Are Outsourced Sales Development and Healthtech a Match?

If you’re in HealthTechNerds or other online communities it’s a question you often see from founders and sales leaders at early stage healthcare companies.

Does anyone have experience with…

Who’s the best…

Do they work?

Do outsourced SDR teams work in healthtech?

When I worked at a telehealth and patient engagement platform, we tried them all. We even started by going through Aaron Ross’s Predictable Revenue training program.

1. Companies that would log into your LinkedIn and message for you

2. Companies that just “did stuff” and meetings would show up on your calendar

3. Using a full-time fully dedicated outsourced team with an outsourced manager.

The first company that would log into our LinkedIn and build our networks and message people is what lead to the massive influx of cold messages on LinkedIn and left a sour taste in many people’s mouths. Long, often unpersonalized messages to brand new connections seeing if they resonate with any points. This often resulted in little to no meetings and more burnt bridges.

The second type of company seems promising. You might meet with them a couple times to go over messaging and discuss your ideal customer profile and then they promise you they’ll get you X meetings per month at Y price. Then a week later…it starts. There’s a meeting on your calendar. Then another. And before you know it, they’re booking you ten meetings a month. But, then you start taking those meetings and something seems…off. The people in the meeting have zero intention to hear about what you do, what pain points you help with, and are turned aback when you start asking them questions about their org. After a few meetings that turn into absolutely nothing, you’re left questioning how these people got booked in the first place. Well the obvious answer is they we’re probably paid to. About 4 or 5 years ago I had the experience of working with one of these companies. Our executive leadership decided to give them a try and I was an Account Executive on the receiving end of the meetings. The contacts I was meeting with seemed appealing but didn’t quite match our ICP. For example, if we sold to CIOs of a community mental health center, I’d meet with an IT person at a university medical center. We stopped using them after spending tons of money on meetings that turned into nothing…and then a few months later something strange happened.

 It was around the holidays, I was at home and got an email from one of the reps who was supposedly doing the heavy lifting to get us meetings. The employee just departed the company and sent a scathing email to everyone he worked with about how fraudulent the company acted. He talked about raising concerns with the leaders, they treated the team terribly, and how they used deceptive tactics.

This example’s a worse case scenario, but it shows why you should never let a company do outbound for you and even act on behalf of your company without having a crystal clear understanding of how they’re doing it.

The third type of partner we worked with was the most promising. We were introduced to the bay area company by a sales mentor the company had. At a very expensive cost, we had 3 full-time SDRs and the company had it’s own SDR managers and sales ops members. The full-time nature of the reps meant we were able to train them on Healthie, work on them with opportunities, and continue to iterate. The business model was a retainer with the company and then we had to fully cover the cost of the SDRs. The advantage for us if it didn’t work out it wasn’t like we were letting go SDRs. The company would just pivot those SDRs to a different project. This worked a little bit but it was way too expensive for the number of meetings that we were getting. Ultimately, we decided that it was best to hire SDRs in house. So we did! The 3 SDRs that were outsourced we brought in-house and I turned into their manager. It was a critical move we did to uplevel their healthcare knowledge.

So can outsourced sales development work?

Not really. Think about where outsourced sales development started. It started with salespeople selling to salespeople. The training, messaging, and pain points should be incredibly easily for the salespeople to understand. They experience firsthand how difficult sequencing can be, tracking pipeline, and value props like increasing win rate. Now take that same SDR fresh out of college and have them try to win meetings about reducing hospital readmissions or improving the pre-visit experience with a CIO of a hospital with 20 years of experience. It’s not relatable to the SDR at all. While the willingness of a VP of sales or sales manager to take a meeting to learn about a sales tools fluctuates, most healthcare product leaders aren’t eager to take meetings. They’ll question you on your product, how it fits in with the rest of their tech stack, experience with similar companies, and more before they’ll consider getting to a meeting.

The only time outsourced sales development works in healthcare is when it’s through networking and run by healthcare industry experts.

This could be teaming up with an AE who’s been in the space for years and can help make introductions or partnering with SDRs who have healthcare experience and are already familiar with your ICP.

Do I need SDRs? Is it time I hire SDRs?

You’re more in danger of hiring SDRs too early than too late.

The SDR role is designed to be a team member who comes into a proven repeatable process and helps increase the quantity that process is performed.

Let’s focus on proven and repeatable. What’s not repeatable? Anyone VP or above who lands a meeting with a 1st or 2nd connection. You know like a founder getting a meeting with another founder who shares an investor. Or a VP who gets a meeting with someone they sold to at their last company.

Before you hire an SDR, you should have a full-cycle Account Executive or sales leader who is repeatedly booking meetings with people outside their network on their 1st-7th outbound touch.

“We need to get more outbound leads” does NOT mean you hire an SDR to ramp up the number of cold emails and cold calls you’re sending unless you’re doing more because it’s already working. Hiring SDRs to chase lead numbers and pipeline is a quick way to burn money. You’re likely better off hiring full-cycle AEs if you don’t have the time or resources to do sales development right. Working with experienced healthtech salespeople to help outsource some sales development can help as they may help you refine messaging, get market feedback, and help you form a concept of what works without spending a ton of in-house resources on it. However, don’t expect anyone outsourced to change the trajectory of your company.

What about an SDR to help triage inbound?

This get’s interesting. I’ve actually been an SDR in this position before. I was qualifying more than 50 leads a month for a team of three AEs.

First, make sure you’ve optimized the inbound process. Your lead capture form should capture a number of fields that help you score leads. This could be size of the organization, the EHR they use, territory, or other variables. The follow up to the form should also offer the right leads with an opportunity to book directly on your calendar. So before hire an SDR to triage leads, first ask yourself if asking a couple more questions on a form can help with triage. Before you hire an SDR at $50K-$60K + commission to do this, spend a little but of money on the sales process to move the needle.

The main reason to have an SDR or Associate Account Executive triage inbound is about time. Account Executives have demos, follow ups, negotations and more on their calendar everyday. If a hot prospect reaches out, it’s not good enough for them to use your calendly and book a time next week. By then they may have had 3 or 4 live conversations with your competitors. An inbound SDR can call them the same day, ideally within five minutes of the lead form coming through, to learn more about their business, pain points, and why they reached out now. It sets a STRONG impression that you are ready and available to serve their business.

The other reason to have an inbound SDR is to make sure people get to a meeting. Just because you offer a calendly or option to book a meeting, not everyone will be ready to schedule at the time they fill out the lead form. Inbound SDRs can follow up to get as many leads converted to introduction meetings.

We 3x’d the number of Sales Accepted Leads in 4 months by focusing on these two areas.

Thank you for reading and if you know a sales leader or founder thinking about sales development, please share this with them!