside sales teams—with their experience in virtual sales, digital competence and ability to work remotely—may have helped you to survive the extreme challenges of 2020. Now, you may want to make your inside sales strategy play internationally. It’s a small world that gets smaller with every advance in communications and air travel. Companies expect to source their equipment, ingredients, technology and raw materials from around the world. So whether you’re selling IT solutions, banking services or package delivery, your market today is worldwide.

As the year comes to a close, we doubt that you will be sorry to say goodbye to 2020. It’s been a challenging year for all of us, with more than a few surprises along the way. Even so, once the dust settles and we’re well-entrenched in 2021, could we look back and see the year from hell as a blessing in disguise?

When it comes to the importance of follow-up, we've all seen the statistics: More than half (60%) of buyers say "no" four times before they say "yes." And yet, 44% of sales reps give up after just one follow-up. It seems many tele-sales and inside sales reps would rather play the numbers game and move on to the next lead rather than follow up with a prospect multiple times. Instead, your salespeople might be better off focusing on their techniques for overcoming sales objections. One way to do that is through storytelling.

Every sales representative wishes for a bluebird—that fabulous sales opportunity that out of the blue drops into their lap. But the reality is that most leads require a lot of time and effort before the sale is closed.

Sadly, when it comes to lead generation, marketing has long had a problem. They can build marketing campaigns and event promotions to generate plenty of leads. But marketing’s problem is one of reputation. Sales reps believe that marketing leads are worthless. The conversion rate on poorly qualified, tire-kicking, lousy leads is so low that sales reps see them as a waste of their time and energy.

Hiring for inside salespeople has been growing 15 times faster than for outside sales reps. In fact, in 2019, inside sales reps accounted for slightly less than half of all sales reps.

Artist Vincent Van Gogh once said, “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” Just as the artist transforms a series of brush strokes into a painting, so too a sales rep should turn a series of activities into a sales process.

To borrow from the self-help author Robert Collier, their success in sales “is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” The challenge is to orchestrate those activities into what we call a sales cadence.

When business is doing well, it’s only natural to want to scale your sales force. It’s a seemingly simple formula. More sales reps equal more growth.

But before you start hiring more reps, there are a few things to consider. When Ciara, a leader in the field of digital conversation assistants, asked reps to share their most significant sales challenges, the number two issue that they named was “difficulties onboarding and scaling sales teams.”