Welcome to today’s newsletter. Today, we'll cover how SDRs can build the deep business knowledge needed to have more impactful sales conversations and better understand prospect needs.
What is Business Acumen?
Business acumen refers to having a deep understanding of the businesses, industries, roles, responsibilities, priorities, and challenges faced by your prospective buyers or customers. For SDRs, it means intimately knowing the landscape and real-world context of your ideal client personas.
This separates business acumen from just surface-level industry knowledge. It's about truly grasping the nuances, metrics, and day-to-day realities that your buyers deal with in their roles.
Why It Matters ?
Lacking strong business acumen is a major handicap for SDRs. It prevents you from truly connecting with buyers, speaking their language, and positioning your solution as the perfect fit. This leads to poor qualification, wasted sales cycles, and stagnant pipelines.
On the flip side, SDRs with great business acumen can ask intelligent questions, establish credibility fast, and significantly improve their ability to advance opportunities.
The Common Pitfalls
Many SDRs try taking shortcuts to develop acumen - like reading generic industry summaries or leaning too heavily on call scripts. But this surface-level knowledge fails to provide the nuanced insights required.
Others make the mistake of learning in a vacuum, disconnected from the frontline sales experience and customer reality their colleagues live daily.
The Optimal Approach
To build meaningful business acumen, start by mastering your company's products/services and unique value proposition inside-out. Only then can you articulate fit and differentiation clearly.
Next is deep research into your ideal customer profiles. Read industry pubs, listen to earnings calls, follow thought leaders. Aim to intimately understand prospects' roles, priorities, KPIs, challenges, and market dynamics.
But don't stop there - learn from your company's sales teams, customer success managers, anyone with daily customer touchpoints. Their first-hand experiences offer invaluable context.
A great exercise is to "pitch" your solution to colleagues from different roles through mock conversations. The back-and-forth exposes any blindspots in your knowledge.
How Leaders can help their team?
There are powerful ways leaders can facilitate this business acumen development:
Build a content library of must-read books, blogs, and industry podcasts.
Have sales teams host weekly lunch & learns to share their prospect knowledge.
Invest in tailored training for your SDRs' target verticals.
Bring customers in for AMAs where SDRs can ask smart questions.
Subsidize top performers to attend relevant industry conferences off-site.
The best SDR managers constantly immerse their teams in the buyer's world.
Developing business acumen takes ongoing effort, but the impact on your sales performance is immense. Equip your SDRs with this critical skill.
That’s it for this week!
When you’re ready, we’re here to assist you in three ways:
B2C SDRS or Aspiring first-time SDRs - Join our Online Cohort beginning June 11th (admissions now open) to learn from us and your peers about securing a role at a B2B SaaS company. We cover everything from the process and skills to extensive mock interview practice. Our Students were placed at companies like Chargebee, VWO, Netradyne, Sogolytics & Zluri with CTC that will blow your mind. Due to the high demand, we are now open on weekends. Our next training cohort starts on June 11th and weekend cohort on June 15th. You can sign up for a demo session here
Train your SDR Team: We offer a 4-week/onsite customized program designed to train your B2B sales reps on modern prospecting. Get in touch by replying to this email or set up a time here