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.

For funded startups, Series A and B is often the sweet spot for outsourced SDR services.

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What are the Pros and Cons of Outsourced SDR Services?

SDR 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

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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.

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Best Practices for Outsourced SDR Services:

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 outsourced SDR solution 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.

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Getting Started with Outsourced SDR and BDR Services

There are two main options to get started with outsourced SDR and BDR services:

1. Hire an Outsourced SDR and BDR agency. Some companies like SaaSBoost.io can offer both sales and marketing help, or even full sale AE services. See the Best B2B Sales Outsourcing Companies And Services 2022 - Complete Guide for a more complete breakdown and comparison of 29 B2B Sales Outsourcing Companies and filter by service category, company size, and more. This is typically a more turnkey, scaleable approach although the up front investment and commitment is likely higher.
2. Hire a fractional SDR and manage them on your own. This may be good option if you have a smaller, well-defined project, budget, or don't mind managing a direct SDR report. You can view SDR profiles that are open to 1099 contract work and focus on SaaS sales here.