The growing trend of dynamic sales journeys, coupled with unprecedented competition, has resulted in businesses across industries increasingly struggling to get potential buyers through the door.
The core principles of sales have remained the same, but the operational strategies and execution tools have evolved, and it’s crucial to keep up with these shifts.
One of the biggest hurdles for modern sales teams is efficiently managing their time. For reference, on average, over 70% of sales reps’ time is allocated to non-revenue-generating, non-customer-facing activities, mostly on prospecting and research.
So the question arises: What if your sales professionals could channel all their time and resources into what they do best and what matters most—engaging interested, ready-to-purchase prospects, hosting demos and meetings, and closing deals?
Well, with the recent boom of reputable agencies providing outsourced SDR services and AI tech, this is easier (and cheaper!) to achieve than you may think!
In this article, we’ll explore how to build a fully functioning outsourced sales team with external and AI sales agents, and how to merge them with your in-house sales team for a cohesive and efficient sales force.
What is an outsourced SDR team?
First things first, let’s remove all the blurred lines between an in-house and outsourced sales team. In-house sales reps are hired by a company internally through the traditional and lengthy process of finding suitable talents, onboarding, and training them.
Outsourced SDRs are external professionals, often provided by dedicated outsourcing companies or agencies, who have the necessary training and expertise to handle the early stages of a company’s sales cycle. They primarily focus on prospecting, qualifying leads, and nurturing them until they are ready to potentially make a purchase, at which point they are handed over to the internal sales team for closure.
Outsourced SDR teams are not company employees but rather an extension of your business, offering expertise and scalability without the need for hiring, onboarding, training, and management.
Partnering with an outsourced sales agency typically follows the following steps:
- Defining your business’s ideal customer profile (ICP), target markets, product/service functionality, and value proposition for outsourced sales reps to effectively carry out their responsibilities.
- Outsourced sales reps will dive deep into identifying targeted leads that match your ICP and then research relevant prospect/company data to compile detailed prospect lists for further outreach.
- Outsourced sales reps will then create comprehensive outreach campaigns, often leveraging their agency’s sales tools like Reply.io, using proven strategies and the most appropriate channels including email, phone, or social media to engage prospects.
- Once prospects respond to their initial outreach touchpoints, outsourced SDRs will qualify them based on pre-defined criteria and hand them off to in-house teams, ensuring only high-potential leads reach those final stages of the sales cycle.
Outsourced SDR teams will be highly effective in 2025 due to the flexibility and scalability they offer businesses, empowering them to grow operations without the costly long-term commitments regarding hiring full-time employees.
Sales professionals’ turnover rates have been steadily increasing, so this gives companies one less headache in the long run. Besides, for many years now businesses have mastered how to manage remote sales teams.