How it works
Three weeks to the first dial, and what drives the cost.
How an engagement starts, what is inside it, what you bring, what makes it cost more or less, and how it compares in kind to hiring. No rate card - the figure depends on your market - but everything that goes into one.
The first three weeks
Week one: the brief, the board and the messaging.
An hour with you on what you sell, who buys it, what a good meeting looks like and who takes it. Then we build the board against your market - the companies, the signals that put them there, the people to call - draft the opening lines from those signals, and walk you through what it found. If the market is thin, this is where we say so.
Week two: the set-up.
A mailbox on your domain, warmed. The sequences written from the signal on each company, not from a template. The scripts, the objection handling and the qualification criteria agreed with you. The rep briefed on your market and your tone.
Week three: the first dial.
The queue is built the night before, ordered by who is likely to pick up, and the day starts on a call. Email and LinkedIn run on the same cadence. The first replies and the first conversations arrive in this week and the next.
Month two onwards: the numbers, weekly.
Dials, conversations, replies, meetings booked and held, and the rate between each. What we changed this week and why. Where the market is responding and where it is not. A meeting is only a meeting if the person fits the criteria you set.
The day-by-day version is in three weeks to the first dial, and which of the weekly numbers matter is in SDR metrics: what to measure. What the first ninety days should look like, checkpoint by checkpoint, is in what to expect in the first ninety days.
What is inside the engagement
| Aspect | Included | What it replaces |
|---|---|---|
| The rep | An experienced SDR, working your market and no one else’s | The hire, the recruiter, the ramp |
| The manager | Daily coaching on live calls, weekly review with you | A fifth of a sales leader’s week |
| The data | Intent signals, waterfall enrichment, verified contacts | Two or three data subscriptions |
| The platform | Setta: dialler, sequencing, deliverability, reporting | Four or five tools joined by exports |
| The board | Built before the first dial, re-sorted weekly | Weeks of a new hire’s research |
| The messaging | Written from the signal, per company, at reply length | Templates |
What you bring
- A market. Something to sell, a kind of company that buys it, and a reason it is worth their time.
- A calendar. Someone whose diary the meetings go into, and who will be in them.
- A person to take the meetings. A closer, a founder, whoever runs the sales conversation. The handover is where sales development works or does not, in-house or out.
- An hour for the brief, and fifteen minutes a week after that.
What drives the cost
We do not publish a rate card, because the honest answer is that it depends. These are the things it depends on, so the number on the first call makes sense. How the market prices this kind of work in general - retainer, pay-per-meeting and hybrid - is in outsourced SDR pricing in the UK.
- One rep or a team. A team on the same market shares the board, the manager and the platform.
- The market. A tight, well-defined buyer with clear signals is quicker to work than a broad one that has to be discovered as we go. Neither is wrong; one takes longer.
- The channel mix. A market that responds on the phone runs differently from one that responds by email or on LinkedIn, and the balance affects how a rep’s day is spent.
- The sale. A considered sale to a senior buyer takes more research per conversation than a simpler one. The research is done before the dial, and it is real work.
- Length. Outbound compounds - the fourth touch, the second month, the re-sorted board. A longer engagement is more productive per month than a short one.
How it compares in kind
A first SDR hire in the UK costs around £85,000 in the first year once the salary, employer’s National Insurance, pension, recruiter, tools and management time are added up - the arithmetic, with its sources, is in this post - and the first quarter of that buys ramp rather than pipeline. An engagement with us is one figure, agreed for your market before we start, and it includes the manager, the data and the platform the hire has to buy separately. Which is right for you depends on whether you already have someone who can coach; the comparison sets both out honestly.
Stopping
You can stop when the diary says you should. Outbound compounds over the first quarter - the fourth touch, the second month, the re-sorted board - so that is the fair length to judge a market on; after that it is your call. What you keep afterwards - the board, the data, the mailbox history - is set out before we start, so there are no surprises at the end.
In their words
What’s impressed us most is how integrated the relationship has become. The Caption team work directly within our CRM, manage opportunities and follow-ups alongside us, and have helped us build a much more structured sales pipeline. We’ve seen opportunities they originally generated progress all the way through to signed customers.
Read the GP Triage case study, or see all our clients’ stories.
Fifteen minutes. No pitch.
Bring the market. We will tell you on the call what an engagement would look like on it, and what it would take.
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