Ep.19: Sales Development Strategies with Trish Bertuzzi: The 40-Second Interview, Building a Beachhead & Being Direct with Customers.

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In this episode, our special guest Trish Bertuzzi, President and Chief Strategist for The Bridge Group, Inc., gives advice on hiring Sales Development Reps for startup CEOS, discusses the importance of hiring veterans and how beneficial they are to young companies, as well as a plethora of other great tactics and tips. Key areas covered are:

• Defining what sales development really means and how the process of forming this definition was a trigger event for Trish to write her new book, The Sales Development Playbook, a purely tactical look at sales development.
• Advice for startup CEOs when hiring SDRs on practices that hurt their company and alternatives to help make the most of these early hires.
• Reasons to outsource your company’s sales development functions and how to properly filter good outsource partners from the bad ones.
• How to properly use numbers to strengthen your value proposition and understanding the different variables of said proposition (#VariablesMatter).

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Podcast Notes

02:15 – The Trigger event for Trish to write the book “The Sales Development Playbook.”

04:13 – How do you define Sales Development for people?

05:20 – The Five Whys. Why listen? Why Care? Why change? Why you? Why now?

06:45 – What advice would you give a team to stop doing now and start doing right away relating to sales development.

07:55 – What is the one thing startup CEOs should do that they’re not already doing?

10:00 – What’s the first thing startup CEOs should do where they misstep early in the process of setting up the sales development process?

12:56 – Why a 50/50 breakdown making a good hire.

13:30 – If you can’t afford to hire more than one, should you hire one?

14:15 – Reasons why outsourcing Sales Development Rep functions to a vendor fails.

16:05 – Why don’t startup CEOs spend more effort on the time piece of the investment?

18:15 – Why military to civilian transitions and job shifters are good targets for potential SDRs? 

20:00 – The one question to immediately ask to vet out if a candidate is worth pursuing in a formal interview process.

25:03 – After passing the 40 second interview, what’s the next part of that call that makes for a good SDR call. 

26:45 – How do you use numbers if you don’t know those could actually apply?

32:00 – How do you vet out whether or not somebody has budget early on?

34:28 – Why to choose a scale of 1 to 4.

36:05 – A skeleton key question to make a person not guarded or have their armor on to open up.

40:00 – Shutouts to make sure people hear the message.

41:02 – How to reach Trish.

 

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast

• The Sales Development Playbook, by Trish Bertuzzi.

• From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue, by Aaron Ross, Jason Lemkin.

• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore.

• Sales Hacker: The Leading B2B SaaS Sales Community.