Can SaaS | Enterprise Tech Outsource B2B Prospecting and SDRs Successfully?

This is the burning question many have.

There’s actually a huge opportunity to accelerate consistent long-term revenue growth with putting the right 3rd party (outsourced) external resources in place.

The reason there are mixed results and tainted views on the topic is directly related to the vendor a person has experience with, their past involvement, and long-term opportunity management. Basically, the program flops have been a direct result of a bad match.

A typical scenario:

A company wants to outsource outbound B2B calls, they research some firms and:

• Their plan and expectation might be something like “How many meetings can we expect?” Or maybe they want to buy a list, or call accounts they want to get into, etc.
• Vendors jump on trying to “sell them a program” based on activity metrics that don’t actually map to real sales pipeline once you dig deeper. But it sounds great so far with the metrics quoted—so many dials and meetings sound amazing!
• They settle on the low-budget option to mitigate risk (which actually increases it) thinking if it works they will do more.
• The program yields poor results, they conclude outsourcing isn’t a fit for them and they need to hire an FTE.

I get calls almost daily from agents that are not my conversational match at all. Not long ago, I got a call from a F500 company, and their agent chewed up all the time I had for them talking about how CEO’s don’t usually answer their phone and that’s why she asked if I was in the fact the CEO :/. I told her if she would have looked me up before calling my cell phone, she would know who I was and suggested she does that on her next call. How much did the company pay for this call? Who knows, it wasn’t cheap. With ridiculous conversations like that going on, of course companies ask “Can SaaS Firms Outsource B2B prospecting and SDR’s Successfully.”

The key ingredient is understanding what you need in a vendor (Article: Before You Outsource B2B Telemarketing or Telesales.)

Today, the vendor field of outsourced options really is very broad and includes everything from a larger call center which is modeled in a very controlled and structured way with hourly employees (higher turnover,) to a more boutique operation which is highly specialized and operates more as a strategic partner for very specific requirements and value-add.

I wouldn’t recommend a large call center in B2B marketing or telemarketing for complex deals other than maybe verifying opt-in status, a single topic data gathering effort, etc. Building long term customer relationships and uncovering deep dive info early in a discussion needs a completely different skill set and level of industry knowledge.

A lot of people want the results of a boutique operation that is strategically aligned with them with the budget they see in Google Ads—like this (see below:)

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People see ads like the above and think they are going to be able to do this “cheap.” It isn’t like outsourcing other tasks you can do on a budget…outbound B2B outreach requires highly developed communication skills and the ability to guide discussions real-time through complex topics. It also demands a very savvy data management practice to support it.

The SDR/Inside Sales role in itself has radically changed because of the empowerment of B2B buyers and the discovery they can do on their own. In times past, you would see more junior reps on those front lines that qualify and stage engagements for the big gun account team (unfortunately the FTE model is often still to put a more junior person as that first engagement—which is a personal peeve because it perpetuates the stigma of outbound.) Bottom line is not having the right skillset on the front lines leaves millions on the table.

A decade ago prospects would take a less-than-great-call to learn more about a platform because they needed to in some cases. Today they can end the call and look your company up, wrongly decide it isn’t a fit because they had no real access that could actually help them see the application in their environment, and move on. All from a bad call.

In truth, the SDR/Inside Sales team needs a sophisticated skillset where they can quickly establish themselves as a peer and map a discussion to the right topics and maintain the discussion as relevant and a needed presence for the prospect—all operating without visual contact. Prospects will engage with a peer that understands their business, but doing that remotely takes an extra level of skill to connect at a peer level.

We had a client do a study of their outbound programs running over a few years, they had a low level firm just getting appointments, another higher-level firm getting appointments, and our program which is more of an SDR program on steroids. Lots of appointments on the surface, but 80% of the deals that closed came from the B2B outbound program they ran with us. This demonstrates it is a much more complex engagement than what companies think of when they hear B2B Outbound or B2B Telemarketing, Telesales.

But it’s notable that a program that performs like that is tightly aligned with the sales team, martech environment, senior level team on the front lines, and fluent on the technology landscape in large enterprises. It takes a commitment on the client side to participate and be involved…if you read the article on outsourcing linked above, you can see what it requires on both sides.

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MariAnne Anne Vanella is CEO of The Vanella Group, a sales development firm working exclusively with B2B enterprise tech firms. She is also an award-winning author of the Best Seller "42 Rules of Cold Calling Executives." She developed the proprietary Telesales 2.0? methodology which produces 5x above the DMA industry standard for tele-based lead generation.

The Vanella Group, Inc. is featured on many industry channels such as SiliconReview, the C-Suite Network, The Sales Lead Management Association, and many others. 

Learn more at www.VanellaGroup.com