Optimizing Outbound Prospecting
PRACTICES
- Coordinating more tightly with Marketing on ABx to surround accounts (ex: running digital ads to accounts while “SDRing”)
- Bringing true top-of-funnel value (ex: offering 1:1 conversations with respected subject matter experts vs. “do you want a demo?”)
- Leveraging intent data
- Much tighter definition/enforcement of ICP & persona
- Seeking warm(er) intros through fellow LI connections
- Leveraging your execs for intros (draft on behalf)
- Engaging partners for intros
- Prospecting 2-3 contacts per account simultaneously
- Deeper research into the person and their company’s key initiatives (before engaging)
- Arm sellers (xDRs & AEs) with stories of how your solution created value for specific customers. Why buy, why buy now, why buy from us?
CHANNELS
- Phone heavy cadences/sequences
- Adding LI video & LI voicemail to touch mix
- Industry relevant direct mail & gifting
TALENT
- Hiring people with 2+ years experience at a recruiting agency
- Ensuring new hires are bought into ‘up to AE or out’ career path expectations
- Managing to minimum daily activity levels (ex: 50 dials per day; x new contacts or accounts engaged per day)
Sales Development Benchmarks
| Annual Base ($) | 25th | 50th | 75th |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbound | 23,100 | 55,,000 | 65,000 |
| Hybrid | 45,230 | 51,650 | 57,600 |
| Outbound | 55,000 | 61,800 | 66,000 |
| Annual Variable ($) | 25th | 50th | 75th |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbound | 23,100 | 25,000 | 34,167 |
| Hybrid | 20,000 | 20,000 | 30,000 |
| Outbound | 24,051 | 29,000 | 35,763 |
| Annual OTE ($) | 25th | 50th | 75th |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbound | 46,200 | 83,333 | 97,500 |
| Hybrid | 66,289 | 75,960 | 85,000 |
| Outbound | 70,250 | 90,000 | 100,000 |
| Activities / Quarter | 25th | 50th | 75th |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbound | 2,245 | 7,557 | 16,083 |
| Hybrid | 1,704 | 3,563 | 5,914 |
| Outbound | 2,964 | 7,364 | 13,486 |
| # Opps Generated Per Quarter | 25th | 50th | 75th |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbound | 14 | 49 | NA |
| Hybrid | 7 | 15 | 29 |
| Outbound | 7 | 15 | 27 |
| $ Closed Won Per Quarter | 25th | 50th | 75th |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbound | 92,085 | 307,929 | 429,570 |
| Hybrid | 23,644 | 66,269 | 139,677 |
| Outbound | 24,743 | 60,803 | 140,416 |
| Activities Per Opp | 25th | 50th | 75th |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbound | 14.7 | 55.9 | NA |
| Hybrid | 115.1 | 245.7 | 464.8 |
| Outbound | 251.5 | 560.5 | 1070.8 |
| Compensation Cost of Sale (%) | 25th | 50th | 75th |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbound | 13% | 7% | 6% |
| Hybrid | 70% | 29% | 15% |
| Outbound | 71% | 37% | 18% |
The following spreadsheet that provides directional guidance on productivity and output.
Standing up an SDR Team In EMEA
- Hire native speakers for the country/countries you are targeting; this is especially important for selling into DACH and France. Also, target UK, DACH, Benelux, and the Nordics first.
- Build cadences/sequences in native languages with localized content; be mindful of touch preferences (call, email, social) and messaging tone by country
- Plan ahead that summer, esp. August, will be slow in Europe for both prospecting and anything internal
- Factor European labor laws and vacation standards into your capacity planning & productivity models
- If you don’t have local sales engineers, you’ll likely need SDRs to be demo proficient (esp. if selling to SMB)
- Hire at least 2 from the start. Put them in the same city as your sellers.
- Start in Dublin or London where there is a rich talent pool used to working with companies HQ’d in the US. The UK and Ireland are also among the most international business friendly locales.
- Send 2 SDRs from the US out for 2 weeks to ramp/train the new hires; continue to surround the new SDRs with intensive support from HQ for the first 90 days
- Know the ins and outs of GDPR and how it is applied/enforced by country. Germany tends to be the most rigid country on this.
- Don’t forget about selling to/from Israel
- Consider running a pilot from the US to prove out the motion before hiring in Europe
- Work out ROEs for engaging subsidiaries of multi-national enterprises
- Secure good contact data esp. mobile numbers. Lusha & Modigie are good sources.
- Have your EMEA SDRs report to your head of Sales Development, not into the local AE or GM. The reason is to keep the SDRs 100% focused on prospecting so they don’t get pulled in 1000 different directions (ex: into marketing initiatives).
- To keep inbound and outbound roles separate (a best practice), many US-based companies continue to operate inbound out of HQ so that EMEA xDRs stay focused on outbound
Inbound Sales Development
- When you have enough quality inbound leads (i.e. demo requests) to sustain at least 2 full time people, create a dedicated inbound SDR role. Why two? Since one must avoid a single point of failure.
- To align incentive and career paths, have outbound SDRs report to sales and inbound SDRs report to marketing. The career path for outbound SDRs is into sales. The career path for inbound SDRs is (typically) not into sales because they don’t build their prospecting muscles; instead, inbound SDRs typically go into CS, support, or other marketing roles.
- If you have inbound SDRs serving a segment, let them handle 100% of the inbound flow even if you have to double comp reps. This will ensure the people most expert in the job engage leads and avoid complex routing rules.
- Reasons to have inbound SDRs:
- Many inbound leads are of unknown quality so it takes a human to pre-qualify.
- Even if leads are high quality, scheduling & rescheduling can get complicated and is usually not the best use of an AE’s time.
Cadences
Cadence / Sequence Consultants (and Authoring Tools)
We strongly recommend that you write your own cadences/sequences. All of the following consultants will teach you HOW to write them and some write them for you. We also included several paid and free tools.
(alphabetical order; * = recommended)
- AK Operations
- (*) CadenceBuilder (free tool)1
- Greaser Consulting
- Growth Engine X (Eric Nowoslawski)
- (*) Lavender (paid tool to optimize individual emails)
- Regie (paid tool)
- RevShoppe
- SamSales (Samantha McKenna)
- Sapper Consulting
- Sell Better by JB Sales (John Barrows; trains on HOW to write but does not write for you)
Economic Impact of In-House SDR Team
SDR programs can more than pay for themselves independent of the opps SDRs actually source. How so?
1. SDRs who are promoted are more likely to succeed than AEs hired from the outside
2. SDRs who are promoted ramp in AEs faster
3. SDRs who are promoted can slot into AE roles faster than AEs can be hired from the outside
4. Internal SDRs are typically less expensive per opp generated vs. outsourced SDRs
With reasonable assumptions (Excel Model), the incremental economic benefit of having in-house SDRs eligible for promotion to AE is approx. $500K over 3 years.
SDR Outsourcing
In general, I do not recommend SDR outsourcing unless you are:
- Expecting the SDRS to perform extremely transactional motions that do not require significant knowledge
- Operating below scale to hire and manage your own SDRs.
- Prepared to invest in-house resources on enabling & managing the outsourced SDRs. This includes writing cadence/sequence content and keeping very close tabs on KPIs such as # accounts engaged, # of touches per day, etc.
- Able to provide a continuous volume of quality accounts to target
- Conducting an experiment for which you are not expecting any ROI (though I would argue that one should ‘stack the deck’ on all experiment to ensure that failure is real and not merely due to flawed execution)
- Not expecting to promote SDRs into AEs. This is a major benefit of having in-house SDRs. Even if the agency offers ‘rent-to-own’ talent, you will not get the same yield as with an in-house program.
Agencies generally hire at lower wages and experience higher turnover. In addition, SDRs may be split across multiple clients. Even when they are dedicated, which I strongly recommend, they naturally have lower intrinsic motivation since they are part of a different company.
The higher rates you pay per outsourced SDR versus in-house SDR covers management, tools, fringe costs and gives you some degree of greater flexibility in hiring/firing talent. In addition, you’ll likely gain a faster start than building your own team and avoid some of the more basic mistakes.
If possible, contract based on performance (ex: $1000 per meeting held which is the true going rate) rather than paying per FTE per month. Set fair but unambiguous definitions for what a ‘qualified’ prospect means, typically the type of company and the job role and job level of the individual. Nonetheless, expect the conversion rate of meetings to opportunities to be much lower than for internal prospecting.
The results of SDR outsourcing have historically been so poor that many firms now position their services as “demand testing” rather than “demand generation.”
SDR Outsourcing Providers
(*) = Recommended
- Air Marketing (Owen Richards; EMEA)
- Alleyoop (fka IST – Inside Sales Team)
- Bandalier (Jeremy Ruch)
- Cience
- Convert.ai
- d.rolls & Associates
- DailyVest
- demandDrive
- DemandZen
- ebq
- Excelerate360 (EMEA)
- FullFunnel
- Growth Engine
- Intro
- Leadium
- (*) Memory Blue
- NextSales
- Operatix
- Outworks
- Point Co (Steve Barton; EMEA)
- Predictable Revenue
- (*) Reveneer
- RevGen
- Salescode (B2B tech sales global outsourcing; currently not recommended)
- Seed2C
- SendToWin
- Simera
- StoryGen
- (*) Televerde (empowering others by hiring incarcerated & previously incarcerated women)
- The Pipeline Group
- Tidal
- Veth Group
- Whistle (David Zeff; EMEA)
Sales Development Consultants
- Bryan Kreuzberger (https://breakthroughemail.com/)
- Marylou Tyler
- OneView (Remington Rawlings)
- Richard Harris
Footnotes
(1) Disclosure: Jeremey Donovan created cadencebuilder.com while working for Salesloft.