The following three myths about outbound prospecting can damage your MSP.
Believe any of these myths and you will drive up stress levels, or worse, be out thousands of dollars in cash and more dollars in wasted hours.
Let's get right to it.
The first myth is that managing an SDR takes an hour of your time each week. Ha! If only it were so little. In reality, you ought to plan for at least 5 hours per week or more to help your SDR during the ramping period.
Why so much time? Well, consider who the average SDR is as a person.
According to the Bridge Group, SDRs have one to four years of experience and the average tenure in the role is 1.8 years. So they are on the younger spectrum, in their twenties and what do we know about ourselves at that age? We were the most ambitious and wanted to work for an awesome company. So an ideal start place for a career in sales would be a high-growth company, like Google or some other SaaS unicorn, because those places are cutting edge and it’s worth grinding cold-calls because there is upward mobility!
Therefore, the sales people MSPs end up with are usually second division players; trust me that they never grew up claiming “When I grow up I want to cold-calls for an IT services company that serves greater Greenwich CT.”
Do not get me wrong, you can find a great person and no one brave enough should be underestimated, but they will require more help and you need to plan for that.
The second myth is that you can close outbound appointments at 20%. Ha! If only it were that easy. In reality, anticipate a lower close rate because the leads do not trust you yet, they don’t necessarily have a major pain yet and your sales process is not fine-tuned for outbound yet.
Sure, you will close the new MRR -- there absolutely is a positive return on investment because of the lifetime value of a managed services contract, but the success should not be measured in a single quarter or month to a “20% close rate.”
The third myth is that the SDR needs to do “100 dials per day.” Nope. Maybe that worked back in 2005, but in 2021, things have changed with how we buy. The decision makers you target are in their late 30’s and 40’s and 50’s; they are attached more to their smartphone than they are to a desk phone. They use LinkedIn, Slack or Microsoft Teams and they check their email a lot. So if you are getting your activity playbook from the old guard, you will miss a big portion of the market and burn lots of bridges from overdialing.
