Experience hiring BDRs for Direct Outreach?

by a searcher from Tsinghua University

4 months ago

Hi all,

We are conducting direct outreach in a targeted industry. As part of our outreach cadence, we are following up on emails by calling prospective sellers. The goal of the call is to schedule a meeting where we can learn more about their business and see if there is a good fit.
Does anyone have experience hiring high quality BDRs to conduct cold calls and schedule meetings? Any suggestions on where to source quality BDRs? 

For context, we have tried out 2 BDRs and it hasn't delivered the results we were looking for. They were both sourced from Upwork and for us, the quality just wasn't there to set up a meeting or drive an engaging conversation.
We have seen some great success when it is either myself or my business partner making the call. Just want to see if hiring a high quality BDR allows us to scale this up. 

Thanks! Sukh

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searcher from The University of Michigan - Stephen M. Ross School of Business

We've hired a ton, but we have a B2B lead generation agency. We use our agency to do proprietary outreach for our acquisitions. Part of the battle is finding "high quality" SDRs, but a very underestimated part of it is the onboarding, training, and systems that you enable them with thereafter. Most SDRs that are out there that are deemed high quality may be good at prospecting for something like a SaaS product, but deal souring is an entirely different ball game. We've watched top performing (99% percentile) SDRs lay goose eggs on our deal sourcing accounts upon entering the team (then quickly turnaround with training and systems). Hope that helps...

3 months ago | like reply | 0 likes

searcher

I haven't hired for search, but I have many times for tech startups as my background is in building prospecting automation/SDR teams.

Note there is a lot of sales talent from tech out there right now that is more open to contract work than normal as it is a tougher market. But sales in general is mostly a hunger/energy game. If you have a screen with them and they can build a relationship well on the phone, and have energy to want to dial... that is 90% of it in my mind. Talk to 10 of them, see who sounds best, and hand off the pitch. You'll know quickly how engaged they are and/or if they are doing their job. Feel free to DM me.

3 months ago | like reply | 1 like

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