The SDR model is fundamentally broken.

As buyers, we see this first-hand. When we actually want to talk to a sales rep it’s a frustrating multi-step process to “qualify” us before we can get any of our questions answered. When we don’t want to buy, we’re contacted dozens of times through email, LinkedIn, and phone with generic “spray and pray” messaging that isn’t relevant to us in any way.

For sales teams, this results in an unsustainable Customer Acquisition Cost. Conversion rates are too low. Inbound leads don’t get the TLC they need. Outbound converts less and less every year so activity quotas are raised causing even lower quality and conversion. It’s a vicious cycle.

In this article, I’m going to break the problem down and share some simple solutions to radically improve results with an “Allbound” model.

Inbound Leads Are Not Created Equal

What we call Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) today include two radically different types of people.

“Hand Raisers,” are people that actually want to talk to sales and request a meeting or a demo. They make up a tiny minority of MQLs. The rest filled out forms to download a white paper, attend a webinar, or access some other marketing content. This is the vast majority of MQLs, people that do not want to talk to sales, often providing fake contact information to avoid being called or emailed.

We’re Wasting Our Most Valuable Leads

Hand Raisers are the most valuable leads by a longshot! They are woefully neglected by the typical Inbound SDR process.

They are shopping around, doing their research, and reaching out to a few vendors. Typically they do this in the same 30-minute window. They want to talk to sales to see a demo, learn about pricing, and/or ask questions about how the product works.

Research shows the first vendor to respond wins the deal the majority of the time. Unfortunately, instead of getting these incredibly valuable leads in front of experienced AEs to answer their questions, the typical Inbound SDR process does the opposite.

All leads are bucketed together in many companies and these potential customers wait hours or days to hear back. When they do, they hear from the least experienced person in the company, an Inbound SDR, often fresh out of college, just a few months into their role. The SDR can’t answer any of their questions and grills them about Budget, Authority and Timeline instead of adding value, as that’s what they are trained to do.

Most Inbound Leads Are Really Outbound

The remaining MQLs, the vast majority of Inbound Leads, are really just outbound prospects with some light marketing engagement. Inbound SDRs are trained to call, email, and/or send LinkedIn messages dozens of times over 4-6 weeks to get them in front of an AE.

There’s nothing wrong with calling prospects that have engaged with marketing content, but it’s not Inbound. It’s Outbound and should be treated accordingly.

Outbound Leads Are Subpar

While Inbound SDRs are hammering cold calls and emails, Outbound SDRs and AEs are doing the exact same thing with a different list of prospects. Most often, these prospects come from a list in tools like ZoomInfo, filtered for company and contact data, ignoring any marketing engagement.

So, we have our more experienced salespeople investing all their time to prospect people that have NOT engaged with marketing.

Why do we have two different teams calling two different lists of prospects?

Route “Hand Raisers” to AES

An obvious solution here is to route Hand Raisers directly to experienced AEs as fast as humanly possible. Ideally, using tools like Chili Piper or Calendly, potential customers can book a meeting right on the website, save everyone time and increase the speed to lead, shorten the overall sales cycle, and increase win rates.

Many revenue leaders challenge this notion, worrying this will burn too much valuable selling time on unqualified leads. This should be tested and confirmed, not assumed. If conversion rates on Hand Raisers are lower than cold outbound prospects, or a set of prospects that can be contacted in the time it takes to have these inbound meetings, adjustments should be made.

There are a few things companies can do to adjust. First, sharing pricing, demo videos, and other information freely on the website will mitigate the number of people that reach out just to see a demo or ask a few questions without a budget. Secondly, forms can capture basic information such as company size, industry, contact roles, and seniority, to route leads to AEs or SDRs accordingly.

Either way, valuable leads should be talking to experienced salespeople as fast as possible.

Treat the Rest as Allbound Leads

Now, what do we do with the other 99% of MQLs? If we put them all together into an Allbound model, we can use all our internal and external data to prioritize them accordingly and route them to the sales reps best capable of converting them.

We can combine marketing engagement data we’ve collected with third-party firmographic, technographic, persona, and intent data to get a holistic view of every prospect and rank them accordingly.

Without going into too much detail on each of these, we’re basically looking to identify the best companies and contacts to prospect based on all we know about their company, the people in those companies, how they’ve engaged our brand, and what signals exist in the market on their intent to buy a product like ours. We then prioritize the best ones and combine internal and external data to maximize our chances of actually reaching them.

Segment to Improve Relevancy

Now that we have one big bucket of prospects, ranked by priority, we can combine all available data to segment these lists and make it easier for reps to get the right messaging in front of them. Segmenting by industry, company size, role, etc, makes it a lot easier for reps to work a list and put out messaging that has the best chance to convert to meetings, pipeline, and ultimately revenue.

SUMMARY

1. Route “Hand Raisers” to experienced reps
2. Treat all other leads as Outbound Prospects
3. Combine internal and external data to prioritize
4. Segment prospects to maximize conversion rate