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Should we outsource SDRs?
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This is a question I get asked from a lot of sales leaders.
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And usually the reason for that is because for one reason or another, the account executives and the people running the meetings are not happy with the SDRs, the quality of those meetings, or they re not closing the amount of pipeline that they need in order for the ROI to pay off.
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So in this episode, what we re going to talk about is whether or not
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This is a smart decision.
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So thanks for tuning into Outbound Squad.
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My name is Jason Bang.
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Our goal is to help you turn complete strangers into paying customers.
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So if you re an enablement leader, a sales leader, and you are managing a group of SDRs, you re overseeing a sales team, you re definitely in the right place.
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So what I want to talk to you about
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is this concept of outsourcing SDR.
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So when we started Outbound Squad, we were actually originally called Blissful Prospecting.
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This is back in 2015 and 16.
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I had started this business essentially as a freelancer.
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So I did a lot of the outsourced SDR type of stuff.
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We ran cold email campaigns, LinkedIn campaigns for our clients, et cetera.
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And
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there s a lot of turnover.
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Even then, when it was easier to send bulk email campaigns and LinkedIn campaigns, there was a lot of turnover that really resulted from me not being an expert in the client s business.
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So whether that was software they were selling or if they re selling into personas, maybe that I never sold into, there was this gap that because I was speaking to them and
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Oftentimes with an enterprise type motion, I didn t spend months like a newly onboarded rep to learn about the business.
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So in my experience, I got a couple of really big kind of reasons why that I want to talk about.
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Outsourcing SDRs with rare exception is a bad idea.
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There s a reason why, and this is, if you re looking into this, you should ask about it.
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There s a reason why churn is very high at these companies.
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And don t get me wrong, there s a handful of companies, maybe half a dozen out there that do a very, very good job of this.
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99% of the companies out there
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are not good.
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I ve worked with tons of clients as large as Gong and Zoom and those types of customers all the way down to startups.
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Not a single customer I ve talked to has been happy with the appointments and the pipeline or lack of pipeline that s generated from the SDR that they re outsourcing to.
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So I think outbound, what we have to wrap our head around is that this is not something we can figure out by outsourcing it and paying a part-time SDR, essentially 3 to 5K.
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per month.
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And to be fair, a lot of this has to do with if, like a lot of the companies I work with, the sales leaders want to make a pivot to outbound, so they ve traditionally relied on a lot of inbound, and maybe that s gotten them to 100 mil in ARR, and they have to make this outbound pivot.
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Getting AEs to close outbound source deals versus inbound, that requires a pretty big culture shift.
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Because if you re used to being fed inbound and you re used to being fed customers that have brand awareness, they have a budget in place, they re educated, they know that they have a problem, they know how to communicate about their problem, that s going to be a much easier deal to close than an outbound sourced deal.
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And there s lots of pros to going to outbound, one of them being
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Hey, the companies that we want to work with might not organically come to us inbound, or at least the senior people that we want to get a sales cycle started with are not coming to us via inbound.
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So that s a really, really big part of this and why you should do it in house is you need to know how to close these deals that needs to be in place before you start investing a ton of money and getting the meeting.
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Outsourcing to SDRs and agency is not a good idea if you ve never done Outdone before as a sales work, you sell enterprise or anything complex.
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Just think about it.
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If you can t even get these meetings in house, how could you possibly expect someone that doesn t have the expertise that you have to get those meetings?
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If you re breaking into new industries or verticals, that s not something that you should test.
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Don t treat the
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outsourced SDR agency like an outsourced R and D. It s a very expensive way to test stuff and you re probably, they re probably not going to do it in a way that would really tell you if that vertical is worth pursuing or that new geographic location that you re going after would be great.
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If you have not figured out your messaging or value drivers,
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There s another one where maybe you ve been mostly PLG or the product is really good and people tend to stay and you get a lot of referrals but you haven t figured out why.
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The actual problem that you re solving and the value drivers and the messaging
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that would actually resonate with these people you haven t really figured out because you haven t had to do outbound before.
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Something that your marketing team is doing from an inbound standpoint and the fact that the product is really good just generates a lot of inbound.
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Don t try to pay someone else to figure out your messaging.
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Paying for someone to help you figure out the messaging is different than just outsourcing it all together.
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You want to be extremely hands-on with us.
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And lastly, if your AEs aren t self-sourcing and doing their own outbound,
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If they don t have that self-sourcing muscle, they are not running appointments with outbound source leads.
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Therefore, they will not know how to close these.
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And the number one thing you re gonna run into is people saying things like, oh, they said they don t have budget, or I wasn t speaking to a decision-maker.
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It s like, no shit.
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Like, it s outbound.
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That lack of awareness around the problem and a project not likely being in place and not knowing what to do and how to multi-thread, that s selling.
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Right?
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Selling to an existing budget is table stakes.
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Every rep should be good at selling to an existing budget.
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Outbound requires you to go find budget in many cases.
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So it might make sense.
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Might.
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I say that with a huge caveat to outsource or work with an agency.
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if you know outbound works but you need help scaling it.
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So let s say that you ve figured out the outbound motion with a small SDR team and you just wanna ramp it very quickly and you know what works, that might be a good stopgap or band-aid.
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So I never think that this is a good long-term solution.
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If you ve mastered messaging and value drivers and your AEs know how to close outbound deals, it might make sense to do this.
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So another situation I could think of is if you have AEs and they re just rock stars at self-sourcing,
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and you haven t even hired or brought in an SDR team because your sales team is so new, and you have less than 10 reps, working with an outsource shop, given the fact that the AEs are self-sourcing, again, that might be a good stopgap until you can kind of build this process out yourself.
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That would be very, very early stage though.
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So, let me know if you agree or disagree.
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Connect with me on LinkedIn.
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It s Jason Bay, Outbound Squad.
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I m pretty easy to find.
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Connect with me on LinkedIn.
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Send me a message and let me know if you agree or disagree.
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Thanks for tuning into the episode today.
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If you like what you heard, please follow me on LinkedIn.
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You ll see announcements for webinars that we have coming up that you can sign up for.
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We actually have one coming up on how to scale cold email across your organization without reps spending hours and wasting hours really researching.
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Uh, if you could leave a review or rating on this podcast, whether it be on Spotify or Apple podcasts so that other leaders like yourself can find it.
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And that s all I got for you today.
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So thanks for tuning in.
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We ll see ya.