Building a sales development engine

The problem

TestOut sold courseware to schools and colleges, and new business mostly started when an instructor raised a hand. That’s a good start, but it leaves growth up to whoever happens to find you. To reach more schools, the company needed people who would go find instructors, start conversations and hand real opportunities to account executives. It also needed shared definitions, so marketing, SDRs and sales all meant the same thing by “lead” and “opportunity”.

What I did

Hired and trained the team. I recruited and trained three sales development reps and built their onboarding: first-day and first-week plans, call scripts, email templates, a “questions to ask prospects” guide and prospecting tips.

Defined the pipeline. I built the lead-to-opportunity system with clear stages: Contact → Lead → MQL → SQL → Opportunity. Each stage had a definition and a hand-off rule, covering inbound leads from marketing as well as outbound prospects the team generated themselves.

Set the activity standards. I set daily and weekly targets for the team: 40 calls, 45 emails and 2 meaningful sales conversations a day, and 5 new opportunities a week. I also built an activity-code system so we could see which activities actually led to opportunities and coach from data, not gut feel.

Ran outbound for the flagship product. I built the outbound strategy for TestOut’s flagship courseware: target lists, messaging and follow-up cadences.

Tested mail plus phone. For the Desktop Pro launch, we sent mailers to 100 instructors at 25 schools that weren’t yet customers, and the SDRs followed up by phone and email. The test produced almost 10 opportunities, and it became the model for the mail-plus-SDR sequences marketing used for years afterward.

Results

• +40% net new customers after my first year running outbound.
• 48 qualified opportunities from the flagship-product outbound strategy.
• A repeatable system: stages, standards, scripts and onboarding that outlasted the original team.
• The first direct-mail test (100 instructors, 25 schools) produced almost 10 opportunities.
• 110 opportunities and $600K+ in pipeline in the team’s first five months (2017).

Why it matters

For demand gen and sales development leadership: I’ve built an SDR function from zero. That means the hiring, the training, the definitions and the metrics, not just the dialing. I also know where marketing and sales development meet, because I later ran marketing and kept using the same lead-to-opportunity spine.