Beyond Dialing: Launching an Effective Partnership With an Extended SDR Team

Coordinating daily collaboration between your outsourcing partner for sales development representatives can significantly impact your go-to-market speed and efficiency. A range of SDR outsourcing partners exists, from action-oriented teams hitting the phones immediately to those adopting a strategic, multi-channel approach requiring more training and coordination. To ensure exhaustive scope, this article leans towards a partner offering a more strategic framework for prospecting.

Here, we dive into how to structure day-to-day operations with your chosen SDR outsourcing partner, focusing on creating a unified team and extending your sales team's reach and speed to market.

Starting with the Basics

Aligning Goals: As earlier articles discussed, goal alignment with an extended SDR team is crucial. Establishing a common ground on objectives—enhancing lead generation, market penetration, or cost efficiency—forms the bedrock of a successful partnership. This alignment ensures both parties work cohesively towards shared KPIs, enabling mutual understanding of progress and success.

Goal alignment is crucial.

Setting Clear Deliverables: Defining clear deliverables before finalising any paperwork is crucial. These deliverables potentially influence pricing and impact various aspects of SDR operations, so they need to be accurately documented. For instance, a deliverable could be outlined as below. This example specificity guides the SDR team in targeting and qualifying processes, ensuring efforts align with desired outcomes.

Getting Started Swiftly

Training & Onboarding: The extended team must thoroughly understand your offerings and target market and have access to supporting materials. This alignment, comparable to the expertise of your in-house SDRs, guarantees that the external team can seamlessly contribute to your sales. Continuous training further sustains performance momentum and fosters innovation within your sales operations.

Outsourced SDRs are professionals in what they do, but their outreach can be only as much according to your company's brand as you allow and support.

Integrating Tech Stack: Facilitating access to necessary tools—from email accounts with your company domain to CRM systems—is essential for operational success. Subject to your IT and security protocols, the SDRs' access should be arranged in time to avoid delays and ensure they are effectively integrated into your team's workflow. Whether or not you grant them access to your CRM, the bare minimum is that you have a list of firms they target that are marked in the CRM so your in-house team stays hands-off to avoid both teams reaching out simultaneously.

Generating Lead List: Your extended team needs a list of contacts and companies to work with. In the example above, we have defined that our SDRs reach out to IT leadership in larger firms. The target description could also define geographical locations (London vs all of the UK), company type (publicly listed companies vs charities), or tech stacks (as fitting to the example, Google vs. Microsoft for emails), among many other factors—the more spot-on the description, the better the results.

Related practical aspects to agree on are the responsibilities for generating the list first and then adding more targets as outreach progresses. A pretty standard setup is to have the outsourcing company bring a list of companies for approval and then discover contacts and their contact details for approved companies. However, it's not unheard of for the client to deliver a detailed list or have the SDRs run loose as long as the set criteria are met. Where in the scale you should be is reflective of market position: entering a new market without the risk of internal and external teams overlapping echoes freedom while existing market presence and hefty pipeline encourage handpicking the targets in-house.

Acing the Day-to-Day Collaboration

Communication & Reporting: Regular, structured communication underpins the success of outsourced SDRs. Establishing frequent check-ins and transparent reporting mechanisms with clear KPIs for SDRs helps quickly address challenges and celebrate successes. Moreover, embracing a culture of feedback after sales engagements uplifts the outsourced team when work is done well and builds opportunities for improvement when needed. Also, pay attention to daily communication. Could a Slack channel be shared between external SDR and your account executives for prompt support and coordination?

Embracing a culture of feedback after sales engagements uplifts the outsourced team when work is done well.

Cancellations: Agree on a process for cancelled or no-show sales calls—make sure you get your money's worth when these happen. Without a transparent, mutually agreed-upon process, cancellations will likely create friction in otherwise smooth collaboration. No one likes a cancellation or no-show, but how they are handled makes a difference between a winning and not-so-perfect collaboration!

Adhering to these guidelines, integrating an extended SDR team into your sales framework strengthens your GTM strategy and facilitates a collaborative environment to achieve your sales objectives. Depending on how you deploy the extended SDR team, they might be your secret weapon!