Pipeline is the oxygen of revenue growth. But lately, building that pipeline has gotten a lot harder.
For years, inbound demand carried much of the load: website traffic, gated content, digital ads. Then AI changed the game. Today’s buyers are researching in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity instead of traditional search. That means fewer website visits, fewer “Contact Us” clicks, and fewer inbound leads.
Instead of waiting for website-generated leads, BDRs and SDRs must proactively seek and reach out to prospective customers.
Your funnel hasn’t disappeared, but it has moved. Your sales development strategy needs to move with it.
The traditional xDR model is breaking down
Having a high-quality team of cross-domain representatives (xDRs) is crucial to a sales organization’s success. Without them generating and qualifying leads, salespeople can’t close deals further down the funnel. BDRs and SDRs start the conversations that lead to revenue.
But finding, hiring, and training them is challenging. xDRs who possess the right combination of skills and resilience are hard to find, especially in competitive markets, and the hiring process often is so slow and cumbersome that top candidates accept offers elsewhere.
There are other obstacles, too:
- High costs of captive teams in expensive markets
- Plateauing inbound lead volume
- Talent headaches: hiring, training, and retraining the right people
- Multilingual challenges when trying to scale globally from one or two high-cost hubs
- Inefficient top-of-funnel activity tying up expensive resources that don’t directly close revenue
In each of these areas working with a sales outsourcing partner can help. A good partner has the global talent pool, cutting-edge technology, and proven strategies you need to drive more revenue, uncover efficiencies, and lower costs.
xDR as a service: Better talent, lower cost
Let’s face it: xDRs can be an expensive proposition from a talent acquisition perspective. While they’re a critical component of sales teams’ success, they aren’t bringing in actual money just yet (just feeding the top of the funnel) so they’re often viewed purely as expenses.
Things get even more complicated – and less efficient – if you have disparate BDR teams spread among multiple locations. When each team needs its own oversight and has its own overhead needs, costs can quickly skyrocket and diminish ROI.
For these reasons, having a captive BDR team is counterproductive. Brands are better off putting their BDR needs in the hands of a trusted partner. By outsourcing BDRs, you can decrease customer acquisition costs and free up captive teams to focus on higher-end prospects and closing deals.
TTEC’s BDR as a Service solution, for instance, taps into our worldwide pool of sales talent to find highly skilled candidates. We’ve got a global reach that brands simply can’t match in-house, including emerging hubs like Colombia and Brazil.
Once BDRs are hired, we ensure they are onboarded smoothly, trained to be true ambassadors for your brand, provided with the technology and tools they need to thrive, and supported in a way that boosts retention and fosters long-term growth and success.
Even better, a sales outsourcing partner can deliver top-tier BDRs at significant cost savings – and easily scale up or down to meet your business’ changing needs.
Drive growth with a proven partner
We’ve seen outsourced BDRs generate strong results firsthand. When a global computer software company had more leads than its sales and BDR teams could work themselves, we quickly stood up a team of TTEC BDRs that worked their way through a list of about 30,000 leads from the company and qualified them.
Our BDR team:
- Generated $6.5 million in pipeline revenue
- Scheduled 1,500+ sales accepted leads
- Earned the Top Team award from the client, beating internal teams
In another instance, our BDRs uncovered missed revenue opportunities for one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computer peripherals, software, and video conferencing equipment. The company was leaving money on the table because some leads didn’t receive proper follow-through.
We began working on several thousand stalled leads for the client. Some leads had received a few automated emails but no personal outreach, while others had received no follow-up at all. We orchestrated a new cadence for the leads, then deployed a team of BDRs who qualified leads and then handed them off to the client to contact prospective customers and finalize sales. In one year, we generated $5.9 million in opportunity revenue; the following year, that number more than doubled to $12.6 million in opportunity revenue.
Work with an expert partner
These results aren’t happening by accident; they are powered by data-driven insights and highly skilled BDRs. We set our teams up for success with our lead propensity model, which uses advanced analytics to put only the highest-quality leads in front of xDRs. We know inbound leads have plateaued, so we make it as easy as possible for xDRs to jump on outbound opportunities.
When your xDR hiring, onboarding, and training are expert hands, and your teams have the tools and technology they need to deliver results, it frees up your internal team’s time and resources to focus on more impactful motions further down the funnel.
Learn more about how you can take sales to the next level by working with an expert partner.
