Outsourced sales development (SDR) is becoming a popular trend these days. While this new approach has its own advantages and disadvantages, we will first talk about the definition of sales development, sales outsourcing, and everything you need to know about it.
But first, let's discuss some terms before diving into the world of outsourcing sales teams and services.
What Is Sales Development?
Sales development roles include business development rep (BDR), or sales development rep (SDR) functions. Typically, these are entry-level roles in a company's sales organization with work in sales, account management, or customer success management.
An outsourced SDR company is an organization that offers services such as appointment setting end-to-end, typically conducting outbound outreach, qualifying inbound leads, or a combination of both.
What Is Sales Outsourcing?
Outsourcing your sales team is a means for organizations, companies, or businesses to generate leads and sales without investing in the whole process of hiring and training full-time sales representatives.
Before getting an outsourced sales team, you need to gear up and not just jump in without preparations. You need to understand your product or service, your business model, and your and the company's views on cold calling.
To outsource or not to outsource outbound? It's a never-ending question in the business. However, both opinions have strong points.
Sales Outsourcing Pricing
Outsourced SDR companies get help from different clients, spreading out the cost of onboarding, training, software licenses, and technology. The actual price of an outsourced SDR team is on a case-to-case basis and will be different based on your company's needs; it's estimated to be $45,000 annually. With that cost, you can usually get the following benefits:
- Sales specialists
- Sales managers
- Researchers
- Account executives
- A high-trained, experienced team, ready to go
- Most advanced technology to meet your sales needs
The Pros of Having an Outsourced Sales Team
Here are the excellent reasons why an outsourced sales development team might be good for you.
Specialization and Experience in Sales
Outsourced sales development companies are experts in their fields and trained SDRs with a focus on sales. With an outsourced sales company, you can gain the knowledge and experience of a single SDR and gain the expertise and skills of an entire team. For every member of your team, they offer years of experience in sales.
An Outsourced SDR Program is Flexible and Scalable
Scalability is one of the essential skills in sales. While there are many ways to increase sales, at some point, hiring more professionals will be necessary, which requires time. Thus, sales outsourcing is a way to scale faster.
However, due to unpredictability brought about by the quarantine and pandemic waves, it's also equally important to “shrink” rapidly. With hired full-time reps, it's impossible to do it quickly and speedily. That's a downside of having in-house sales. Here comes the attractive flexibility and common practice for outsourced sales: you can quickly reduce your sales reps drastically.
We'll show you an example. A company wanted to enter a small niche market fast with their new product. They used an outsourced sales development team to acquire potential clients. After a month, their sales team got so many leads that they had to stop getting new leads and halt their contract with the outsourcing sales company. In a year, the company went back to the provider and hired them again for two months. You see, in this case, it would have been costly and time-consuming if they would have kept an in-house SDR team.
Outsourcing Reduces the Cost of Mistakes
By having an outsourcing sales team, your company can avoid many risks with creating and managing sales teams—for example, the risk of choosing the wrong person.
Targets New Markets or Underrated Markets
Confidently enter an unexplored territory by hiring an experienced team of outsourced sales. This will help you get a higher return on investment. If you want to reach new or underserved markets, flexibility and adaptability are crucial. Your outsourced sales can scale up or down rapidly depending on your needs to adapt to your company’s shifting priorities with the joined advantage of keeping your core sales at bay.
Optimized Reporting / Accountability
One of the significant concerns when opting for outsourced sales is the lack of control over the external team. However, good providers or companies counterbalance this with weekly or monthly reports. Don't worry; these experts are reliable and responsible for meeting your needs.
Reasons Why Getting Outsourced Sales Services Might Be Bad for Your Company
While there are many good sides of outsourcing your sales development representatives, take a look at the following reasons that this approach is not a good fit for you:
Your Business Model Won't Work
An unfit business model is a primary reason why you shouldn’t outsource sales development. If a business model is B2C, B2B2C, or B2C2B, chances are high; it won’t fit an outbound model. Your product pricing is a crucial factor in this matter.
You Think Cold Calling is Outdated
There are many arguments that cold calling and emailing are dead. Indeed, there are more effective ways of targeting leads than ever before. One of the primary roots of this belief is that cold outreach is annoying, inappropriate, and a waste of time.
Here's a fact: The not-so-cold reality of cold outreach (calling and emailing) is it’s a fool-proof way to achieve direct targeting of winning logos valuable to your business. Not to mention, cold outreach, as well as email outreach, LinkedIn prospecting, and direct mail prospecting, is one of the reasons account-based marketing and account-based sales are pretty hot topics in the last few years. To know more about cold calling, click here.
You Lack Understanding of Your Product or Service
Surprisingly, such companies or businesses exist. They don't understand what they are offering to the table, the value of their items, and how they stand out from the competition; they often don't take time to learn the ins and outs of their why's.
In an inbound business model, such blind spots aren’t always visible and obvious. It's rare for marketers to deal with objections.
You see, that's the reason why such businesses don't work well with a sales outsourcing model.
Efficient and great SDRs will always do their homework first to deeply understand why any prospect would even care in the first place. Then, they’ll keep the conversation progressing by bringing relevance to the appointments they set.
In Summary
It’s easy to see sales development outsourcing as unfit for your company. To discount the merits of an outsourced approach without digging in is easy as well.
However, challenging reasons not to outsource sales development may give you a new perspective on your business and, maybe, even make you take that step to grow through outsourcing.