About the tens of the business technology companies I’ve had the pleasure of working with, the pipeline (the quantity and quality of sales opportunities) is the most important driver of go-to-market success.
While pipeline is often thought of as the domain of marketing, sales development representatives (SDRs) can be responsible for more than 60% of the pipeline in B2B SaaS.
SDRs are top of funnel salespeople, making cold calls, writing emails, or sending outgoing mail. They are important even early stage or in “sales-allergic” industries like DevOps or ITOps. In short, SDRs are a critical part of a company’s pipeline and therefore its overall success. Despite this, there’s little information about building an effective organization outside of loose sales playbooks focused on topics like call volume or tech stacks. These topics don’t cover the toughest questions like where to find SDRs or how to get the most out of them. Here are four common obstacles founders and executives face as they build their SDR teams, and the solutions to achieve success.
While pipeline is often thought of as the domain of marketing, sales development representatives (SDRs) can be responsible for more than 60% of the pipeline in B2B SaaS.
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It is best to build in-house
One of the most common questions asked by early-stage founders is whether they should outsource outbound sales or set up an in-house SDR team. It’s attractive to outsource SDR recruiting, as setting up an in-house team takes a lot of time, resources, and effort – and churn if it doesn’t pay off. Vendors offer the promise of a stable suite of “ready to call” SDRs and expensive software stacks with no long-term commitments.
However, it is almost always better to build an internal SDR organization, especially with a startup company. First, outsourced vendors are rarely successful in communicating the nuances and key benefits of your solution, especially for highly technical products. In addition, much of early marketing and demand generation is about learning and experimentation, answering questions like, “What messages resonate with our target customers?” or “Are we reaching out to the right customers?” If you outsource, you might get leads, but you certainly won’t learn that.
In many cases, outsourced vendors will spam large lists of leads to avoid lower conversion rates. This can harm your brand. You only get one chance to make a first impression and burning leads can have a serious downside. You can also get customers that don’t fit your ideal customer profile, putting a strain on product, customer service, and strategy teams.
To manage the common risks of building in-house, leverage outsourced vendors like MemoryBlue for SDR training or tools like SalesLoft to build a lower-cost tech stack. Finally, make sure you hire a sales leader who is willing to lead both an SDR and an account executive (AE) team.
