Services

Outsourced SDR and BDR Services

Unlock the Power of Apollo.io

Get Apollo.io onboarding help, or optimize your existing Apollo.io instance

Build an automated pipeline of warm leads and booked calls and qualify inbound leads with Outsourced SDR and BDR (Inside Sales) Services

The top end of the sales funnel has traditionally required a full time SDR or BDM hire. By leveraging software and data along with experience and expertise, much of the process of building an ABM (Account Based Marketing) list and generating initial interest and booked demos can be automated for early stage SaaS Startups.

Consider SDR Outsourcing options with SaaSBoost.io.

-Plug in SDRs/BDRs

Are you ready for

Outsourced SDR and BDR Services

?

The outbound BDR role, while it can work, is hard. The B2B buying process has changed and prospects email and LinkedIN inboxes are flooded. Buyers want to do their own research on a company online before engaging with a rep. There are several things to have in place before it makes sense to hire an outsourced BDR or SDR team to do cold email or LinkedIN outreach:

  • Content - baseline level of blog, video, case studies, product features, alternative to competitor pages, and industry or solution area specific content for the prospect to research at their own pace. This is also needed for matching your specific ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles) to the right message that will resonate and generate the initial response.
  • Trust - any referenceable customer or partner logos, funding, quotes, experienced management/product team all help to build a bit of social proof. For more ideas see How to Build Social Proof for SaaS - Social Proof Checklist.
  • Get listed on SaaS product directory and customer review sites like G2, Capterra, etc. If you can seed this with a few positive customer reviews even better. This may provide some inbound leads and traffic back to your site from buyers building vendor short lists and looking for alternative solutions, and also helps legitimize your company with a bit of third party validation (there is a vetting process with the top directory sites).
  • Build your LinkedIN company presence - share content from the company page and make sure any employees or even key contractors are connected to your company page. This is something a B2B buyer will check before engaging with a startup vendor.

Once these things are in place, response rates will increase and outsourced BDR and SDR services will have a much better chance for success.

What are the Pros and Cons of Outsourced SDR Services?

SDR Outsourcing services can have several Pros and Cons:

Pros of using an Outsourced SDR Agency:

  • Limited up front investment/commitment vs. hiring a full time employee
  • Outsourced agencies can be scaleable and elastic to ramp up or down depending upon ROI, budget, resources, campaigns, etc.
  • A good outsourced SDR agency should be using the latest software, data sources, and techniques for generating demand at the top end of the funnel
  • Better use of time for founders or resource limited SaaS startups - get on more sales calls and demos with prospective customers vs. the tedious tasks of some SDR work
  • Less time and management overhead when using an agency or fractional SDR resource vs. hiring, managing, training your own employee

Cons of using an Outsourced SDR Agency:

  • Possible risk to your brand anytime a third party is representing your company and product in the market
  • Hiring and developing your own SDRs builds a "bench" for your companies next AEs and sales leaders
  • Third party agencies or fractional SDRs will not be as invested in your company and the long term growth as a full time, dedicated employee.
  • Outsourced Sales agencies are harder to train and keep up to date on product and positioning changes, new features, positioning vs. competitors, etc.

Best Practices for SDR Outsourcing:

Taking the Pros and Cons into account, there are several best practices to consider when setting up an outsourced SDR agreement and setting your company up for success:

  • Tightly define your ICPs (ideal customer profile) and what constitutes a good lead or meeting. This includes account level demographic, firmographic, and technographic data (company size, geo, industry, tech installed, etc.) and also the contact (title, role in decision making process).
  • Set up a separate domain for cold email outreach. Redirect it to your website and warm it up before scaling up cold email outreach to protect your domain and IP address. Limit the amount of emails to 150 a day.
  • Define a narrow segments or campaigns to test and then scale. An agreed upon defined target account list (TAL) per campaign may be the best way to measure impact and lift over a time period and ensure no channel conflict with any direct sales efforts.
  • Provide up front feedback on scripts, outbound messaging, etc.
  • Provide 1 or 2 anchor content pieces and landing pages to use in outbound efforts.
  • Set up a solution to identify B2B website visitors and pass those account based web visitor activity details back to the SDR team. This helps account prioritization and boosts results.
  • Carefully structure how you incentivize the outsourced sales agency. Number of successful intro meetings can be a good middle ground pay for performance metric. It should be the fractional SDR's job to chase no shows. However, If SDRs (even internal employees) are solely tied to meetings with no closed loop back to eventual closed won deals, incentives are misaligned and reps will focus on getting any demos booked even if not a good fit. Renewals should be tied back to revenue and there should be a system of reporting back to the outsourced SDR provider on quality of leads and demos. Most quality agencies work on a monthly retainer basis with some sort of performance aspect that can include cost per meeting, cost per opportunity or SAL (Sales Accepted Lead), or commission on revenue. For a more deeper dive on pricing see B2B SaaS Sales Outsourcing Pricing Discussions and Resources.
  • While contracts will usually have an initial 2-3 month minimum commitment for onboarding, setup and allowing time for sales cycles to develop, make sure there is a 30 day out clause to terminate the contract if things are not working out.
  • Set up a weekly meeting and reporting schedule to report on progress and share what's working or not and fine tune messaging and processes, product updates, etc.
  • Have the fractional SDR show up to the demo call to ensure a smooth transition and consistent experience for the prospect.
  • Provide access to a shared calendar (Calendly or similar tool). Set up a private Slack channel for communication.
  • Synch CRM systems, or have the outsourced sales agency set up a dedicated CRM for your defined TALs so you have a history of communications and can check progress on any account.
  • Use an agency that offers a combined ABM (Account Based Marketing) and SDR outsourcing solutions like SaaSBoost.io. 90+% of the buying process is done online before a buyer is ready to engage with a rep or take a demo. A combined approach surrounds the entire buying team, meets buyers in the channels they are already researching (third party sites, forums, social) and layers in personalized SDR efforts at the account level.

What's Different about SaaSBoost.io vs. other SDR Outsourcing Firms?

There are many options if you are evaluating SDR Outsourcing firms.

SaaSBoost.io takes a more strategic approach vs. other SDR agencies. We can help you:

We can come up with a specific plan and pricing depending on your specific needs - contact us.

If you have most of this already set up and just need SDR bodies to turn the cranks, there are many other firms that can easily plug in callers into your process - check out the Best B2B Appointment Setting Services 2023 - Complete Guide for options.

Outsourced SDR Pricing

SDR Outsourcing costs with SaaSBoost.io: Start at $6K/mo retainer + per lead/demo variable cost. Contact us to get started.

Want to Build a full Outsourced SDR Team?

SaaSBoost.io can help build the initial structure and prove the model with an initial 1-2 SDRs. Once a repeatable formula is established we can tap into our pool of qualified SaaS Sales candidates to add additional SDRs to the team, with the added option and flexibility to turn into permanent direct hires.

What We Can Provide:

  • checkmark

    Create ABM (Account Based Marketing) lists = Who to Target. Discovering companies that may be in market for your solutions or a particularly good fit based on their profile. Methods can include: *Technology Installed (Builtwith, Datanyzye) - find out what front end web technologies and target those segments. *Intent Data Providers - Bombora and related intent data providers can report on which companies are actively researching your related topics/keywords. *Social Listening by Keyword/Topic - Syften, F5Bot and other social listening tools can alert you to conversations on Twitter, Reddit, Slack, and other targeted communities discussing and searching for your solutions.

  • checkmark

    Messaging - We'll develop outbound email scripts and marketing messages based on your product, marketing, segments, buyer profiles and A/B test them.

  • checkmark

    Set up and run cold email outreach sequences to drive demand and booked demos. We take a targeted, personalized approach to outbound email and LinkedIN outreach (anti "spray and pray"). No brand tarnishing; No IP, email blacklisting or spam issues.

  • checkmark

    If budget allows, we can run ABM programs to target just identified accounts and serve them ads and content to generate leads efficiently and at scale.

  • checkmark

    Have inbound leads that need to be qualified? SaaSBoost.io can fill the traditional SDR or BDR role and qualify leads and move along to the next stage of the sales process.

  • checkmark

    Want to build an entire SDR process and team from scratch? We can talk about a more strategic engagement where we set up a lightweight marketing and sales automation tech stack, help define ICPs, generate initial account and contact lists, craft and test outbound email sequences, and hire/manage/train your first set of SDRs to develop and grow a team over time. Apollo.io is a great option as an initial all in one sales automation tool that includes up to date and robust account and contact data, email sequences, automations, a VOIP dialer, CRM integrations, and more. SaaSBoost.io is a certified Apollo.io agency partner and can set up and turn it into a lead generation engine. Contact us to talk through options.

Case Studies:

SaaSBoost.io for Growing SaaS Startups

How the Process Works

1

Provide us an email address

You provide us access to a temporary corporate email address from your domain - required by some providers to prove ownership (it can be generic like 'listings@yourcompany.com'). We only use this email address for the purpose of submitting/editing/approving listings. You can delete it afterwards if needed or change the password later if you want to keep that as a separate inbox for listings communications.

2

Fill out our form once with your product and company details

Fill out the form once with your full company and product info data (screenshots, pricing, videos, etc) and choose which directories to submit to. Some fields are optional and can be left blank. We'll pull any additional info needed from your website to complete the submissions without a lot of back and forth or asking minor questions. The goal is to get the listings published and links from the directories up and running. You always maintain full ownership of the listings per each site's TOS and you can update/enhance/fill in any gaps at any time.

3

See the live listings

It can take up to 2-3 weeks to get everything submitted and go through the full approval processes for publishing on every site. We will send a weekly email update with published submissions (i.e. 8 out of 20 published so far, here the links, etc.). There is not a guarantee that all 20 will ultimately be reviewed/approved/published but they will definitely be submitted and if there is any missing info or reasons for rejection will pass that info on and work with you to correct (not typical). Once live, we include one round of revisions. Need ongoing help keeping listings up to date? Talk to us and we can help.

Directories we submit to:

Choose the directories that are a fit or match for your SaaS solution

Cloud Ratings
Sprout24
Cuspera
SaaSWorthy
FinancesOnline
SourceForge
AppSumo
Product Hunt
CabinetM
CrowdReviews
SaaSGenius
Serchen
TechnologyAdvice
PeerSpot
TrustRadius
SoftwareSuggest
AlternativeTo
TrustPilot
FeaturedCustomers
Software Advice
Capterra
StackShare
Crozdesk
GetApp
Good Firms
G2

Software Directory Listings - Done for You as a Service

Pricing

SaaS Directory Listing Service
One Time Fee

$999

  • checkmark
    Choose up to 20 Directories to submit to
  • checkmark
    Enter your data once - we submit to all directories
  • checkmark
    Accuracy Guaranteed - One Round of Revisions Included
Start Now
Common Questions - FAQs
Get in touch at
jeremy@saasboost.io
How do product directories impact SEO?
Directories are generally considered a good targeted referral traffic source with no SEO benefit or harm. We're only placing you in hand picked, relevant product directories and review sites focused on SaaS. After years of abuse and shady SEO practices, Google likely ignores most directory links. Does that mean there's no reason to get listed on these platforms? No, it is still a key product discovery mechanism for serious B2B buyers. SaaS software purchasers are spending time on these sites so it's important to be there with at least a baseline presence to get considered for the short list.
Why do this through SaaSBoost.io?
The main benefit is to save time and headaches - submitting company and product listings is a manual process with a lot of email back and forth and approvals (as well as sales calls and emails from reps selling sponsored directory packages). The process can actually be a little tricky with submitting, formatting, etc. We have VAs that have the process down and everything documented.
Should I submit before I have customer reviews?
There are different strategies here. Obviously it is ideal to have lots of glowing customer reviews, but even if you are not at that stage there are still product discovery benefits to getting listed early. Plenty of buyers may also be intrigued by startups in stealth mode or with new and innovation solutions and approaches. Buyers are often looking for alternatives to the obvious SaaS choices.
You own the listings and can make changes at any time. Need help to frequently update the listings? Contact us and we can likely help streamline this process for you.
Want to talk first?
No problem - drop us a line and we can set up a time to talk through the process and answer any questions.

LiveWebinar (RTC Lab)

LiveWebinar (RTC Lab)
  • Industry 
    Webinar Platform
  • Location
    Gdańsk, Poland
  • Company Size
    15

$0 to 6 figure plus ARR in under 5 months

LiveWebinar is a SaaS webinar platform based in Poland.  Established first direct US and NA sales presence. Built a database of prospects, helped evaluate and implement CRM (PipeDrive); set up outbound marketing automation/cold email outreach funnel(Woodpecker). Quickly got up to speed on complex, technical SaaS webinar platform in a new market and have a growing customer list of enterprise and white label customers.

Envato

Envato
  • Industry 
    Online Training
  • Location
    Melbourne, Australia
  • Company Size
    2,000

7 year partnership with Millions in Revenue

Envato is an Australian based digital learning platform and marketplace.  As long term partners we own the full sales process even through operations and billing/collections.

Envato Tuts+ is an Australian based company with a network of tutorial based websites.  Almost all of their revenue comes from subscriptions and a digital goods marketplace. Their Tuts+ division has a network of tutorial based websites for web developers, designers, creatives, and business owners. Online advertising, content and marketing programs are not a core offering so it made sense to outsource this portion of the business.  SaaSBoost.io came in and:

1. Set up ad products strategy, pricing and consulted on media kit and overall advertiser value prop.  Focus went beyond display, mostly growth around sponsored content/native ads

2. Handled all ad operations including trafficking and reporting

3. Invoicing and collections

4. Through outbound sales have grown revenues 5x. Key wins include first time advertisers like Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, plus a host of smaller tech startups including New Relic.  Several long term, larger deals with multiple ad products bundled as part of integrated buys.  Sponsored and custom content has been the biggest growth driver.

A partnership going on 7 years has driven millions in revenue. Customers include AWS, Microsoft, New Relic, Adobe, Atlassian and many web developer and design focused startups.

ResolveDebt.co (now Arrears)

ResolveDebt.co (now Arrears)
  • Industry 
    Debt Collection Software
  • Location
    Los Angeles, CA USA
  • Company Size
    7

Partnered with pre-revenue SaaS to build initial outbound and inbound lead engine, supported by content, directory listings, Apollo.io/Hubspot setup. Result was steady flow of booked, qualified demos (avg 10+ per month).

Tactics, Services Used:

Outsourced SDR Services - email, phone, LinkedIn outreach.

Apollo.io Setup, Automations, Sequences, List Building; integrated with Hubspot CRM.

Built initial cold call, demo, email scripts, sales FAQs, objection handling. A/B tested, refined over time.

Cold Email Domain Setup for Outbound Outreach and to protect primary domain.

Intent Data - used intent data sources Bombora and Leadsift to identify in-market accounts researching relevant software (debt collection software); automated outreach to right contacts at those accounts .

Dealfront setup, integration to identify anonymous website visitors (accounts) and automate cold outreach to matching buyer personas to convert to traffic to demos.

SEO Analysis, Content Mapping - Identified high intent keywords like “chatgpt for debt collection” and “ to drive traffic and support outbound efforts.

Software Directory Submission Service - posted Arrears on 10+ software directories including G2, Capterra, SoftwareAdvice for product discovery, links, traffic.

ProgrammableWeb (Mulesoft/Salesforce)

ProgrammableWeb (Mulesoft/Salesforce)
  • Industry 
    B2B Publishing
  • Location
    San Francisco, CA
  • Company Size
    <10

Python Scripting and Cold Outreach for leads, $100K+ ARR

ProgrammableWeb is the web's oldest and largest API Directory, a media property owned by SaaS vendor Mulesoft (now Salesforce). One tactic that was efficient and effective was to build a Python script to scrape company mentions and links to inform a personalized, relevant and timely automated cold out reach sequence. Using Snov.io (data/lead info), marketing automation (Quickmail.io), and booking (Calendly) software, the result was an automated pipeline of 50+ monthly warm leads and booked calls.

Want to find out more?
Read about our Pricing, Process and Phased approach to Outsourced SaaS Sales
  • Buyer personas
  • Lists - Account, Contacts
  • Custom Scoring Models (Accounts, Contacts)
  • Personalized, targeted Sequences for different personas/lists (you write; we can help if needed)
  • Integration with Hubspot, other CRM
  • Apollo.io Plays (automations)
  • Continued Fine tuning, troubleshooting, consult over 2 months of setup

Apollo.io Consulting Pricing

1-on-1 Apollo.io Roadmap

  • checkmark
    Initial 1 hour consult call to understand your sales process, tech stack.
  • checkmark
    Step by Step Roadmap to setup Apollo.io to meet your goals, based on your specific situation
$1,000
one time fee
Order

Apollo.io Setup or Reconfiguration,
Done for you as a Service

  • checkmark
    Initial 1 hour consult call to understand your sales process, tech stack.
  • checkmark
    2nd call to get alignment on setup and plan
  • checkmark
    Initial custom Apollo.io setup, including:
  • Buyer personas
  • Lists - Account, Contacts
  • Custom Scoring Models (Accounts, Contacts)
  • Personalized, targeted Sequences for different personas/lists (you write; we can help if needed for an additional fee)
  • Integration with Hubspot, other CRM
  • Apollo.io Plays (automations)
  • Continued Fine tuning, troubleshooting, consult over 2 months of setup
  • Custom Reporting and Dashboard setup (depending on your Apollo plan features)
  • Best practices playbook, documentation, tutorials for your SDR and Sales team (List definitions, account and contact stages, process)
  • 45 minute recorded call with your sales team (optional)
  • Timeframe: Usually 3-6 weeks
$3,000
one time fee
Order

Cold Email Domain Setup, Warming

More info on process here, including why you don’t want to use your primary domain for cold outreach, DNS settings, factors for email deliverability, # of emails per domain/mailbox here: Cold Email Best Practices for SaaS Companies

Includes:

  • checkmark
    5 Domains, 2 Email Inboxes per Domain (10 total)
  • checkmark
    DNS Settings - SFP, DKIM, DMARC, 2 week email warming period, redirect domain to your main website
  • checkmark
    Central inbox set up as "Send from"
  • checkmark
    Domains are bought on Namecheap and then ownership is transferred. Google Workspace is set up and then ownership is transferred.
$450
/for 5 domains
Includes 5 domains, 2 email addresses per domain (10 total)
Order

Ongoing Apollo.io, Cold Outbound support

On call Fine tuning, troubleshooting, consult after initial setup (up to 5+ hours a month)

$500
/mo
Order

One time - Hourly Apollo.io Consulting Call

Book an hour call anytime to troubleshoot, optimize, setup, strategize about all things Apollo.io and outbound sales

$200
one time fee
Order
Apollo.io Video Tutorials

Learn More About Our Processes for Helping Early Stage SaaS Companies Grow Using Apollo.io

Get Started with SaasBoost.io

Tell Us About Your B2B SaaS Sales Outsourcing Needs.

Best Outsourced Ad Sales Rep Firms And Services 2021 - Complete Guide - Top 10 Companies Compared

Who this guide is intended for:

Independent Web Publishers, media companies, and website owners and operators that are considering outsourcing or hiring dedicated ad sales sales help and expertise to grow revenue with limited risk/up front investment. The focus is on moving beyond programmatic display and into more integrated, strategic ad products to expand revenues.

Can Outsourced Ad Sales really work? Is there a minimum traffic level or monthly unique visitors required?

For Direct Sales to work, a web property generally must have realistic potential for at least $10K/month (ideally more) in direct ad sales revenue beyond programmatic display. There is not necessarily a specific monthly traffic level - niche B2B, purchase focused websites will command much higher premiums and advertiser demand than B2C or less focused, news oriented sites.

Read the Guide