Gartner's Four Tips to Boost Pipeline Generation

Concerns over a lack of adequate pipeline is driving chief sales officers (CSOs) to implement or consider investments in sales development representatives (SDRs), according to new research by Gartner.

The research firm is suggesting that CSOs focused on driving pipeline growth should focus on SDR team productivity by improving execution in specialized coverage, data sourcing, engagement playbook, and data-driven call coaching.

"SDR teams specialize in identifying prospective buyers, performing outreach to new prospects, and qualifying incoming leads, making this a great area of investment for pipeline growth," said Dan Gottlieb, research director in the Gartner for Sales practice. "However, SDRs suffer productivity issues due to a combination of unrealistic quota setting and limited operational guidance."

Gartner research shows messaging is a top challenge for SDRs, indicating insufficient support from marketing and enablement teams. This leaves SDRs to create their own messaging, which often yields low connect, reply, and meeting conversion rates. Additionally, short SDR tenure of 15.5 months coupled with average ramp times of three months leaves less than a year at full productivity.

"This puts a significant burden on front-line managers for ramp and continuous coaching to maximize the ROI of the function," Gottlieb concluded. "To yield repeatable positive pipeline contributions, CSOs must invest in practical programs for their SDR teams."

To combat this, Gartner recommends that CSOs focused on driving pipeline growth via sales development teams should consider the following four steps to improve productivity:

1. Create specialized SDR roles to narrow scope: Specialization enables flexible resource allocation, where SDRs can be deployed against  specific audiences to proactively address pipeline coverage gaps. 
2. Shift data responsibilities to more cost-effective roles: Using SDRs to perform large volumes of manual data entry is an inefficient use of selling resources. CSOs can redirect SDRs' time to high-impact sales engagement tasks by dedicating demand generation or operations resources to streamline the data management process.
3. Design a prescriptive sales engagement playbook aligned to workflows that provides guidance on multichannel messaging and multitouch prospecting behaviors to improve SDR connect, reply, and meeting conversion rates.
4. Scale front-line manager coaching with conversation analytics.