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By: The Encircle Team
Building a strong team is crucial for the success of your property restoration business. While many owners focus heavily on operations, they often overlook another critical role: business development representatives (BDRs). Investing in sales talent can be the game-changer for your restoration business to thrive and grow.
We hosted a webinar with experts from Sanktum, a business specializing in helping restoration contractors develop high-performing sales teams. Here are some of the recommended steps you should follow to find and support the right BDRs for your restoration business.
Identifying the need for business development professionals 🤔
- Your first BDR hire will be responsible for selling, but will be more focused around account management. They will:
- Take care of understanding who your clients are.
- Build and maintain relationships with new clients.
- Your second BDR will be responsible for covering your primary market, alongside the first BDR. Hire your second BDR when you start to see momentum with the first. This will:
- Create competition with your first hire, incentivizing both of them to do better.
- Give you a hedge against the fact that one person just may not work out.
- Hire your third BDR when you’re ready to expand out of your primary market (eg. if you’re wanting to enter a new market, area, or territory).
Hiring the right business development reps 👔
Up against a tough labor market, you’ve got to be on top of your hiring process to better your chances at finding a good fit.
Sales vs marketing: hire the right person to fill your role!
Many business owners ask, is it a sales or marketing professional that I should hire? It’s important that you differentiate between business development/sales and marketing professionals to make sure you’re hiring for the role your company needs.
Sales is typically about closing deals quickly and generating revenue through direct interaction with customers. Marketing is more driven by media interactions, and takes a broader approach, creating awareness of your brand and driving long-term sales growth.
Should I only hire sales reps with restoration industry knowledge?
Hiring from outside the restoration industry is a totally acceptable tactic! You’re looking for fresh people with the right traits — after all, you can teach them all about restoration, but you don’t want to have to worry about teaching them how to sell.
Recommended read! 📖
Check out the book “Who: The A Method for Hiring” by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. This book presents a very useful methodology to help your team interview and hire the right sales people.
Onboarding & supporting your business development hires 🤝
Getting your new sales team members off to a great start is key to their success and long-term retention. Here’s how you can effectively onboard and support your new sales team members.
Steps in the onboarding process:
- Give them some tasks, and see if they’re able to follow through. For instance, get them to put together a target list, including addresses organized in a geographical structure that’s logical.
- See if they’re able to book meetings. This should be established in their first few weeks so you know if they can convert an interaction into an actual scheduled meeting, and are able to convey to the client why they should meet with them. Track how many of those booked meetings are actually occurring, and how many are being canceled.
- See if they can convert probe meetings into commitments. By week five or six, you should be able to tell if your new hire can get a commitment from a client in which they’re willing to give you their next event as a trial job.
Supporting your BDR after the onboarding process:
- Transparency is key. Give your BDR a set of KPIs with purpose behind them, explaining why they have to do something, and what the benefit’s going to be for them.
- Weekly one-on-one meetings for accountability. Set the expectation that you’re going to meet every week to review what they did. Stick to this schedule as closely as you can, both to support them and to help build a culture of accountability.
- Allow your sales people to celebrate successes that they have control over. Don’t just focus on celebrating how many jobs they got, because there'll be times when they go a week without a job, and this can cause them to start doubting themselves. Instead, celebrate milestones like how many probe meetings they had, how effective those meetings were, and how many commitments they received.
Setting reps up for success with Sanktum’s sales process ⭐
There’s no way around it; this is a face-to-face business. BDRs need to make phone calls and send emails, but the main objective behind those efforts is to schedule meetings and physically get in front of people.
Sanktum broke down what they call a probe meeting, which their Restoration Industry Probe Selling (RIPS) process revolves around. Let’s unpack some of those process stages here.
Stage 1: Prospect identified
Before the probe meeting stage, your reps need to identify people that can potentially send you business. They could go out there and sell on the basis of being liked, but why waste time and money if they aren’t even the right client for you?
Stage 2 & 3: Probe meeting scheduled & completed
The probe meeting is a deep-dive discovery meeting, an opportunity to do pain-point analysis and have a formal sit-down with the prospect. The BDR will need to have actual physical appointments scheduled on the prospects’ calendars, where they show up, sit down, and go through a set of questions; they can’t just be casual drop-ins.
These probe meetings are what you should be counting and evaluating for BDRs, aiming for at least 3–5 probe meetings each week. To achieve that, they’ll likely need to have about 20–40 face-to-face interactions. If you know that a BDR can consistently have meaningful meetings, you know that they’ll be able to do all the other steps in the sales process and walk away with a commitment most of the time.
Innovative compensation models to motivate & retain talent 💰
Sanktum’s compensation model accounts for both the sales cycle and the nature of work in the restoration industry. Their model consists of: salary + commission + bonus.
By following the steps outlined above — from hiring and onboarding to supporting and compensating — you’ll be setting both your BDRs and your company up for success in the long-run.
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