Outsourcing BDR teams brings flexibility, cost savings, and growth. Make sure they have great leads to ensure the team’s effectiveness.
The Challenges of Scaling an In-House BDR Team
Building an in-house BDR team presents several key challenges for startups and sales leaders looking to scale revenue growth:
Hiring costs are high. Building an in-house team requires significant investment in recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, and training new reps. This entails both financial costs as well as management bandwidth.
Ramp-up times can be lengthy. It typically takes 4-6 months for new BDRs to get fully productive and hit quota. This slow velocity inhibits a startup’s ability to accelerate.
Finding qualified talent is difficult. The best reps get snatched up quickly in a competitive job market. Startups often lack the brand awareness or resources to attract top talent.
Turnover rates tend to run high. BDR churn can exceed 50% annually as reps use the role as a stepping stone, creating constant flux.
Outsourcing helps address these pain points through flexible scaling, access to specialized skills, and flexible pricing models.
Defining Outsourced BDRs
Outsourced BDRs are highly qualified business development representatives (BDRs) who dive into new partnerships to help growing companies generate sales leads and opportunities. These BDRs specialize in demand-generation activities like outbound prospecting, lead qualification, appointment setting, and sales nurturing.
The key benefit of an outsourced BDR team is flexibility and scalability. Companies can quickly add headcount as needed to align with sales goals and seasonal fluctuations. Outsourced BDRs offer on-demand revenue acceleration without the hassle of hiring, training, and managing an in-house team.
Benefit #1: Flexibility and Scalability
With an outsourced BDR team, companies often have more flexibility and scalability in their sales development process than with an in-house team. Businesses can easily scale up by adding outsourced BDRs on demand to meet changing business demands. This eliminates the need for companies to hire, train, and manage in-house for sales development roles. There is no hiring lag and little ramp-up time. Instead, companies can rapidly ramp up sales development efforts to target new markets or respond to increased leads and opportunities.
Benefit #2: Cost Savings
When companies outsource BDRs, they save significantly on costs as there are no employee overhead expenses. Outsourcing can help businesses save up to 30% on costs by eliminating expenses like workspace and equipment that come with hiring in-house employees.
Additionally, outsourced BDRs have very low startup costs. Rather than having to hire and train full-time employees, you can leverage an outsourced team that is ready to hit the ground running. This allows you to test lead generation campaigns and scale up or down as needed.
In summary, outsourced BDRs lead to major cost savings by eliminating employee overhead and only charging for actual prospecting work completed. The flexible, activity-based pricing model keeps costs variable as campaigns scale.
Benefit #3: Faster Time to Revenue
Outsourced BDRs can ramp up faster due to specialized training. With high activity levels and prospecting cadences in place, outsourced BDRs can hit the ground running. Rather than taking months to train junior reps, outsourced teams apply proven processes to book meetings right away.
The combination of expertise and speed enables outsourced BDRs to accelerate pipeline and new revenue opportunities faster. This results in a faster impact on pipeline and ultimately revenue.
What to Look for in a Provider
When choosing an outsourced BDR provider, you’ll want to look for certain key characteristics that indicate they can deliver results.
First, seek out a proven success record. Examine their past performance with other clients to verify they have successfully generated qualified leads and pipeline in your industry or related ones.
Secondly, choose a provider with deep, relevant industry experience. They should understand your buyers, offerings, and sales cycles to connect with the right decision-makers.
Additionally, seek customized prospecting and nurturing tailored to your unique needs rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Finally, choose a provider that emphasizes hands-on optimization and coaching of your program over time to continually improve performance.
Pitfall #1: Poor Lead Quality
One common concern with outsourced BDRs is receiving poor-quality leads that don’t convert. If the outsourced partner is focused solely on volume, their incentives will focus on KPIs like call or email volume rather than definitive leads or opportunities in your sales funnel.
The key is ensuring your BDR partner is focused on the right KPIs, and create accountability by setting goals that are tied to actual pipeline and revenue creation rather than vanity metrics. By having clearly defined goals on lead quality and ongoing visibility into activities through your CRM, you can quickly identify any issues with alignment.
Pitfall #2: Lack of Transparency
One potential pitfall of outsourcing BDRs is a lack of transparency into their activities and performance. Without visibility, it can be challenging to ensure alignment and effectiveness.
Outsourcing can open communication gaps since the BDRs are not in-house. Limited visibility into their day-to-day prospecting activities makes it harder to provide coaching and refine approaches.
To prevent transparency issues, it is important to have regularly scheduled meetings with the outsourced BDR team. This provides a forum for reviewing metrics, addressing concerns, and gaining insights into what is working well versus not.
Additionally, the BDR provider should supply detailed prospecting reports that offer visibility into outreach activities, conversations, and resulting opportunities. With the proper transparency safeguards in place, lack of visibility does not have to be a pitfall to outsourced BDR success.
Getting Started Tips
When first getting started with an outsourced BDR, it’s important to set yourself up for success by following some best practices:
First, be sure to set clear goals and expectations for what you want the outsourced team to accomplish. Define the metrics of success, ideal customer profile, sales processes, and anything else relevant to your objectives. Clear guidelines will help align the team to your needs.
Next, provide sufficient assets and tools for the outsourced BDRs to use. This may include lead lists, contact databases, product collateral, email templates, battle cards, and other resources they need to execute effective outreach campaigns. Don’t leave them without the materials needed to properly represent your brand and offerings.
You should also define structured processes and cadences for prospecting, outreach sequences, qualification standards, and handoffs to sales. Documented processes will ensure consistency and enable the team to scale effectively. Be as prescriptive as possible with the workflows.
Lastly, maintain involvement and provide regular feedback. Check-in frequently, monitor campaign performance, review outreach messaging, listen to sales calls, and provide coaching. Outsourced teams thrive with active collaboration, support, and guidance. Be a partner in their success.
Following these tips will enable a smooth onboarding process and set up your outsourced BDR for revenue impact right away. With alignment on goals, resources, processes, and collaboration, you can leverage their specialized expertise to accelerate pipeline generation and sales.
Ready to launch your outsourced BDR team? Contact us today.
