The CRAP Report

You know, one of my all time favorite movies is “Sixteen Candles.”  And easily, one of my favorite all time movie characters is the Long Duk Dong, played by Gedde Watanabe.  Long Duk Dong (seriously, his real name in the movie), is a foreign exchange student who comes to the U.S. and stays with the main character’s (Samantha, played by Molly Ringwald) grandparents.  The grandparents are in town for the wedding of their oldest daughter.  Throughout the movie, Long gets himself acquainted with American culture, including high school parties.  Long story short, Jake, Samantha’s crush, comes to the door looking for Samantha.  Long answers the door, nursing quite a hangover.  Jake tries asking Long where Samantha is, and although his English isn’t that great, Long tells Jake that Samantha is getting married.  The truth is that Samantha is at her sister’s wedding, not getting married.  You see, sometimes people can speak the same language, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they understand each other.  That is true in sales prospecting, too.

Whether you have your own B2B lead generation team, or your using someone else to find qualified sales opportunities for your sales team, make sure that the Business Development Rep’s who are calling on your behalf have a good understanding of what your technology does.  You see, just as Long thought he was answering Jake’s query as to Samantha’s whereabouts, he really didn’t.  You don’t want your BDR’s doing the same thing to prospects asking questions about your (or your client’s) technology.

I’ve always felt like a good rule of thumb in terms of preparing BDR’s to be better sales-ready qualifiers is to make sure that they get some form of training on the technology that they’re calling on from a sales rep.  I think this is a good idea because (my hope is) a sales rep is constantly fielding questions during product demonstrations and conference calls that are asked by the very same people that BDR’s speak with – prospects.  Who better to prepare a BDR for questions on technology than your sales folks (or sometimes sales engineers)?  I’ve worked on several projects where the Marketing team has been the one to train BDR’s on software and services, and that is great, but I’ve always felt that the sales reps have been “that” much more effective for the BDR’s.

I think sometimes there is a difference in the way that Marketing and Sales describe the same product or service offering, and again, I’m really only speaking from experience.  I want my BDR’s to answer questions from the decision makers that their talking with on the phone with the same product knowledge that the next person in the sales process has, and typically, that’s a sales rep.  Now what are the implications of that?  I guess it means that Marketing and Sales needs be better allied, but we’ve known that for a while now, haven’t we?

I think, in terms of communicating and speaking the same “language,” it is important that you make sure your BDR’s have a solid foundation in the technology that they’re calling on.  They should be able to answer, to use an onion as an analogy, the first few layers of the peel.  They should have those answers given to them from a Marketing and Sales team that has their language aligned…Let me know what you think?