How to Build an Outbound Engine for B2B SaaS

If you’re a SaaS founder or a sales leader, I’m sure you know how hard building a pipeline can be. It’s non-negotiable. However, scaling outbound is where things get harder.

Hiring and training an in-house SDR team takes months of hard work: sourcing, onboarding, training and replacing with the added budget chaos of salaries, tools and management time.

According to a report on The Hidden Costs of Onboarding a New Employee by Glassdoor, it costs almost $4000 in hard costs to find and onboard a new employee, including job board fees, background checks and the new hire’s training.

Soft costs, such as lost productivity, can add up to more of the total cost to hire. All of this before a single deal even closes. It’s too much!

Keep reading on to find out how you can avoid this chaotic process…

At Scalemill, we help B2B SaaS leaders solve this problem by giving you predictable outbound results without exploding your internal headcount.

Here’s how it works:

1. Be clear on who you want to reach out to

   Before sending any message or email, you have to be clear on who you need to target. A lot of SaaS companies skip or miss this step and end up wasting $$$ and time on irrelevant contacts. Define your ICP:

   
   

   • Who is facing problems that your product can solve?

   • What is the industry and company sizes you’re looking to reach out to?

   • Do you need to pitch to the founders, decision-makers or the SaaS leaders?

     
     

2. Build an outreach that can be repeated
   

   Outbound doesn’t mean to deliver one pitch and vanish forever. It’s important to have proven, repeatable cadences that can be used across multiple channels. Your go-to outbound engine will comprise

   
   

   • Tested cold emails that don’t land in spam

   • Personalized LinkedIn messages

   • Calls at the right time, after the right amount of touch points/hammering

   
   

   Scalemill helps SaaS companies design multi-step cadences with personalization and testing. Our goal is to get higher reply rates on the value of your product.
   

3. Leverage offshore, trained SDR teams

   You don’t necessarily need an army of in-house SDRs to execute better. What you need is a clear, defined strategy. A dedicated and trained SDR team who can adapt to your process quickly, run your cadences, handle lead qualification and pass on qualified appointments to your AEs.

   
   

   This means:

   
   

   • Lower cost per lead

   • Faster ramp-up time

   • No burnout cycle of hiring and replacing SDRs

   • Scaling clean, without chaos
     

4. Always track, test and tweak

   An outbound setup never works if you just set it up and forget it forever, considering it’ll keep running on its own. Sales isn’t magic, well yes it is if you have the right team. However, there is real hard work involved!

   
   

   A trained team will:

   
   

   • Track open and reply rates weekly

   • Test new subject lines and CTAs

   • Drop what’s not converting

   • Double down on what’s working

   
   

   You don’t need a lot of people, you need the right people to make the magic happen!

   
   

   Final thoughts

   
   

   Outbound is still one of the most predictable ways of growth for B2B SaaS companies but only if you do it the right way. A massive in-house team will not keep your pipeline healthy, a trained team will.

   
   

   Refine your ICP, set up a repeatable outbound system, get the right team and keep optimizing. This is how your outbound will scale as you grow, not go against you.

   
   

   Want to see how this works in real time?

   
   

   At Scalemill, we’ve been doing this for over a decade to help SaaS companies like yours design outreach strategies, run remote teams, execute strategies and deliver results. If you’re ready to scale without overhead and headaches, let’s connect!