February 9, 2023
Getting new leads and converting them to your customers is the only way your business can prosper. Hence, sales and prospecting together form a crucial part of every organization. As acquiring customers is a journey you need to optimize at every step, a dedicated team of Sales Development Reps (SDRs) must be at the top of your priority list.
Your entire business including the growth trajectory will depend on the quality of leads you generate, which further is driven by your SDRs. If you’re a sales or recruiting manager, hiring SDRs is one of the most vital responsibilities you have to take on.
However, SDRs are entry-level positions in most cases. So you can’t evaluate candidates based on their experience. Here’s where the hiring gets a little tricky. After all, SDRs will drive crucial functions like prospecting and qualifying leads, engaging with them, and driving prospects down the sales funnel.
How do you ensure hiring the right SDRs for your sales team? What skillsets and personality traits should you be looking for in an ideal candidate? How to approach hiring the top SDRs for your company?
We answer all of the above, and more in this blog. Stick around for insightful coverage on hiring a Sales Development Representative.
At the ground level, an SDR is responsible for identifying potential customers, generating new business opportunities, and managing leads throughout the sales pipeline. While this is a broad overview of the role of an SDR, let’s dive in to break down the role further.
The performance of SDRs is usually evaluated based on their ability to seamlessly move leads through the sales pipeline. Their primary responsibility is to nurture leads and act as a go-to problem solver for them, much like a consultant.
Unlike other sales reps or BDRs who are evaluated based on the number of leads they close, SDRs focus on the top of the funnel. It should be noted that both roles go hand-in-hand, and the sales team cannot function with either of them.
The sales cycle starts with the marketing team sending lead information to SDRs, who then engage and nurture the leads. During the initial part of the sales cycle, businesses need to educate the leads effectively and build a positive relationship with them – SDRs are responsible for leading such efforts.
Here are the primary roles and responsibilities of an SDR.
As you grow your business and aim to accelerate your sales through a steadily flowing pipeline, hiring a full-fledged SDR team becomes the primary requirement. A well-defined sales process, a fast-moving pipeline, and a plan for nurturing those leads are the primary expectations from your SDR team.
The first approach of anyone looking to hire a Sales Development Representative would be to look at a candidate’s work experience of a few years and a sales degree. However, most SDRs having rich experience reach senior-level positions in a few years.
So the position of an SDR naturally becomes entry-level where you don’t have the luxury of looking at candidates’ past performances.
It’s evident that hiring an SDR is challenging and requires a deep evaluation of candidates. Before kickstarting your hiring efforts, the best thing you can do is to lay down a clear and concise recruitment plan.
When hiring SDRs with less or no experience, you’ll need to evaluate them through the identification of relevant traits and skills.
Here are the top 6 traits you should always look for when hiring SDRs:
As far as the skill requirements are concerned, here are the top skills you should primarily look out for when hiring an SDR:
To start things off, identify your industry standards when it comes to the role of an SDR. Additionally, communicate with sales managers, VPs, and other stakeholders for learning about the company’s unique requirements.
Ask questions like
Framing the role requirements comprehensively with clear criteria for skills, knowledge, personality traits, and relevant industry work is immensely important initially.
Moving on, decide on your hiring timeline and outline the recruiting process. Also, finalize the evaluation parameters using which the candidates will be considered for further rounds.
A job description is much more than a formal document covering the roles and responsibilities. An appealing JD would not only help you attract the right SDR candidates and optimize the further recruitment cycle but also helps you save a lot of time and effort.
Apart from the roles and responsibilities, you must cover the perks and benefits associated with the role. Do not forget to add your company’s vision and mission in order to drive your candidates’ expectations in the right direction.
Sales Development Representative Job Description Sample
Role
SDRs are inside sales representatives who focus on outreach, prospecting, and lead qualification. SDRs don't focus on closing deals, but rather on identifying if leads are good candidates for sales. An SDR moves leads through the sales pipeline.
Responsibilities
Requirements
Soft Skills
Bonus
Once you have a thorough understanding of your sales team’s requirements and the job description ready with you, it’s time to source candidates. Start with creating a compelling job post highlighting the following:
Prepare an impactful job post and job advertisement assets if required. The next step would be posting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Sales Development Representatives:
At the beginning of the blog, we discussed the top characteristics to look out for in an ideal Sales Development Representative. Here’s where we analyze those parameters.
From profile screening to phone screen rounds and further interviews, keep the following tips in mind while evaluating candidates:
Connect with the selected SDRs and decide on the compensation and commission. Ensure you understand their payroll expectations and negotiate accordingly.
Next, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.
Not to forget – Always have a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.
Hiring skilled Sales Development Representatives is crucial but challenging at the same time for organizations.
To find the best SDRs who would further drive your prospect engagement and sales cycle, – leverage automation for accelerating passive talent sourcing and engagement.
Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement automation platform. Take a look at how you can source SDRs from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:
Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.
Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.
Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.
From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:
While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.
A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.
As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.
To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.
Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.
Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.
A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.
Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.
Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.
Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..
A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.
Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.
Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.
Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.
Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.
Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:
Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.
Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?
You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.
Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.
Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.
As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.
Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.
Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:
Role
The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.
Responsibilities
Requirements
Soft Skills
Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.
Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:
Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.
Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.
Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.
Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.
Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.
Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.
Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?
Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.
Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:
