Responsibilities of a sales representative

Oh boy, talk about opening a can of different things that could be overwhelming altogether.

Sales representatives, regardless of whether they're sitting behind a computer, or a counter in a real life store, have tons of responsibilities. Yes, they're all sales related, but it's not that simple.

Especially when you put the same sales reps in an outbound sales first business that also relies on marketing. So, what does it equate to?

Modern day sales reps are called SDRs (*short for sales development representatives). These people are responsible for a couple of things.

1. Cold call prospects/ leads and talk to them to upsell a product or service. Alternatively, the same cold call could be about pitching for a new product or service in an effort to convert the prospect.

2. Marketing dept. sales reps also have to do prior research on prospects; their pain points, competitors, existing products and why the new one is a better variation etc.

3. On top of everything, SDRs and BDRs get a list of contacts they have to call daily. They're prospects,/ leads that i mentioned earlier. This is primarily the core function of the job.

And you know what's the irony in all this? Cold calls have a low conversion rate. It's a universal phenomenon. But a 2% conversion rate means that when there's a higher number of cold calls to make, the conversion rate is also high.

The same thing applies to email outreach and vice versa.

Luckily, technology has advanced to the point where there are tons of smart digital solutions that make sales reps' responsibilities less of a hassle. There are cold calling solutions like Trellus.Ai. Salesloft, Apollo, Salesforce, HubSpot (*being a very popular industry name) etc. These programs streamline calling, task management and a lot of other things where it's easier to manage stuff, scale business and increase outreach altogether.