What is Sales Development Research Analyst? My experience as SDRA for 2 years in BPO company

This article is written to remarks my 2nd anniversary working as Sales Development Research Analyst in BPO Company or better known as outsourcing company. Sales Development Research Analyst or SDRA is a position under sales division. Even though there is the word Sales, this position does not perform sales or direct selling activity like sales people in general. SDRA is more about analysis and research activities, then the results will be forwarded to the Sales Development Representatives team for follow-up.

What is the main duty of SDRA? The main task of SDRA is to look for leads. If you look at the main task, SDRA can also be called Lead Generation. My experience as  SDRA, what I do every day is not much different from Lead Gen. The difference between SDRA and a Lead Gen lies in the action steps.

SDRA looks for leads by conducting research, analyzing and put the results in a report. Research can be done by mining data by reading news/articles/journals every day. The data includes profiling, prospects current problems and/or their achievements. This data will be analyzed to then draw conclusions, who is the right person to contact (leads) and what are the strong reasons why our services are suitable to help them solve the problems they are facing. The results will later be forwarded to the Sales Development Representative team for their use.

To become SDRA, you must be able to operate CRM and sales tools. Some of the CRMs that I have used and currently using are Outreach and HubSpot. Meanwhile, the Sales Tools that my team and I use are Seamless.ai, Apollo.io, Zoominfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. In my personal opinion, tool that has up-to-date information is LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Meanwhile, a Lead Generation or Lead Gen, not only collects data but also approaches clients. As far as I know, Lead Gen does not performs presentation in front of clients because that's Sales Development Representative or an Account Executive portion. That is the basic difference between an SDRA and a Lead Gen.

Both SDRA and Lead Gen must also be able operates CRM and sales tools to search and collect data. Apart from that, several tools that are also useful for SDRA and Lead Gen are Google Workspace, including Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and also management tools such as Trello or Asana for scheduling daily activities and setting targets.

I work (from home) at a customer service outsourcing company for two years. My company is located in Australia and we, about a thousand employees, are spread all over the world. There are many challenges and opportunities that come with WFH and working with a team that lives on another continent. I will share tips on how to manage productive time and where to get work from home job in my next article.