The Future of Outsourcing Outbound Sales

Outsourced SDRs in '24

Coincidentally, the number of outsourced lead gen companies + fractional sales leaders has tripled since orgs started purging their quota-missing sales teams.

In 2024, the biggest question for most CROs will be whether to experiment with outsourced sales teams or to double down internally. This question is difficult to answer — there have been horror stories about outsourcing and for most orgs, hiring 10 young, cheap SDRs won’t have the ROI promised during that revenue prediction meeting.

At the end of this, I’ll give you the framework for an inexpensive, scalable outbound model with the highest return.

3 Different Outbound Models

When COVID-19 killed off corporate office in the U.S., every tech company came up with the same bright idea — to hire a bunch of fresh graduates to be their remote outbound sales teams. Enterprise companies over-invested their time and money with hopes they’d get an outrageous ROI (spoiler, they didn’t) while MM and SMB orgs tried scrapping together couch change and VC money to do the same.

For some, it worked. For other, it didn’t.

Three different models of outbound were born from that.

→ Outsourced

→ Scalable

→ ?

Outsourced

For those who have the money but not the time.

Backed startups often find themselves doing this; they have no systems in place and are face down building their product. It’s always a way to experiment to see if outbound works well enough in their industry.

Scalable

This is the option everyone wants but few find success in. It’s the model where you invest X amount of money into SDRs to receive an ROI of X*3.

This works well under the following conditions:

• ACV is 1/3 (minimum) of the SDR’s salary
• 1 meeting (minimum) must close out of every 30 meetings
• Average customer lifespan > 12 months

Safely, this can be tested with an outbound agency.

Most organization like to build internally and hire 1 SDR. The results of that 1 SDR are not a fair sample size, though, which can pose as a problem when setting expectations as the SDR team scales.

(My Secret Model)

Which isn’t much of a secret, but it’s certainly uncommon. The strategic model can’t be scaled, otherwise it wouldn’t be strategic. Here’s how it works — the SDR team is split up to focus on three independent activities:

• Compounding activities
• Lagging activities
• Live activities

Compounding activities: Activities that compound over time, including social media content and free resources. In other words, your SDRs become micro-influencers that build the brand through social content to create a flow of inbound leads as well as brand awareness. The teams at Lemlist and Refine Labs are good examples of this.

Lagging activities: These include activities that create delayed responses from prospects (ie cold email, cold DM, cold WhatsApp). As opposed to letting several SDRs create email sequences, there’s typically a higher conversion rate when hiring a single email specialist to manage multiple email domains along with the copy and list building.

Live activities: The fastest & highest converting activity of all that is the most scalable. This includes cold calling, live events, and any other activities that occur in real time. While it works the best in terms of conversion %, the success is limited due to volume limitations.

With the strategic model, you’ll hire less heads to cover more ground and grow rapidly. The tech stack that I’ve used to make this possible is designed to be cheap, scalable, and easy to use.

If you’d like to build out this framework, here’s a link for us to chat.