SDR outsourcing: the four models, and what each one really buys

The four models

Vendors describe themselves in many ways, but engagements resolve to one of four shapes. Working out which one you are being sold is the first useful question.

Dedicated seat

You rent named SDRs, usually on a monthly per-seat fee, and often manage them yourself. Closest to in-house without the hiring. You carry the output risk: the seat is billed whether or not it produces meetings.

Agency-run outbound

The vendor owns the whole engine, including data, infrastructure and copy, and reports on results. Usually a retainer. Fastest to start, least visible day to day, and quality depends heavily on whether the vendor genuinely runs the infrastructure or subcontracts it.

Performance or per-meeting

You pay for qualified meetings booked and attended rather than for time. The vendor carries the output risk, which aligns incentives, and makes the definition of a qualified meeting the single most important term in the contract.

Fractional leadership

You buy the management layer rather than the doing: someone senior to design the motion, hire and coach. Useful when you have SDRs who are not producing. It does not, by itself, generate meetings.

What in-house actually costs

The comparison that gets made is salary against vendor fee, and it is the wrong one. The fully loaded cost of an in-house SDR includes employment taxes and benefits, the data and sending tooling they need, the management time to hire and coach them, and the ramp period before they produce anything.

The ramp is the part most often left out, and it is not a small correction. It applies to the vendor too, for a structural reason worth knowing: sending domains and mailboxes have to be warmed gradually before they can carry volume without damaging their own reputation. Anyone promising meaningful volume in the first fortnight is either using infrastructure that was warmed for somebody else or is about to burn it.

We publish no rate card here because the shape of an engagement changes what it should cost. What we will do on a call is show the arithmetic for your situation, including the case where hiring in-house is the better answer.

Questions worth asking any SDR outsourcing vendor

These are the ones that separate vendors quickly, and they are the ones we expect to be asked.

Definition

What exactly counts as a qualified meeting, and is it written into the agreement rather than described on a call.

Rejection

How do I reject a meeting that does not meet it, on what window, and what counts as a valid reason.

Infrastructure

Whose sending domains are used, and is my own domain involved in any way.

Sequencing

How many messages does a prospect receive, and what happens when they do not reply.

Suppression

How are my existing customers and open opportunities kept out of the audience.

Exit

What do I keep if we stop: the data, the domains, the copy, or none of it.

One message per campaign, and no follow-up sequences

Most outbound programmes send a sequence: an opener, then several scheduled follow-ups landing in one conversation until someone replies or the steps run out. We do not do that, on any channel, for any client.

Each campaign sends exactly one message. If someone does not reply, they are not chased in that thread. They become eligible for a later campaign built on a genuinely different angle, which reaches them as a new first message rather than as pressure applied to an old one.

One message per campaign is a real constraint and it costs us volume, so it is worth being plain about why we accept it. A second message to someone who has already ignored the first reads as pressure regardless of how it is written, and on LinkedIn it is literally the same conversation, sitting directly under the message they chose not to answer. The reply we want comes from a better first message to a better-chosen person, not from persistence.