{"id":19362,"date":"2019-03-05T18:29:57","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T18:29:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=19362"},"modified":"2024-09-24T15:08:12","modified_gmt":"2024-09-24T14:08:12","slug":"automation-changing-sdr-role","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/automation-changing-sdr-role\/","title":{"rendered":"How sales development is being transformed by automation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Historically, the role of the sales development representative (SDR<\/a>) has been to collect qualification criteria<\/a> so they can determine if a prospect is promising enough to be introduced to an account executive.<\/p>\n

However, SDRs today, especially at Intercom, are doing much more than that \u2013 they are accelerating the sale by providing prospects with value early on.<\/p>\n

“Now sales teams can automate away so many of the tasks that used to be manual and repetitive”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thanks to automation technology like chatbots, sales teams can automate away so many of the tasks that used to be manual and repetitive. Nowadays, SDRs can collect information from leads and answer basic product questions in the middle of the night while they are sleeping soundly in their beds. It frees up their time when they\u2019re awake to focus on higher impact work further down the funnel.
\n\"ExampleRight now our SDRs spend most of their time keeping pre-qualified prospects’ interest in using our product high by identifying which problems Intercom will solve for them. That means providing prospects with educational content and jumping on discovery calls<\/a> to make sure that initial intent is carried through.<\/p>\n

Whereas before, our SDR team was incentivized to identify and pass along stage one opportunities, or leads who have met certain qualification criteria, now we\u2019re incentivizing them to prioritize\u00a0stage two opportunities<\/a>\u00a0by having conversations and confirming customers\u2019 use cases.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, we try to have our chatbot<\/a> do the stuff that bots are good at \u2013 capturing a lead\u2019s details, asking some simple qualifying questions \u2013 and leave the stuff humans are good at \u2013 understanding customer pain points, solving their problems and building relationships<\/a> \u2013 to the humans.<\/p>\n

“Chatbots will make sales reps even more important, not less”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The effect of this is that SDR teams are shifting from repetitively posing questions to being seen as increasingly strategic assets to the sales organization. In the years to come, we\u2019re betting that chatbots will make sales reps even more important, not less.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to automation technology like chatbots, sales teams can automate away so many of the tasks that used to be manual and repetitive, dramatically changing the nature of their role.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":295,"featured_media":19649,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"category":[25198],"tags":[13915,489,14872,2105,12477,3198,586],"coauthors":[1435],"class_list":["post-19362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-ml","tag-bots-for-sales","tag-chatbots","tag-chatbots-for-sales","tag-live-chat-for-sales","tag-real-time-sales","tag-saas-sales","tag-sales-strategy"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Sales Development Is Being Transformed by Automation<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Thanks to automation technology like chatbots, sales teams can automate away so many of the tasks 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