We spend a lot of time analyzing our interview process for outsourced inside sales roles. Every candidate goes through multiple sets of behavioral interviews, which are graded according to a strict rubric and routinely assessed for correlation to team member performance in our 'sales as a service' programs. 

One of our earliest team members noticed that - like many employers - we'd asked him towards the end of his interview if he had any questions for us. When he got the offer to join our team, he had a suggestion regarding the interview process he'd just been through.

"I was thinking...do you all score out the quality of candidate's questions?"

At the time, we didn't. But we knew even at the time that two qualities most predictive of strong SDRs in our organization were natural curiosity (after all, asking good, open-ended questions is a key part of the job) and enthusiasm for the position. Hypothetically, an individual who asks high-quality questions in the interview is more likely to have both traits.

Over the interim two year period, we introduced a grading mechanism for questions asked in our interview process that rewards candidates who ask well thought-out, non-logistical questions (for any candidates reading this - yes, this is a dead giveaway!). In our last review of our interview's statistics, we found that the 'questions question' has become one of the single most predictive areas of our interview process. Candidates who ask higher-quality questions (that is, questions that aren't purely logistical and are indicative of a natural curiosity about the role) tend to perform significantly better in our inside sales positions. Go figure.

We took some time to interview one of our part timers, Mallory Fowler. Mallory's been hard at work these last few months achieving some awesome results on a SaaS sales outsourcing campaign.

Through her story about a (very) early attempt at a flower business, we learned that Mallory's motivation to achieve amazing results has been a lifelong quality. We look for traits like these in our interview process for inside sales roles. 

​"I have always had a passion for talking to people. Starting from the age of five, I used to have this flower/plant shop in front of my house. I lived in a rural area, and I would convince random people in their cars to buy my flowers. Even though I was five, so I was cute and people wanted to buy my flowers, I still had that passion and that motivation to literally run up to cars on my street and ask them if they wanted to buy my flowers and sometimes convince them to pay crazy amounts for random flowers I dug up out of my yard. I still love being able to talk to people and explain why this option, for any future client or my current clients, is the best, because I truly believe it. I like to talk through it and understand exactly what you mean as a future client, or what people who might be future prospects want, and translating that into the sales funnel."

Particularly in times of crisis, building empathy with prospects and finding innovative ways to connect with them is critical.

Video outreach (that is, sending personalized or templated videos via e-mail or social media to prospective customers) has become increasingly prolific, powered by tools like Vidyard, BombBomb, and Linkedin video. There are clear reasons to like this approach: it allows inside sales reps to replicate the feeling of an in-person interaction and stand out from a crowded field of other salespeople competing for prospects' attention (provided prospects aren't already saturated with videos). The downsizes, of course, are the amount of time needed to film videos relative to sending out personalized e-mails or increasing dials.

We've run tests on video outreach over the last few weeks for our own sales outreach, where we pitch our outsourced inside sales teams. We've used both Vidyard e-mails and Linkedin video messages, testing outreach to decision makers at SaaS companies throughout the U.S. Our results show a 3-4x improvement in reply rates to personalized videos in e-mails and Linkedin messages vs. personalized e-mails (that is, a templated outreach e-mail that includes a sentence or two personalized to the prospect). Roughly half of the incremental responses were 'positive' replies (that is, affirming interest in our offering), vs. the remaining half which simply thanked us for sending the videos. In our case, the videos generally take about 2-3 minutes to prepare and send, versus 30 seconds - 1 minute to personalize an e-mail. 

In short, the question of whether the incremental minute or two to send a video is justified by the increased reply rate depends largely on the % of positive replies you get (mostly a function of the level of need in the market) and annual contract value (ACV) of your product. There are instances where the incremental replies you get from video outreach come from folks who do not have a need for your product, or where the product you are selling is simply not expensive enough to warrant such a time-consuming form of outreach. However, in most cases where outbound sales is productive as a channel, our belief is that the trade-off is worthwhile.

Some great tips on video outreach from the JB Sales team on a webinar here.

B2B sales isn't easy - no matter what you're selling. But staffing agencies in particular have the challenge of differentiating themselves to prospective buyers in an extremely competitive space. 

We're proud of our work with Employment Solutions, a national recruiting agency that has generated over $170 million in revenue. For over a decade, Employment Solutions has distinguished itself through a unique, collaborative approach to professional staffing.

​In this newly released case study, learn more about our work helping a local institution grow even faster.

Later this month, we'll be debuting a project that's been in the works at Bandalier for months.

For the last two and half years, growing technology clients have been making use of our managed inside sales teams, which come with an entire sales operations department to help build targeted lists, a dedicated outsourced inside sales team that we build to perform outreach via phone, e-mail, and social media, and a client delivery infrastructure to help review and analyze results via our real-time dashboard. It's an awesome fit for companies looking to build an infrastructure for inside sales, and we've received some great feedback.

Our next service offering - which we're dubbing 'talent as a service' - is targeted to companies that have a sales strategy built out and need great talent to execute it. This service will allow companies to onboard and deploy vetted, trained remote U.S.-based inside sales and customer experience talent themselves; all within 24 hours. Bandalier clients will be able to access dozens of profiles of customer-facing candidates, schedule interviews, and onboard remote candidates directly onto their teams.

Some features of our 'talent as a service' candidates:

• U.S.-based out of our Binghamton, NY HQ; WFH during COVID-19
• Vetted in our rigorous interview process and trained through Bandalier's bootcamp
• Rates starting at $25 / hour
• Tied to an internal Bandalier team with weekly call reviews, coaching, and basic management
• Opportunity to hire directly onto your full-time team if there's a good fit

Our vision for Bandalier has always been to connect growing companies with customer-facing talent situated in small towns and cities throughout the country. Our new service line is an important step in reducing the friction involved with identifying, training, and onboarding that talent. 

Participants in our talent as a service beta will have first access to talent on our platform. If you're interested, we want to talk to you! Schedule an intro call here.

We get asked this question a lot, and we were happy to see this pop up as a topic on a Modern Sales Pros thread recently. When SaaS companies consider whether or not to build an outsourced inside sales team, they want to know whether or not they'll get bang for their buck. It's easy enough to run an LTV:CAC ratio, and there's lots of great information available about the specific points at which sales development teams begin to become profitable (tl;dr: usually somewhere between $5 - 15K ASP, depending on who you ask). But often lost in the conversation are the nuances of company strategy. 

Here's an excerpt of our response:

"What sometimes gets lost in this conversation is that company strategy matters a lot.

As an example, we've seen several clients build a traditional SDR program for deal sizes below $10,000. In some cases that may be because their investors are pushing them to prove out growth / demand for the product (even if unprofitable or just breakeven at first), in others it's because they feel they need to get folks onto the platform before they move upmarket, and there are still other cases where they plan to upsell with other products down the road. Similarly, what works and is profitable for a SaaS company with gross margins of 80% might not work for a services business with 40% gross margins.

Finally, the ROI on SDRs is extremely sensitive to highly variable numbers like decision maker reach rate, appointment scheduled rate, and conversion rate: all of which we've found vary tremendously (and much more than many folks initially realize) by industry.

When folks are looking to build out the case for an SDR model, our advice is usually to find some way to have one person on the team spend a couple of days acting as an SDR to get the basic math in place (that is to say, spend a couple of days cold calling). You won't necessarily have the math to calculate cost of acquisition, but you'll have some basic inputs (DM reach rate, demo scheduled rate) that shrink the margin of error around your assumptions. And because you'll probably get better over time, your estimates will likely be conservative."

​We receive a lot of questions about outbound prospecting in the period of COVID-19. “Is it actually possible to sell anything in a period like this?”. Our answer - as is so often the case - is that it depends. As an example, here are our standard metrics for one program in the month. This analysis compares the period following stay-at-home orders being issued in most areas (March 13th onward) against the previous month.

​The overall impact of COVID-19 was much stronger on this campaign - but not in the way we’d anticipated. Here, we’re targeting decision makers located in manufacturing facilities. While at first we saw a dip in connect rates, over time office lines started to be routed to decision makers at home, where they were much easier to get a hold of - and to pitch. Potentially because the total of number of phone calls they’re handling has reduced, we’ve had an easier time getting in touch.

When we look at our global performance during COVID-19, we’re finding individual outliers - both positive and negative - driving a lot of the numbers. Seemingly minor changes to personas being targeted or channels used matter a lot. For one client, as an example, targeting decision makers in a slightly more junior position within the organization has had a measurable impact on results within a few weeks.

So long as there are decision makers to be targeted and organizations have needs, sales isn’t going anywhere. We’ll be encouraging our teams to lead with empathy and think outside the box to generate results for our clients.

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