Maximize Your Lead Qualifying with Outsourced SDR Services

When your sales team struggles to create effective inbound marketing strategies, visionary business leaders must ask, “Who executes inbound lead management?” If your answer is sales reps, sales managers, or the entire sales team, then you need to explore how a sales development representative (SDR) helps to improve lead qualification, increase relationship building and ultimately, optimize your entire sales process.

In Valve+Meter’s in depth exploration of sales development representatives, we explore 8 key reasons your business may benefit from outsourced BDR services:

1. Expertise
2. Reduce Expense
3. Focus on Core Competencies
4. Scalability
5. Access to New Markets
6. Increase Sales Velocity
7. Reduce Risk
8. Flexibility

A Sales Development Representative (SDR) is responsible for driving sales and achieving sustainable growth by generating and nurturing inbound leads. Especially in the early stages of the sales cycle, SDRs work to identify and qualify potential customers, build relationships, and drive interest in your company’s products or services. Every time an inbound lead contacts your company via your website, phone, email, social media, and other channels, an SDR is the first point of contact. The main objective is qualifying the prospect and disseminating the relevant data.

To achieve this, an SDR blends skills in research, fact finding, and 1:1 networking. Instead of focusing on converting every lead into a sale, SDRs focus on organization and efficiency. They have a comprehensive understanding of your company’s products, services, and target market, and engage potential customers in conversations and communications in a friendly and professional way. At the same time, SDR learns about prospect’s business needs and whether your company can solve their problems. Since the initial contact from a lead is often not the key decision maker, an SDR must also play an essential role in nurturing leads for your sales team. This often applies to maintaining relationships with existing leads over time to gain referral and repeat business.

An SDR is not simply a customer service representative. They possess strong communication and interpersonal skills, prioritize tasks effectively, and manage a large volume of leads and follow-up activities. They use cutting edge technology to manage leads within the sales funnel with the eventual goal of transferring high priority and fully qualified BoFu leads to your closing sales rep. An SDR is one of the most organized, creative, and highly intelligent members of marketing teams throughout successful businesses.

An internal team of traditional sales representatives have a very clear objection of converting each qualified lead into a sale. Exceptionally talented account executives can waste an excessive amount of effort on poorly qualified leads. This may lead to strong leads being lost to competitors because your entire team is focused on the wrong prospect. This is the primary function and distinction of an in house SDR who manages leads-ushering the hottest leads to your closing sales reps; disqualifying leads who are not a good fit your brand; and nurturing quality leads who are in still in the consideration phase (ToFu and Mofu) and not ready to meet with a closing sales rep.

Sales Development Representative

• Engages new inbound leads in early stages of sales cycle.
• Works to identify and qualify potential customers.
• Demonstrates value proposition and educates prospects.
• Optimizes lead management throughout your sales team.
• Nurtures ToFu and MoFu leads through sales funnel.

Closing Sales Representative

• Engages highly qualified leads at the later stages of the sales cycle.
• Work to convert BoFu leads to buyers.
• Negotiates and finalizes deals with potential customers.
• Works with operations to fulfill product or service orders.
• Builds relationships for ongoing sales and referral network through follow up.

A sales development team can be built internally or outsourced to a marketing agency. Both internal and outsourced SDR service provides businesses the ability to effectively manage leads and improve the efficiency of your in-house team of closing sales representatives.

Building an in house sales development team may be practical for certain businesses. An established brand with strong inbound marketing may hire their own sales development representatives. The primary advantage is all of your efforts stay in house. Your sales development team can work directly with your salespeople to execute strategy. There is an initial investment in hiring the right talent and setup that includes training and equipment.

Salary, benefits, and equipment costs are typically similar to standard sales. A sales development team will need continuous improvement training and access to the latest technology. These ongoing costs should be considered when deciding between building your own internal SDR or working with an SDR outsourcing company.

For some companies, especially small to medium sized businesses, start-ups, and seasonal businesses, building your own sales development team can be challenging. The initial and ongoing costs of employing an SDR may cut into revenue. Because sales development requires a deep understanding of your business and marketplace, internal SDRs require time to onboard successfully. These are some of the reasons that SDR outsourcing companies offer faster, cheaper, and more efficient solutions than building your own sales development team.

When you work with an SDR outsourcing company, all of these steps have been fleshed out already, saving you time and money. There are 8 key benefits of outsourced sales development.

1. Expertise

An outsourced SDR team brings powerful expertise quickly into your business. With research and insight into your products and services, outsourced sales development works rapidly as an extension of your team. Professionals who are trained and skilled in generating leads, nurturing prospects, and driving revenue growth.

2. Cost Savings

There is a lot of expense to hiring new personnel that is eliminated when you contract an outsourced SDR to execute marketing campaigns. Outsourcing your sales development can be a cost-effective way to expand your sales capabilities without incurring the high costs of hiring, training, and managing a full-time in-house team.

3. Focus On Core Competencies

An SDR outsourcing company allows you to retain your sales processes and operations. Sales development representatives improve your marketing without disrupting your internal sales teams. Often small to medium sized businesses try to fit sales reps into these roles instead of core competency of closing sales.

4. Scalability

At Valve+Meter Performance Marketing one of strongest value propositions to businesses is the ability to scale marketing efforts. As outsourced sales development becomes more effective, your sales grow. SDR outsourcing companies like Valve+Meter allow you to reinvest and maximize return on marketing.

Likewise for seasonal businesses, an outsourced sales development team can easily scale up or down based on your business needs, allowing you to adjust your resources as demand changes without having to worry about the costs and logistics of managing a large sales team.

An outsourced SDR can always help your business during a new product launch when demand is high. Often alongside an aggressive marketing campaign, an abundance of leads can overwhelm your team. Outsourced sales development allows you to manage leads during increases in inbound sales inquiries.

5. Access To New Markets

With a sales development team that has experience in different markets, you can expand your reach and target new customers that you may not have been able to reach before. This is effective when your marketing efforts are casting a wider net into the marketplace. The inbound leads must be qualified. Lead qualification can hone in on the most effective markets to target and adapt your outbound and inbound marketing tactics.

At Valve+Meter, all data is tracked alongside lead qualification. When you can identify the origin of high quality leads, then you can improve effective efforts and reduce redundancies and reduce marketing spend.

6. Increased Sales Velocity

Outsourced sales development teams are focused solely on driving leads and moving them through the sales funnel. Appointment setting the most qualified leads for your sales representatives is vital to success. Just as important is managing cold and warm prospects. You don’t want to waste the effort of your sales representatives or lose your potential leads due to errors in processes and structures. SDR outsourcing companies manage leads at all stages of the funnel and only eliminate prospects that do not fit your brand. This increases your overall sales velocity and helps you achieve your revenue goals more quickly.

7. Reduced Risk

By outsourcing your sales development, you are partnering with a team that is accountable for their results and performance. This helps to reduce the risk of investing in an in-house sales team that may not perform as expected. An outsourced SDR is always accountable for their efforts and benefits to your marketing strategy.

8. Flexibility

Outsourcing sales development offers flexibility in terms of service levels, pricing models, and scope of work, allowing you to tailor the service to your unique business needs. This helps with start-ups, product launches, and seasonal businesses. Whether you need continuous efforts from an outsourced SDR or supplemental effort, outdoor sales development is an ideal solution.

Marketing companies that offer SDR services have a deep understanding of the sales and development process already and are equipped with the right prospecting technology to aid their efforts. Outsourced sales development relies on continuous improvement to succeed for their clients. This means you have access to the latest technology including tactics within research, data gathering, machine learning, email marketing platforms, and data analytics tools. SDR outsourcing companies also provide ongoing improvement to their staff. All of these benefits are far less expensive than building a single in-house BDR team. An outsourced SDR team can spread its costs over multiple clients.

There is a key distinction between business development representatives (BDRs) and sales development (SDR). BDRs work on outbound marketing efforts including cold calling, prospecting, networking, and direct lead generation. Sales development refers to inbound marketing. Generally, lead generation is attributable to outbound marketing. However, an outsourced SDR team can improve lead generation.

Traditional outbound marketing like advertisements and even more recent adaptations like Pay-Per-Click (PPC), drive traffic to your website, phone, and social media. The resulting leads need to be qualified, nurtured, and managed. With outsourced SDRs, they have the time dedicated to finding the right prospects within these inbound leads. Not just that, but they also have the tools to do the proper research and time to vet qualifying leads to ensure they are relevant to your business. With better research tools and data to propel them, you’ll see an influx of leads into your sales pipeline.

Outsourced SDR services with a marketing company will often include the technology to help build a rapport with your prospects to increase their interest in your products and services. When a relationship is established right from the beginning, leads are more likely to convert. The focused effort plus the proven technology that an outsourced SDR company brings to the table really speeds the sales process along. As the SDRs learn more about the inbound leads and your products and services, an outsourced SDR is likely to provide insight into all of your marketing tactics.

At Valve+Meter we use a data-driven strategy to test our outsourced SDR efforts on your behalf. This data can be analyzed to improve our efforts and optimize your sales and marketing structures. Within our lead generation services, outsourced SDRs communicate with BDRs to assess and improve efforts. This is especially important when working on the same client account. When direct lead generation efforts align with lead qualifying, lead nurturing, and prospect management strategies all parties benefit.

Valve + Meter Performance Marketing is a marketing company based in Indianapolis, Indiana that offers a complete suite of marketing services including outsourced SDR services. Every member of our team regardless of discipline works together at our headquarters.

As part of our drive to innovate marketing, we design state of the art technology to continuously improve. As a leading SDR outsourcing company, Valve+Meter encourages growth throughout our company. One any given day, a SDR will work with an SEO and paid media team to optimize our processes and structure.

We form hypotheses, test, measure, and adapt to ensure that we practice what we preach. We use our data to track progress, generate leads, and refine our strategy to increase revenue for our clients. But it’s not just enough to take our word for it. We have a number of reviews from current clients that would recommend our services to any other B2B business that is looking for more consistent and increased lead generation. When you’re looking for an outsourced SDR firm to work with, be sure they come recommended by other companies.

When you’re looking to hire an outsourced SDR company, it’s important to ask questions about their technology and data. How do they know that their SDR teams work well? How do they find their quality leads? Valve+Meter values data at the forefront of all of our services. We only offer services that work and we’ve done the testing and vetting of our tools to make sure they provide the data that back up our claims. When you sit down with us to learn more about our processes, we’ll show you how we use data to fine-tune our process.

Before you sign with any outsourced SDR business, make sure you clarify the scope of the partnership to make sure you’re getting what you expect out of this service. Be upfront and clear about the kind of leads you expect to get from outsourced SDRs and your business goals that you hope they can accelerate you towards.

If you don’t establish your sales goals with the marketing company that manages outsourced SDRs, then you may find they ‘re not working in tandem and you won’t see the sales performance you expect. Don’t sell yourself short, and make sure the company you chose to partner with can make your dreams achievable. When you choose to work with a marketing company like Valve + Meter, we can also include other marketing channels that can also help move potential customers through the sales funnel to generate even more quality leads.

If your in-house sales team is struggling to get new customers in the door on a regular basis, then it’s time to talk to Valve+Meter Performance Marketing about Outsourced SDR services. Our team is experienced and equipped with the right tools to help drive more leads to your business so your sales teams can close more deals, which can make your business more revenue. When your business can close more deals, you can scale and grow your SDR needs accordingly to grow your business even more!