The Definitive Guide to
Building a Successful
Outbound Lead
Generation Team
“When you’re doing outbound, it’s really hard to measure success. One of
the best ways to do this, is by having people execute existing messaging
and a consistent cadence with their outbound process, and you can’t do
that unless you have all of those things in a sales playbook.”
Trish Bertuzzi
President and Chief Strategist for The Bridge Group Inc.
“Your prospectors should not close. Your prospectors should not
respond to inbound leads. Your prospectors should not act as part-
time telemarketers for marketing who want to fill their events. Your
prospectors should prospect.”
Aaron Ross
Author of “Predictable Revenue”
“The three most important criteria I look for in lead generation reps are
coachability, curiosity, and prior success. Always, always, always run a role
play over the phone as part of the evaluation process.”
Mark Roberge
SVP of Sales and Services for Hubspot
“Today, prospects look for and respond to individuals who have expertise
and knowledge of their industry, role, and can provide benefits. Those Lead
Generation and/or Sales Representatives, who can demonstrate knowledge
about the prospect, their business, and the problems they can help solve,
will set themselves apart from the crowd and win the respect and business
of many.”
Larry Reeves
COO and EVP of Sales for AA-ISP
Building an Outbound Lead Generation Team // 2
“Motivation comes from within, but environment sets the right tone for
self-motivation. You should always be asking questions to improve
your environment. How is my sales floor configured? What message
do we send with the office furniture, access to outside light, selling
infrastructure like phone systems provided, and overall ‘feel’ of the
physical office environment?”
Steve Richard
Co-Founder of Vorsight
“Many companies now have a lot more leads coming in as a result of
inbound marketing. The problem is: many of the leads aren’t really leads yet
– they’re more like contacts that have to be nurtured for a period of days,
weeks or months before the lead is ready to schedule a call or meeting.”
Dave Kurlan
CEO of Kurlan and Associates Inc.
“With sales intelligence tools like LinkedIn, InsideView and DiscoverOrg,
you can uncover what’s important, key priorities, multiple decision
makers, common interests and much more. It’s what you need today to
build instant credibility and relevance.”
Jill Konrath
Author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companiess
Building an Outbound Lead Generation Team // 3
Contents
Building an Outbound Lead Generation Team // 4
Meet the Authors
Introduction
The Fundamentals of Outbound Lead Generation
What is Outbound Lead Generation?
The Benefits of Outbound Prospecting
Is an Outbound Prospecting Team Right for You?
4 Questions to Ask Before Building a Prospecting Team
Planning Your Prospecting Team
Setting Expectations for Your Outbound Prospecting Team
Picking the Right Structure
Building Your Team
Getting the Right People
Onboarding
Managing Your Team
Creating the Right Process
Dialing Efficiency
Experimentation
Holding Team Meetings
Ongoing Training
Culture
Alignment
Measuring Your Team
Key Metrics for Your Team
Activity
Productivity
Process
Benchmarking
Essential Tools for Your Prospecting Team
Phone Tools
Email Tools
Social Prospecting
Sales Coaching and Management Tools
Reporting Tools
Review
Appendix
5
6
7
9
10
11
12
13
15
24
26
28
32
34
36
37
43
45
46
49
53
55
57
58
61
66
68
69
71
72
73
74
74
75
76
Mike Baker
Mike is a content writer and journalist who
enjoys diving into complex issues and
exploring the world of data-driven business
intelligence. Before coming to InsightSquared,
Mike earned an English degree from Oberlin
College and wrote for several newspapers,
websites and marketing firms around the
country.
Meet the Authors
Meet the Authors // 5
Zorian Rotenberg
Zorian is a sales and marketing veteran who is
a recognized authority on metrics-driven sales
and marketing management in the software
industry. Prior to InsightSquared, Zorian was
on the management teams of several global
software companies including Acronis, Veeam
and AppAssure (which was sold to Dell),
ranging from $8 Million to over $100 Million in
annual sales, each of which he helped grow by over 100% year over year. He
was also CEO at StarWind Software, a software company with customers
in over 100 countries where he grew worldwide sales by 100% and North
American sales by 145%+ by using the best practices of metrics-driven inside
sales management, demand generation and sales prospecting.
Zorian has a degree in Finance and with minors in Applied Mathematics and in
Computer Science from Lehigh University and earned his MBA from Harvard
Business School.
Introduction
Recently, Inbound Marketing has been proven to be the most efficient way
to generate new sales leads. However, many companies want to grow sales
beyond what they can achieve with inbound leads, and there is no better
way to do that than with Outbound Lead Generation. In other words, it’s
not just Inbound or Outbound - it’s Allbound, as Allen Nance has said. This
book explores the benefits of Outbound Lead Generation (or Outbound Sales
Prospecting) teams, the best practices for building such a team and the
essential methods for managing your new team to achieve measurable results
and sustainable revenue growth beyond what you can do with Inbound alone.
Here are some of the key points you will find in this book,
• How a prospecting team can significantly boost your sales
• What questions to ask before building your team
• How to attract the best reps and key management tips
• The right KPIs to measure your team’s performance
• The best tools to help you get the most from your team
Sooner or later, all young companies face a common problem – their sales reps
are closing a large percentage of the deals that come their way, but the pipeline
just isn’t big enough to sustain growth. If you’re in this situation, you have
several options: You can increase your marketing efforts. You can have your
reps root around for their own prospects. Or you can build an Outbound Sales
Prospecting team whose sole responsibility is to fill your pipeline with leads.
Although this last option isn’t right for every company, it has several
advantages that make it the right choice for many businesses, especially those
that are expanding. Outbound lead gen teams are designed to efficiently fill
your pipeline with prospects, allowing your sales reps to focus on closing.
If you want to quickly grow your pipeline and generate sustainable growth for
your company, this eBook will help you decide if building an outbound lead
generation team is the right choice for you.
Building an Outbound Lead Generation Team // 6
The Fundamentals
of Outbound Lead
Generation
Section // 1
The Fundamentals of Outbound Lead
Generation
Why are so many companies turning to outbound lead generation? How can it
improve your business?
In this chapter we will explore why you should consider adding a prospecting
team by looking at the following fundamentals:
• What is outbound lead generation?
•
Is an outbound prospecting team right for your company?
• What questions should you ask before creating a team?
The Fundamentals of Outbound Lead Generation // 8
What is Outbound Lead Generation?
You know there are customers out there for your product or service – the
question is how to find them. A marketing team is great for attracting people to
your business, but it is not ideal for going out and aggressively targeting new
prospects.
If your goal is to quickly generate pipeline and proactively reach out to new
potential customers, an outbound lead generation team may be your best bet.
These teams are designed to dive deep into your target market and connect
with some of your most likely potential customers. Outbound lead generation
is a way to reach out to targets, educate them about your product, gauge their
interest and, hopefully, turn them over to your sales team to convert into paying
customers.
The Fundamentals of Outbound Lead Generation // 9
The Benefits of Outbound Prospecting
The success of your sales team relies heavily on a growing pipeline. Other
factors matter, of course – how the team is managed, how valuable your
product is and how skilled your sales reps are – but without a healthy pipeline,
you stand no chance of reaching your growth goals. Luckily, this problem has a
straightforward solution: fill your pipeline with leads! Expanding your company
means finding new customers, and prospecting teams are one of the best ways
to do this.
Your first question is probably “Why invest in an outbound lead gen team
instead of one of the alternatives?” This is a fair question – outbound lead
gen teams require a significant upfront investment and do not always offer
immediate results. However, many companies find that this investment is
well worth it once they start seeing the fundamental benefits of an outbound
prospecting team.
What are these benefits?
Essentially, the advantages of adding a prospecting team fall into three
categories:
1. Prospecting teams allow your company to add pipeline at a much faster
pace than alternative methods such as inbound marketing or partnerships.
2. They help you efficiently explore new markets, experiment with new
messaging techniques and gather a great deal of data about talk tracks,
value propositions and buyer personas.
3. They add more depth and versatility to your sales team by allowing you to
outsource low value work from your more expensive Inside Sales Reps and
providing you with a bench of your next sales reps.
Once you understand the benefits of outbound lead gen teams, you will agree
that they are one of the most reliable ways to grow your pipeline and that they
often have a very high ROI – especially if your company exhibits one or more of
the following common signs.
The Fundamentals of Outbound Lead Generation // 10
The Fundamentals of Outbound Lead Generation // 11
Is an Outbound Prospecting Team Right for You?
Before you consider building an outbound lead gen team, you must make sure
you would actually benefit from one, which typically means your company
exhibits one or more of the following 5 signs.
1. You want to grow sales but you don’t have enough opportunities in your
pipeline.
2. Your sales are complex and require extensive legwork from your sales reps
to navigate elaborate businesses or bypass numerous gatekeepers, which
leaves them little time to do their own prospecting.
3. You are trying to expand and you need more information about new
markets.
4. Your sales process needs recalibration and could benefit from more
interactions with, and feedback from, a wide range of prospects.
5. You want to experiment with market segments and new messaging.
4 Questions to Ask Before Building a Prospecting Team
If you are one of the many companies that meets one or more of the above
criteria, it is time to start designing your outbound lead gen team. This doesn’t
mean you should immediately go out and hire a stable of new lead gen reps,
though – first you need to answer these questions that will help you best
design and position your new prospecting team.
“Who am I selling to?”
Not all leads are the same, so it is important to carefully identify your targets
before you design your prospecting team. Work with the sales team and key
stakeholders to create an ideal customer profile (or several) so you can tailor
your lead gen team to target the right prospects.
“What do I want my prospecting team to accomplish?”
Do you want to expand into new markets? Do you want to breathe new life
into your sales process? Do you want to build brand awareness? Outbound
lead gens can accomplish many things in addition to growing your pipeline, so
make sure you know what you want to achieve before you begin building your
team.
“What is the Team’s Reporting Structure – in Marketing or in Sales?”
Prospecting teams are great at fine-tuning your messaging and generating
leads, so they are natural fits for a marketing department. However, lead gen
reps also work closely with your sales reps, and must therefore be closely
aligned with Sales. Decide where your new team will be situated, who it will
report to and how it will be overseen.
“When do I need more sales?”
Like any team, a prospecting team will not contribute results immediately – it
typically takes a few months for a new team to supply a steady stream of leads
– so it is important to plan ahead if you want to maximize your results.
The Fundamentals of Outbound Lead Generation // 12
Planning Your
Prospecting Team
Section // 2
Planning Your Prospecting Team
Building a new team from scratch is never easy, so it is important to prepare as
carefully and fully as you can. In this chapter we will look at the best ways to
design your prospecting team, attract the right people and get the team up and
running as quickly as possible.
Some of the most important topics will be:
• Determining the right size and structure for your team
• Deciding where to place your unit
• Understanding the different types of lead generation reps
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 14
Setting Expectations for Your Outbound Prospecting Team
You’ve decided your business will benefit from an outbound lead gen team,
you’ve asked (and answered) all the right questions about what the process
will entail – now what? Now it’s time to tackle the hard part: designing your
prospecting team, hiring the right reps and managing your new team to
success. Throughout this eBook, we will explore each of these aspects in detail
and give you the tools you need to get your outbound lead gen team up and
running.
First up is planning your team. There are no pre-packaged prospecting teams
– you need to design one from the ground up that suits your company. To do
this, you need to understand your target market so you can determine how
big your team should be and how it should be structured within the context
of your company. (For more information on how to best manage your team,
including how many managers you should have for your reps, skip to “Chapter
4: Managing Your Team,” which begins on page 34). Before you plan your team,
you need to set explicit goals about what you hope to achieve and in what
timeframe.
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 15
Setting Goals
The major objective of your team is to fill your sales pipeline with quality leads,
but what exactly does this mean? How many prospects are you hoping to
generate? What new markets are you hoping to tap into? How much time do
you have to grow your pipeline?
These expectations should be realistic. Use historical data and a clear picture
of your pipeline and target markets to help you set reasonable goals for what
to expect from your new team. Ideally, your lead gen team will produce a steady
stream of prospects that will last as long as you need it, but this requires you to
plan ahead and set explicit goals that you can easily track and refer back to.
To set goals about how many leads you want to generate and, eventually, how
many deals you want to create, you need to have a clear image of what is
possible – which means understanding your target market and, perhaps more
importantly, your company’s revenue goals.
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 16
The following three sections are focused on how companies utilizing
prospecting lists can determine the size of their teams and the amount of
time it will take to exhaust their target market. If your company relies on
lists – typically businesses that sell to more mature markets or offer more
commoditized products – these sections will help you get the most from your
lists and better understand which types and sizes of lists to use. For companies
that rely on non-list-based prospecting, skip ahead to page 22 and the section
on structuring your new team.
Annual Capacity, Quota and Budget Model
The question of how big to make your outbound lead generation team is
critical: too small and your sales team won’t have enough opportunities to hit
quota; too large and your cost of sales will balloon.
To help size your prospecting team, we’ve developed three tools that use a
combination of industry standards, efficiency assumptions and company-
specific data to determine how large your prospecting team should be, when
you need to hire new reps to reach your sales quotas and how long you can
feed your outbound team with names from purchased lists.
The first of these tools is the Annual Capacity, Quota and Budget Model, shown
on the next page. For an interactive version of the Annual Capacity Quota
Model, click below.
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 17
The Annual Model takes your annual revenue goals – $10,000,000 in this
example – and works backwards to tell you how many Sales Development Reps
(outbound prospecting reps) you need to reach this target. Once you input your
quota, average deal size and the expected efficiency of your team, you can use
this model to identify the size, cost and key activity levels for your outbound
prospecting team (as well as your marketing and inside sales teams).
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 18
The top section is filled with the fundamentals of your sales goals: annual
quota, average deal size, win rate, and average sales cycle. These inputs help
calculate the number of deals, and thus the number of opportunities you’ll
need to reach quota. The second section sizes your outbound prospecting
team, based on two critical efficiency inputs: Dials : Opps (the number of dials
required to produce one qualified opportunity) and Dials per SDR per day. Line
14 outputs the number of SDRs you need to hit your annual quota, based on the
assumptions you’ve entered.
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 19
Monthly Capacity, Quota and Budget Model
Now that you have the Annual Model, it should be pretty simple to determine
your monthly quota and goals, right? Just divide by 12. Not so fast. In reality,
if you have an increased revenue target in place for next month, you need to
grow your pipeline today – which means your prospecting team needs to have
increased its activity last month. If, for example, your company’s revenue quota
is set to increase by 20% from one month to the next, you need to plan ahead
and grow your pipeline proportionally to meet that goal. How long does it take
your sales reps to convert an opportunity into a deal? How long does it take
your SDRs to turn a dial into an appointment? The Monthly Model allows you
to use this information to plan ahead and adjust the size and activity levels of
your prospecting team to keep up with changing monthly quota goals.
Just as with the Annual Model, the Monthly Model takes general assumptions
(that don’t change from month to month) such as sales cycle (how long in
advance of a deal you need to create an opportunity), SDR cycle (how long in
advance of creating an opportunity you need to dial) and marketing cycle (how
long in advance of creating an opportunity you need to contact a lead).
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 20
An interactive version of the Monthly Model can be found in the lower left hand
corner of the “Sales Team Planning Model” Excel file, which you can download
on page 17.
After this, the model asks for you to input monthly assumptions. If you expect
flat performance over the entire year, we pull in the assumptions you’ve
already entered on the Annual tab. However, you have the ability to improve
performance over the course of the year, or adjust for seasonality. Finally, you
can define your ramp up schedules for various roles including SDR as they
ramp up to 100% of a Full Time Equivalent (FTE). We provide space for a six-
month ramp, but the Bridge Group benchmarks SDR ramp up time at 3 months.
Once you’ve entered all of this information, you can look at the third section
of the model, which is its true substance. In this section, you can determine –
based on your quota and the other items you’ve entered above – when to hire
your new SDRs and how many you need to hire to ensure that you will hit your
quota every month. To do this, enter planned SDR hires by month in Line 27.
The model will compare the activities you need to reach quota with the monthly
capacity of your team, adjusted for ramp up time. If the cells in Line 30 are
green, you have enough capacity. If they’re red, you should plan to either hire
sooner or hire more reps.
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 21
Market Coverage and Dials Required
Once you have determined the proper size for your team in order to meet
both monthly and yearly revenue goals, you need to determine where your
prospecting team will find names to call. Buying lists is the easiest way to
source names. However, depending on the nature of your market and the size
of your goals, this may or may not be sufficient.
Our third tool looks at your market and estimates the number of dials you’ll be
able to source from lists. It starts by taking the total number of companies and
assumptions about how easily names in these companies can be identified in
lists. It then asks for input on your process, in particular how many attempts
your SDRs make per name and what percentage of that process they’ll
complete on average. Once you have the total number of dials that lists can
produce, the model adds the number of names your marketing team will
provide and compares this number to your team’s annual dial capacity.
Look at the chart on the following page to see how long you can source dials
from lists for your SDR team. For an interactive version of the Market Coverage
and Dials Model, click below.
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 22
How many years will it take your team to cover all the names sourced from
lists? If the model outputs more than two years, you should be able to use lists
effectively. If the answer is less than that, you’ll need to think creatively about
how to find names for your SDR team to dial. If you cannot find more names,
your SDR team’s efficiency will drop significantly.
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 23
Picking the Right Structure
What you discover about your target market will not only tell you how many
reps you need and the amount of names you need to feed your new team, but
also the most appropriate structure for your team. Should you be working
most closely with Marketing to try and generate as many leads as possible?
Or should you work with Sales to ensure that the leads you find get handled
properly and quickly?
Reporting to Marketing
In companies where Marketing is responsible for a large share of the pipeline,
prospecting teams often report to the VP of Marketing. This can help
streamline the operation, as the Marketing VP is accustomed to handling
the inflow of leads. This is especially true in situations where there is a high
volume of lower-value opportunities, because it is easier for the marketing
team and the lead generation team to collaborate to find and reach out to a
large number of prospects. These teams can also work together to experiment
with messaging techniques and to nurture leads that have gone cold.
Reporting to Sales
In more Sales-centric businesses, prospecting teams often report to the VP
of Sales. Obviously, this will give your lead generation team a slightly different
feel than if it were situated in the marketing department, as the sales team
will emphasize the quality of the leads and the rate at which they convert to
opportunities and, ultimately, won deals.
(For more information about structuring your team and designing the right
hand-off process, please turn to page 44).
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 24
Inbound and Outbound Reps
In companies where Marketing is responsible for a large share of the pipeline,
where your team is situated also affects the composition of your team. Most
prospecting teams are split into two sections: inbound reps who qualify
marketing leads and outbound lead generation reps who find prospects
through cold calling and targeted emailing. Study the structure of your
business – how many leads Marketing generates, what type of prospects you
want – and design your team accordingly. Having the right balance of inbound
and outbound lead generation reps will help you create opportunities more
efficiently and, ultimately, generate more revenue for your company.
“Your prospectors should not close. Your prospectors
should not respond to inbound leads. Your prospectors
should not act as part-time telemarketers for marketing
who want to fill their events. Your prospectors should
prospect.”
Aaron Ross
Author of “Predictable Revenue”
Planning Your Prospecting Team // 25
Building Your Team
Section // 3
Ultimately, your team is not a set of objectives or a carefully created structure
– it is people. So the next steps – defining your ideal lead gen rep, hiring them
and onboarding them – are the most important parts of the process.
In this chapter, we will look at the best practices for building a high-
performance prospecting team, including:
• Finding the right reps
• Onboarding them to get them up to speed quickly
• Designing a playbook to train your reps
Building Your Team
Building Your Team // 27
Career Path and How to Attract Reps
Before you start looking for the right reps for your team, you need to
understand what the role entails and what people typically expect from it. First
and foremost, it is important to know that being an SDR is rarely the end goal
for most prospecting reps. Instead, they see it as a gateway to other positions
in the sales process – such as an Inside Sales Rep (ISR) or sales manager of
some kind.
When you are trying to fill out your new team, this should be on your mind. You
should make it a priority to let your SDRs – and potential SDRs – know what
specific opportunities will be available to them if they succeed in their current
role.
Of course, promotions are not just handed out freely or after a set amount of
time, and you should be clear about what milestones your team members need
to hit if they want to be considered for a step up to ISR or another role.
High-growth companies may want to bring on an in-house recruiter whose sole
job is to quickly find the best prospectors. Many rapidly growing companies
find that they can never have enough SDRs, and that recruiting the best reps
is a full-time job in and of itself. Hiring a full-time, in-house recruiter can
streamline this process and ensure that you always have enough top-tier SDRs.
Getting the Right People
No matter how well you design your team on paper, it will fall short of
expectations if you fill it with the wrong people. The qualities that make a great
lead generation rep are not necessarily the same as those that make up a good
sales rep (or marketer, for that matter), so you need to understand what goes
into a superlative prospector.
In the following section, we will look at the steps you should follow when
bringing on your lead gen reps, including what qualities they should have, how
they view their career path, how you should compensate them and the best
methods for folding them into your company.
Building Your Team // 28
Traits of Successful Sales Prospecting Reps
Once you’ve defined the role and established a career trajectory, it’s time to
start attracting the right people. What qualities should you look for?
Here is a list of some of the essential attributes of any effective lead gen rep.
• Listening skills
• Hunger to succeed
• Competitiveness
• Coachability
• Planning ability
• Strong follow-up ability
• Optimism
“The three most important criteria I look for in lead
generation reps are coachability, curiosity, and prior
success. Always, always, always run a role play over the
phone as part of the evaluation process.”
Mark Roberge
SVP of Sales and Services for Hubspot
Building Your Team // 29
Compensation
Before you start recruiting SDRs, you need to establish a fair compensation
plan to attract the best talent to your company. An outbound lead gen role
is traditionally an entry-level position, so you won’t need to offer as much
as you would for another sales position. However, base salary is only part of
the equation, as most outbound prospecting teams are built around a clearly
defined bonus and commission structure that is tied directly to performance
goals.
Here are some standard salary supplements to consider using to motivate your
own team.
Appointments Scheduled
This is the most basic bonus for your SDRs and should be distributed monthly
when your reps hit certain pre-defined goals for generating qualified leads. It
may also be important for you to differentiate between appointments that your
reps schedule as opposed to those that are actually attended, as this will hold
your reps accountable for generating quality appointments, and not just a large
number of them.
Opportunities Created
You should also reward your reps – again on a monthly basis – for contributing
opportunities to the sales pipeline. This can be based on the number or value of
the opportunities your reps create.
Won Deals
Every time one of the leads your prospecting reps generated converts into a
won deal, you should reward the rep with a percentage-based bonus.

Spiffs
On top of these regular bonuses, you should provide your SDRs with smaller
spot incentives (often called spiffs) when they accomplish a specific goal or
hit a certain benchmark. Gift certificates, getaways and gadgets are all popular
spiffs.
Building Your Team // 30
The compensation options listed above are just a guide – you should examine
these options and pick the ones that are most in line with your objectives. If
your pipeline is small or stagnant, for example, you may want to incentivize
your reps to focus more on baseline activities. If your pipeline is in decent
shape but is not reliably leading to bookings, you may want to emphasize
bonuses for Won deals. (For more information on using spiffs and rewards for
your team, please skip to the “Culture” section, which begins on page 49.)
Building Your Team // 31
Here is what you should put in your playbook:
1. Ideal Customer Profiles that outline the various titles, backgrounds,
characteristics and pain points of your ideal customers.
2. Industry resources like blogs, books and studies that can help your new
reps quickly become experts in your field.
3. A list of key competitors within the industry.
4. Email Templates to help reps learn how to write catchy, compelling and
effective prospecting emails.
5. Call Scripts or Call Tracks to help your reps learn the best practices for cold
calling and improve their communication with prospects.
6. A list of common objections to help your reps best respond to prevalent
questions and doubts.
“When you’re doing outbound, it’s really hard to measure
success. One of the best ways to do this is by having
people execute existing messaging and a consistent
cadence with their outbound process, and you can’t
do that unless you have all of those things in a sales
playbook.”
Trish Bertuzzi
President and Chief Strategist for The Bridge Group Inc.
Onboarding
To get the most out of your new team and ensure that they ramp as quickly as
possible, you need to have a strong onboarding process. One of the best ways
to achieve this is to create a playbook that serves as a comprehensive resource
for new employees.
Building Your Team // 32
Time to Hire and Ramp Time
Even with the right playbook, your new reps will not be 100% effective on their
first day – or month (and this is on top of the 1-2 months it will take you to
even find your first reps). To plan accurately, you must understand how long it
takes for a typical new SDR to ramp up to full capacity and what you can do to
accelerate this process.
Training
A well designed playbook will help you onboard new reps, but it is not enough.
You must schedule time for one-on-one meetings with each of your new reps
and use these times to provide tailored guidance to help them learn the ropes
and improve their performance. Many outbound prospecting teams employ a
designated trainer, whose primary responsibility is to quickly and thoroughly
train new reps to help them reach full capacity. The amount of time it takes
an average SDR to ramp varies significantly – anywhere from 1 to 6 months –
depending on how effectively they are trained, so if you want to get your team
off the ground as quickly as possible, make sure you have a strong onboarding
process in place.
100% Productivity
How long it takes a rep to reach full productivity obviously varies, but most
people (including Trish Bertuzzi of the Bridge Group) agree that it takes more
than 3 months on average. Until this point, your reps will incrementally become
more proficient at their jobs, and this ramp time should be reflected in your lead
and revenue projections.
Time to Revenue
With all of this in mind, it’s easy to see how long it will likely take before your
team generates even its first dollar of revenue. Including the hiring process,
average ramp time, the time before your leads hit the pipeline and the length of
your Average Sales Cycle, it is safe to say that it will probably take 6-9 months
before your new team creates any revenue for your company.
Building Your Team // 33
Managing Your Team
Section // 4
Managing Your Team
You’ve designed your team and filled it with the best SDRs you can find – what
comes next? In short, it is time to establish the mechanics of your team’s
operation and your management process, which should include:
• What your reps’ daily routines will look like and who they will report to
• How often you will meet with your team
• What you should do to build a strong culture
Once your new reps are fully onboarded and ready to start growing your
pipeline, the real work begins. How can you best run your team to generate
leads quickly? What management methods should you use to get the most out
of your reps? As a benchmark, you will typically want to have about 4-5 SDRs
per first line manager on the outbound team, but managing a new prospecting
team to success requires a much deeper understanding of how to lead your
team.
Managing Your Team // 35
Creating the Right Process
Lead generation is a high-volume enterprise, which means that you need a
clear and repeatable process to ensure that you are getting the most out of
your team. Of course, this process should not be created by happenstance –
you need to use a combination of your own data and industry best practices to
help you create a process that drives results.
The most fundamental aspect of managing a prospecting team’s process is
ensuring that your reps are taking the right actions, which in this case means
making calls to the right people at the right time and saying the right things. In
this section, we will focus on the three most important elements of optimizing
your reps’ calls:
• Determining how many calls to make to a prospect, and when to make them
• Coaching your reps to plan for and research their calls
• Encouraging your reps to experiment with different messaging tactics
Managing Your Team // 36
Dialing Efficiency
Perhaps the most important aspect of creating the process for your
prospecting team is coming up with a contact model that gives your SDRs the
best chance of connecting with targets and converting them into opportunities
without having them waste their time on unlikely-to-convert prospects. There
are industry standard touch models – usually either 6 or 8 – that you can use
as the early foundation of your dialing plan, but then you should fine-tune your
process once you have more of your own data to work with.
Managing Your Team // 37
Number of Attempts
To come up with this process for your own reps, you need to have a detailed
understanding of how effective your reps’ dials are across a variety of metrics.
For example, how many times should your reps call prospects without
connecting before they give up? In the chart below, you can see the data we
collected about the connect rate on various attempts for thousands of calls.
As you can see, the marginal effectiveness of each subsequent attempt after
the 5th declines steadily for high-growth B2B SaaS companies, going from
about 6% on the sixth attempt to less than 2% on the tenth. After that, it drops
sharply. Using this information, we settled on an 8-touch model – the sweet
spot where our SDRs maintain a relatively high average connect rate (about
9%) without stopping too early and missing out on the non-negligible number
of prospects who pick up only after five or more attempts.
(Note: Connect rates vary significantly among industries, so our analysis of high-growth B2B
SaaS companies is not necessarily reflective of yours. The underlying principle, however – that
you should think about how many dials you want your reps to make to a given prospect and
what times are best for them to make their dials – are applicable across the board.)
Managing Your Team // 38
Day of Week
Of course, not all attempts are created equal. Our data also showed us that
some days of the week have much higher average connect rates than others,
which helped us build a schedule for our SDRs. In the chart below, you can
see that Tuesday has a significantly higher connect rate (just under 10%)
than Monday (9.4%), and that the average connect rate declines significantly
every day through Friday, where it bottoms out at 8.5%. What does this tell us?
This information helped us decide to have our SDRs make more calls early in
the week and focus on other activities – such as list research and training –
toward the end.
Managing Your Team // 39
Time of Day
We didn’t stop there, though. Once we dug deeper into the data, we realized
that our reps’ average connect rates varied not just based on the attempt
number or day of week, but also by the time of day. In the chart below, you
can see that the connect rate was highest between 10am and 4pm (in the
prospect’s time zone), which allowed us to create a daily schedule to optimize
our reps’ efficiency.
Managing Your Team // 40
List Research
Part of making more efficient calls is following a sound dialing plan, but
the other part is ensuring your reps are prepared for the calls they make –
regardless of when they make them. To do this, your team should have good
insight into your company’s target markets and a clear plan for targeting them.
One of the most effective ways to do this is to utilize prospect lists, which help
focus your team’s efforts and improves their success rates of converting leads
into opportunities.
Work with your company’s marketing team to establish expectations for
how these lists will be generated and managed. You may also want to hire a
Research Analyst to help you compile lists and enter them into Salesforce to
help make your SDRs as efficient as possible. These workers, who are typically
fresh out of college as well, are responsible for ensuring that every entry on
the list has the appropriate information: the correct name and number, the
prospect’s title and any other pertinent details.
Research Analysts are not perfect fits for every type of company (ones with
smaller, less complicated sales, for example, may not need a Research Analyst),
so think carefully about how exactly you would benefit from bringing one on.
Gathering Sales Intelligence
Even without a Research Analyst, your reps should be utilizing research to
help them get the most out of every call. To give your SDRs the best chance
to succeed at cold calling, help them gather as much information about their
prospects as possible. There are many tools on the market to help with this
process – such as SalesLoft, InsideView and iSell (which are covered in
more detail in the “Tools” section of this eBook, which starts on page 70). A
detailed understanding of each prospect gives your reps a much better shot
at connecting with them, pitching to them and ultimately converting them into
opportunities.
Managing Your Team // 41
Call Planning
The more sales intelligence and pre-call research your SDRs have at their
disposal, the more effective their calls will be. This is especially true if your
outbound lead generation reps stick to a pre-defined call plan to help them
achieve uniform and repeatable success. This plan doesn’t need to be overly
rigid; it should just serve as an easy way to help SDRs ensure they are hitting
on all of their major talking points and that they are prepared for what their
prospects are likely to say in response.
Below are the main elements of a simple call plan to share with your SDRs to
make sure they go into each call with the right plan:
• What is your ideal outcome for the call?
• What information should you be trying to get from the prospect?
• What are the prospect’s likely needs/pain points?
• Which features of the product or service should you emphasize?
• What signs should you be looking for to identify a likely buyer?
• What likely objections should you be prepared for?
(You can find a template for a full Sales Call Plan in Appendix C.)
“Today, prospects look for and respond to individuals who
have expertise and knowledge of their industry, role, and
can provide benefits. Those Lead Generation and/or Sales
Representatives, who can demonstrate knowledge about
the prospect, their business, and the problems they can
help solve, will set themselves apart from the crowd and
win the respect and business of many.”
Larry Reeves
COO and EVP of Sales for AA-ISP
Managing Your Team // 42
Experimentation
One of the biggest advantages of building an outbound prospecting team
– on top of growing your pipeline, of course – is the ability it gives you to
experiment with new messaging techniques, market segments and prospect
lists. This benefit cannot be overstated, as it enables your company to improve
positioning and messaging at a fast pace and on a large scale.
To get the most from your experimentation, though, you need to place an
emphasis on tracking results and measuring effectiveness. Doing so can show
you precisely which messaging approaches work best for each market segment
and which demo scripts have the highest conversion rates.
Here are three areas you can use your new prospecting team to experiment
with:
Messaging
The way you pitch your product or service to prospects plays a huge role in how
many appointments you set and, ultimately, how many deals you book. Don’t be
afraid to “fail fast” and test several different messaging approaches.
Marketing Segments
Your SDRs connect with a large number of potential customers, which makes
them a great means for exploring new markets with an eye toward expansion.
Prospect Lists
Lists of potential customers are incredibly valuable, but they are not all equally
so. Have different reps use different lists and compare the results regularly.
(See Appendix B for an example chart measuring the Call : Demo ratio and Win
Rate within a target industry.)
Managing Your Team // 43
Hand-Off Process
The goal of any prospecting team is to provide qualified leads for meetings to
the sales team, so it is essential that you have a clearly defined and repeatable
process for handing these leads off. The most effective way to do this is to use
a standard method for defining the leads – at all their various stages from lead
to opportunity – that your team brings in.
Once your SDRs connect with a prospect and book a meeting, their work is
almost done – but not quite. It is their responsibility to follow up with the sales
rep who will be leading the meeting and make any necessary introductions.
Again, your team will ultimately be judged by how many deals it contributes, so
you should do everything you can to help the leads your team generates convert
into opportunities and, ideally, won deals.
Managing Your Team // 44
Holding Team Meetings
Coaching your outbound lead gen team to success requires consistent
communication with your reps, which is best achieved through a series of
regular meetings. Here is a simple schedule to follow:
1. Weekly Team Kickoff Meeting - Held at the beginning of every week to
assess last week’s successes and failures and plan for the coming week.
During this meeting, you should give each of your reps a copy of the Weekly
SDR Plan, which outlines that week’s approach in terms of messaging, new
targets and weekly goals. (For an example plan, go to Appendix D.)
2. Bi-weekly Team Meeting - Held every other week to discuss more strategic
initiatives and recap past performance. Unlike your weekly meetings, this
one should focus on your larger objectives – such as your quarterly goals
and long-term development aims. Make sure to support the claims you
make in this meeting with hard data and clear insight into your team’s recent
performance against expectations.
3. Weekly 1:1 Coaching Meeting - Held toward the end of each week with each
of your reps to discuss specific tactics and areas of improvement. Dig into
each individual rep’s performance data and use this information to provide
customized feedback and coaching. This should be the time when you
answer questions from your reps and provide them with individual goals
and benchmarks. Because your outbound reps are likely to be relatively
inexperienced, you may want to spend more time with them than you do
with your more senior reps – industry best practices are 3 hours each week.
(Refer to the “Tools” section of this eBook on page 69 for more information
about the tools you can use to get the most out of your prospecting team.)
4. Getting on the Phone with Reps - SDRs spend the majority of their day on
the phone, so it is important for you, as a prospecting team manager, to
spend a significant amount of time on the phone listening to your reps in
action. Not only will this help you identify messaging problems and common
objections, but it can also help you provide better coaching opportunities for
your weekly one-on-one meetings.
5. Review - In addition to regularly scheduled, relatively frequent meetings,
it is important to hold periodic reviews with your reps to discuss their
performances. These meetings should be held a few times each year and
focus on your SDRs’ career aspirations and their performance histories.
Managing Your Team // 45
Ongoing Training
Some managers think that once their SDRs are up to speed and fully onboarded,
their training is done. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, it is
essential to continue training reps throughout their tenure, and you should
regularly coach and teach your SDRs, whether they have been part of your team
for six months or six years.
You should work to constantly develop your team’s skills and design an
ongoing training program that helps incrementally bolster your team’s
capabilities and capacity. Identify the key skills that your reps should have and
design an ongoing training program that helps your reps adopt and improve
upon these traits.
(For more information about how to be an effective Sales Manager for your
prospecting team, please see Appendix A for a management checklist or
download a copy by clicking here.)
Managing Your Team // 46
Daily and Weekly Activity Reports
Regular meetings and ongoing training are essential ways to coach your team
to success, but it is also important to give them the raw data they need to
evaluate their own performances. One way to do this is to send out nightly and
weekly emails that show how each rep performed during that time period and
how they stand relative to their co-workers.
Here are examples of weekly and nightly activity reports that you can send to
your team to help them see how they are stacking up against expectations and
their team members on a regular basis.
Managing Your Team // 47
Managing Your Team // 48
Culture
Being a Lead Generation Rep isn’t easy, so it’s important that you create a
strong and stimulating culture for your new team. Of course, what this process
entails will vary significantly depending on your company and industry, but
there are a few common elements you can turn to that will help you instill a
positive culture designed to help motivate and reward your reps.
Managing Your Team // 49
“Motivation comes from within, but environment sets
the right tone for self-motivation. You should always be
asking questions to improve your environment. How is
my sales floor configured? What message do we send
with the office furniture, access to outside light, selling
infrastructure like phone systems provided, and overall
‘feel’ of the physical office environment?”
Steve Richard
Co-Founder of Vorsight
Contests
Contests and competitions are great ways to add drama and energize your
team. Who can schedule the most meetings in a month? Who can end the
quarter with the highest “Dials : Appointments” ratio? Adding an element
of friendly competition to your team on a regular basis will keep your reps
motivated and performing at a high level.
Here at InsightSquared, we reward our outbound lead gen reps for the number
of opportunities they source. Each month, the rep who creates the most
opportunities receives a cash prize, which spurs competition and can have a
noticeable impact on generating pipeline. You can use a report like the one
shown below to keep your reps up-to-date about their current standings and
what they need to do to take the lead.
Individual vs. Team Contests
Although your reps perform their tasks independently, many experts believe
that rewarding your team as a whole – as opposed to individual reps – will have
a more positive impact on your team’s morale and performance. Pick contests
that reward team metrics such as total number of opportunities sourced and
percentage of quota achieved – this way your reps can work together to reach
their goals and focus on collaborative metrics instead of individual ones.
Managing Your Team // 50
Gamification
The concept of ‘gamification’ has become increasingly popular in recent years,
especially in the sales world. Creating an atmosphere that rewards reps for
specific actions and tracks performance over time is a great way to add an
element of fun and healthy competition to your team’s culture.
One way to use gamification to motivate your reps is to display lead and sales
stats on a leaderboard in your office. This simple step helps your reps maintain
a useful competitive edge and easily track their performance.
Furthermore, simple gamification techniques like using bells and gongs to
announce appointments and deals will help create an atmosphere of light-
hearted competiveness and publicly acknowledged achievement.
Managing Your Team // 51
Rewards
Of course, all games need stakes, so it is important to include incentives for
each of your competitions to keep your SDRs performing at high levels and
invested in the outcome of their efforts. Bonuses and incentives make up a
significant portion of most SDRs’ compensation packages, so you should make
a point to regularly reward your reps when they reach certain milestones or
exceed expectations in their performance.
Get creative when you pick rewards for your reps – fancy dinners, vacation
days, trips, gym memberships and so forth are all great ways to incent your
reps and get them to do their best work.
Spiffs
Most of your rewards will be clearly defined – a certain percentage of every won
deal, for example – but other incentives can be given out more sporadically or
spontaneously. As discussed earlier, these frequent, relatively small rewards are
often called spiffs and they are used to motivate reps on a daily or weekly level.
Celebrations
It’s not all about material rewards, though. Sometimes a simple celebration or
party can accomplish just as much in your efforts to create a dynamic, positive
culture. Celebrate whenever your team reaches a major benchmark or hits
goals ahead of schedule. These celebrations can also double as team-building
opportunities, so don’t be afraid to schedule a night out or weekend trip for your
entire team.
Managing Your Team // 52
Alignment
Communication within your team is essential, but it is also important to
communicate effectively with the teams around you. This is especially true
for outbound lead generation teams, which are often closely linked to both the
sales and marketing teams. To ensure proper performance, it is integral that
you have a clear process for interacting with both Marketing and Sales.
“Many companies now have a lot more leads coming in
as a result of inbound marketing. The problem is: many
of the leads aren’t really leads yet – they’re more like
contacts that have to be nurtured for a period of days,
weeks or months before the lead is ready to schedule a
call or meeting.”
Dave Kurlan
CEO of Kurlan and Associates Inc.
Managing Your Team // 53
Alignment with Sales
If your prospecting team is situated in the Marketing Department, you
should take regular steps to better align yourself with Sales, which means
communicating with the Sales Manager about lead and bookings goals and
regularly soliciting feedback about your team’s performance. Additionally, you
should ensure that your lead gen reps are properly supporting the sales reps,
which usually means having each lead gen rep working with no more than three
sales reps.
Alignment with Marketing
In companies where Prospecting is part of the Sales Department, you need clear
attribution rules to identify which team was responsible for creating (and, in
some cases, nurturing) the lead that ultimately led to a deal.
This may sound simple, but in practice, it is often complex. Marketing and
Prospecting often work simultaneously on leads – with SDRs calling prospects
at the same time as marketers send the prospects pertinent materials – which
can make it difficult to determine which team is responsible for a won deal.
Although this is a complex problem, there is a fairly simple solution: whichever
team creates the lead – Outbound Prospecting or Marketing – has 30 days
to convert that lead into an opportunity. If they do, they receive credit for
the opportunity. If they fail to convert the lead within 30 days, the lead is
recycled and the next real interaction – either an SDR connect or a marketing
form completion – gains attribution should the lead convert. Not only does
this reward the teams for generating leads, but it also frees them to use any
materials at their disposal – be they Marketing or Prospecting – to help convert
that lead into an opportunity.
Managing Your Team // 54
Measuring Your Team
Section // 5
Measuring Your Team
Without measuring your prospecting team’s performance, you can never be
sure that your team is meeting its goals or contributing to your company’s
revenue. In this chapter we will look at the most important metrics to measure
and evaluate your prospecting team’s performance on a rep and team level,
including:
• Activity efficiency ratios
• Pipeline contributions
• Prospecting-generated bookings
Measuring Your Team // 56
Key Metrics for Your Team
Once you have built your team and instituted a process for managing it, you
need to start measuring its performance. Ultimately, your prospecting team will
be judged on how many deals it creates – and this means you need to carefully
track how well your reps are performing and how the leads they produce
progress through the sales funnel.
This isn’t always easy. Correctly identifying where leads come from and what
caused them to convert into opportunities can be tricky, but there are a few
simple metrics that you should track to ensure that your prospecting team is
meeting or exceeding your goals. This means knowing how hard your reps are
working, how effective they are at creating high-quality opportunities and what
percentage of their leads eventually turn into deals.
The best way to get the most from your outbound prospecting team is to use
data to help you stay on track and regularly measure your performance against
expectations. This way, you can easily demonstrate to your team and other
members of your company how effective your prospecting has been and what
you are doing to continuously improve it.
You should use reporting and dashboard tools to help you track your
performance in three areas: activity, productivity and process.
Measuring Your Team // 57
Activity
Baseline Activities
The most fundamental metric you should be tracking is activity – such as calls,
connects and appointments. This information will help you better understand
the foundation of your team’s performance and tell you if you need to alter
any of the basic characteristics of your team, such as by adding more reps or
changing your cold calling process.
Measuring Your Team // 58
Middle of the Funnel Activities
From there, you should move on to examining the middle of the funnel – how
many meetings and opportunities your lead gen reps have created over a given
time period. Although dials form the backbone of any outbound rep’s day, it
is important to regularly keep track of how they are doing in terms of more
downstream metrics such as meetings and deals.
Measuring Your Team // 59
Calls By Time
The bulk of your prospectors’ days will be spent on the phone, so it is important
to regularly check when they are making their calls. As we saw in the Dial Plan
section of this eBook, not all times of the day are created equal, so it is a good
idea to use a call activity report like the one shown above to ensure that your
reps are emphasizing the best times of day.
Measuring Your Team // 60
Productivity
Activity Effectiveness Ratio
Tracking your team’s activity metrics will help you understand how much effort
they’re putting in, but only by measuring their productivity – opportunities
created, demos booked and so forth – can you truly determine if your team is
actually serving its purpose. Work with Sales to make sure that your team isn’t
simply finding prospects, but that it is handing over well-qualified, high-quality
leads that regularly convert into opportunities and deals.
One of the best ways to do this is to start measuring your lead gen reps’ “Dials
: Opportunities: Deals” ratios. Tracking this metric will give you a much clearer
picture of not just how hard your reps are working, but how effective they are at
generating opportunities and deals.
In the figure above, it is clear that Shawn Marion is a much more effective SDR
than Steve Nash, even though he made significantly fewer calls. Managers who
only look at simple activity metrics may believe that Steve Nash – who made
a large number of calls – was the more effective rep, but analyzing deeper-
diving efficiency ratios prove that it was in fact Shawn Marion who should be
rewarded for his ability to efficiently generate deals. Knowing this can help you
better manage your prospecting team by finding ways to increase the other
reps’ “Dials : Deals” ratios and by putting those reps with favorable ratios in a
position to create more opportunities. What made Shawn Marion so effective at
creating opportunities? What can you do to make your other reps have similarly
impressive ratios?
Measuring Your Team // 61
Downstream Efficiency Ratios
Measuring Your Team // 62
Once you’re sure that your reps are performing the right activities, it is important
to measure how effective these activities are at leading to downstream
milestones such as connects, meetings scheduled and opportunities sourced.
Identifying low ratios in any of these metrics means that you should be coaching
your reps in a particular area. For example, a low Dial : Connect ratio might mean
that your reps need to improve at obtaining direct numbers, calling at optimal
times of day or getting past gatekeepers. A report like the one shown above
gives you up-to-the-minute information about how your reps are performing in
terms of these three critical KPIs.
Leads Generated by the Prospecting Team
After you’ve determined how efficient your reps are at converting leads, you
should use the following report to see how many leads your prospecting team
has created over a given time period – and, more importantly, how many of
those leads have been converted into opportunities.
Measuring Your Team // 63
Pipeline Generated by the Prospecting Team
Once you know how many opportunities your team has contributed, you
should analyze what happened to the opportunities your prospecting team
contributed after they entered the sales pipeline. This will tell you how many
prospecting-generated opportunities converted into won deals and whether
your prospecting team is contributing enough new opportunities to replenish
those that have flowed out of the pipeline as both won and lost deals. Pay
specific attention to the number of newly created opportunities as well as the
net flow of opportunities and total number of open opportunities – your team
should always be contributing enough new opportunities to keep your net
pipeline growing even as your quota-carrying reps close deals.
Measuring Your Team // 64
Contribution to Pipeline
If you want to know how effective your prospecting team is, you need to know
how many opportunities it has generated, which means examining your sales
pipeline closely. Each week or month, you should look at a snapshot of your
team’s pipeline contribution from previous time periods to ensure that your
team is consistently adding more opportunities to the pipeline. In the report
above, for example, you can see how much value is in this team’s pipeline and
what stage the opportunities are in.
Measuring Your Team // 65
Process
Sales Funnel
One way to see whether the opportunities your prospecting team has created
are high-quality is by examining how routinely your ISRs are converting them
into won deals. Check your company’s win rate (overall and by stage) to see
how the opportunities your team is creating are progressing through the
various stages of the sales cycle.
Measuring Your Team // 66
Bookings Generated by the Prospecting Team
Ultimately, you need to know how much revenue your prospecting team has
created, which means analyzing how many bookings resulted from the leads
your lead gen reps contributed. Use the following report to see exactly how
much revenue your prospecting team has generated and whether your team’s
contributions are growing or shrinking over time.
Measuring Your Team // 67
Benchmarking
Activity Effectiveness Ratio
Tracking your reps’ performance in a variety of ways is essential for making
sure your team is contributing to your company, but it is really only useful if
you have specific benchmarks with which to measure it against. Here are some
benchmark data points to keep in mind for building a prospecting team for
high-growth B2B SaaS companies.
• Dials / Rep / Day = 60 (Top Performers = 200+)
• Dial : Connect (i.e. to conversation) = 5-10 Dials
• Connect : Appointment = 12%
• Dials : Opportunity = 150 Dials
• Opportunity : Deal = 20%
• Cost per Appointment = $700
• Open Opportunities per Quota-Carrying Rep = 25-30
• New Business Win Rate % = 20%
• % Pipeline Contribution by Prospecting = 40%-60%
Measuring Your Team // 68
Essential Tools for
Your Prospecting
Team
Section // 6
Essential Tools for Your Prospecting Team
The last few years have seen an explosion of sales and marketing to