BDRs Should Serve as the Link Between Sales & Marketing. Here’s Why.

A shift has occurred over the past few years that has some raising their eyebrows…BDR’s are reporting to MARKETING! That’s right, marketing! If you look at BDRs as a lead generation and qualification machine, this shift actually makes a lot of sense. So, whether or not you’re actually ready to bucket your BDR team wholly under marketing, you should leverage BDRs to serve as the ever-crucial link between sales and marketing. Here’s why.

Lead generation teams often fail because of the massive disconnect that exists between sales and marketing. This is completely avoidable. BDRs spend their days qualifying prospects and talking to a variety of personas within different organization types. They’re collecting insightful information that can help marketing better communicate with prospects at all stages of the funnel AND qualifying prospects for the sales team to close. BDRs serve as the perfect link to ensure sales and marketing collaboration and success. But, that rarely happens. So, how do you as a manager, make sure BDRs are leveraged properly?

Implementing BDR Insights for Marketing

As mentioned, BDRs regularly engage with your target market, which is precisely why they can be so valuable from a data gathering standpoint to the marketing team. While there are of course quantitative metrics that marketing teams focus on like downloads, click-through rates, engagement tracking and so forth, BDRs can add a qualitative element to all this data. What exactly is the target audience looking for in regards to content and what do they want to hear from a messaging perspective? The conversations BDRs have on a daily basis can answer these questions and help your marketing team be more successful by creating better performing content and targeted messaging.

An easy way to ensure that this feedback loop runs smoothly is to first set up certain marketing focused fields in your CRM. This allows your team to log information from their conversations and make it visible to the marketing team in a dashboard. This dashboard can capture information like common objections, key pain points and what information prospects are asking for (like white papers, pricing, etc.).

As a BDR manager, you are responsible for making sure the sales and marketing teams utilize your team to its full potential and act as a bridge between the two. Because the information and activity the BDRs produce is vital to both teams, it also may be helpful to set up a periodic meeting between sales and marketing to collect any feedback in ways to improve the process. This gives you all time to review the data in your CRM, discuss any major trends your team is seeing in the market, and make sure the sales team is up to date with appointments and opportunities the BRDs sourced. All in all, BDR teams are sometimes overlooked within organizations, so as the leader, don’t let that happen and make your team stand out!