What is an outsourced SDR agency, and what should one include?

An outsourced SDR agency is a company that employs, trains and manages sales development representatives, and points them at your market on your behalf. The reps prospect under your name, usually across phone, email and LinkedIn, qualify the people who respond, and book them into your diary for your own salespeople to close. You pay for the function rather than for the people, and the ramp, the tooling and the coaching are the agency’s problem rather than yours.

The same thing goes by several names - SDR as a service, outsourced sales development, appointment setting, outbound agency - and the names matter less than what is inside the engagement. That is where the good ones and the poor ones separate.

What a proper one includes

1. A rep who has done this before.

   Not a graduate learning the job on your budget. Someone who has prospected other markets, can hold a conversation with a person who did not ask for one, and has already found out that they can stand the refusals.

2. A manager on the calls.

   The difference between a rep who improves and one who settles. Somebody whose job is to listen, correct the opener, rewrite the email and re-order the day, weekly, without you having to do it.

3. A board before the first dial.

   The companies worth calling, chosen by what they are doing rather than their industry code, with the signal that put each one there and the people to speak to. You should see it, and be able to argue with it, before anyone rings anyone.

4. The data and the stack.

   Contact data with UK coverage, enrichment, a dialler, sequencing, deliverability and reporting, already wired together. At Caption the reps work on Setta, our own platform, so the queue is built overnight and the day starts on a dial rather than a decision.

5. A cadence across every channel.

   Call, email and LinkedIn on one sequence, so nobody is chased twice in a day and nobody is forgotten in week three. The reply usually comes on the fourth or fifth touch.

6. Qualification you agreed to.

   A meeting is only a meeting if the person on it fits the criteria you set. The agency should be measured on held, qualified meetings, not on diary entries.

7. Reporting you can read in a minute.

   Dials, conversations, meetings, the rate between them, and what changed this week. If the numbers are a mystery, the work is too.

What it is not

• A list broker. Buying contacts and a sequencing tool gets you a list, not a function. The function is the person working it and the person coaching them.
• Pay-per-lead. A model that pays for names produces names. It rarely produces the fourth touch that gets the reply, because the fourth touch is not paid for.
• An AI SDR. Software that writes and sends on your behalf is a channel, and a useful one in the right hands. It is not someone who can hold the conversation when the prospect picks up the phone, and the phone is still where the meeting gets agreed.

How to tell in the first conversation

Three questions do most of the work. Who listens to the calls, and how often? Can we see the board before we sign? What happens in week three, when the first list has been worked and nobody has replied yet? A good agency has a specific answer to each. A poor one talks about its process.

And one more, which is really about you: who on your side will take the meetings? An outsourced SDR fills a diary. Somebody has to be in it.