When should you build outbound in-house, and when should you use a partner?

In the Bridge Group's 2025 survey of 351 B2B companies, a new sales development rep needed about three months to ramp, stayed about 1.9 years on average, and only 60% of SDRs reached quota. Numbers like these sit behind a decision many companies face: build outbound in-house or bring in a partner. I run a company that works as such a partner, so read my view with that in mind. I'll try to show where each option makes sense, including when it shouldn't be a partner at all.

What does building outbound in-house involve?

The visible part is people. In the same Bridge Group report, median on-target earnings for an SDR were $80,000, and companies had about one SDR for every 2.4 account executives. By my calculation from their averages, three months of ramp out of a tenure of roughly 23 months means about 13% of an average SDR's time in the role is spent getting up to speed. When that person leaves, the clock starts again.

The less visible part is everything around them. Someone has to manage the team (the report puts it at about 6.4 SDRs per leader), and someone has to own data on companies and people, sending infrastructure, sequencing tools, and the rules for qualifying interest and handing it to sales. These pieces are needed whichever way you go. The real question is who builds them and who runs them.

What does research say about doing it yourself versus using outsiders?

The question is older than outbound. In a 1985 study in Marketing Science, Erin Anderson looked at 159 sales districts of 13 U.S. electronic component manufacturers and asked when a company sells through its own employees and when it uses independent representatives paid on commission.

The strongest factor was how difficult it was to evaluate a salesperson's performance. The harder it was, the more likely the company was to go direct and rely on supervising its own people. Product lines that were complex and hard to learn, and districts that required a lot of non-selling work, pointed the same way. Company size, the amount of travel and the importance of key accounts did not.

The study is about field sales in one industry four decades ago, not about outbound, so it is a lens rather than a rule. My reading for outbound is that the question is less "can we afford a team?" and more "can we describe and check what good work looks like?"

When does in-house make more sense?

• Your product takes months to learn, and a credible first conversation needs deep knowledge of it.
• What counts as a good conversation is hard to put in writing, so you would need to watch the work closely to judge it.
• Outbound is a permanent, central channel for you, and you are ready to hire, coach and replace people.
• You want what you learn about the market to build up inside your own team.

When does a partner make more sense?

• You want to start before you could hire and ramp a team, or you are testing a segment and don't yet know if it justifies a hire.
• You can define criteria for qualified interest and check the results against them.
• You don't have someone with experience managing SDRs, data and sending infrastructure.
• You need data, infrastructure and automation working together without building each piece yourself.

A partner also needs time to learn your offer, and that learning sits partly outside your company unless you agree how it comes back to you.

What should you agree with a partner so you keep control?

Anderson's finding also tells you what to fix if you do work with a partner: make the work easy to evaluate. In practice that means agreeing on:

• criteria for qualified interest, set before launch,
• what each handoff contains: who the person is, why the conversation started and what they said,
• reporting on who was contacted, what came back and why contacts were rejected,
• feedback from your closers on what happened after the meeting,
• who owns the data, accounts, domains and tools, and what happens to them if you stop working together.

The last point varies between arrangements, so get it in writing. The feedback loop is the one I covered in more detail in my article on separating outbound from closing.

How do you decide?

• How long does it take a new person to learn your offer well enough to start a credible conversation?
• Can you write down what a qualified conversation is for you?
• Is outbound a channel you want to run for years, or one you want to test first?
• Who would manage SDRs, data and sending infrastructure if you built it in-house?
• Where should what you learn about the market end up?

At MSGA we can build and run the whole system or take on a chosen part of it, and with each client we agree who runs it, who maintains it and what gets handed over. If your answers point to an in-house team, that is the better choice, and a partner should tell you so.