Outbound Prospecting & Cold Calling Metrics: Benchmarks for Outsourced Sales Development

Sales VPs always ask me, “What are the cold calling metrics you track at your outsourced appointment setting firm, Vorsight? What are your SDRs expected to do?

My answer is organized into the ROA framework from the book Cracking the Sales Management Code

• Results
• Objectives
• Activities

Rather than giving you the averages, I’m giving you the numbers from the top 5% of our SDR team. You are better than average. Your benchmarks should be too.

These are the Activities which are controllable input cold calling metrics:

• At least 95.4% of contacts you add to your pursuit list should have pre-call research.
• At least 81.6% of contacts you add to your list should have direct dial phone numbers.
• You need to add an average of 57.0 new contacts to your list per Week / 11.4 per Day
• You need to average 603.9 Dials per Week / 120.8 Dials per Day

The Objective of all these activities is conversations with prospects.

• 21.4 Conversations per Week with Director, VP, and C-level executives / 4.3 Conversations per Day
• (Side note: we don’t measure email conversations, but if we did we’d only count an email as a conversation if there are two round trips – you email prospect who replies, you reply, prospect replies again. This is a handy method from my friend Katie Azuma.)

 The above, week in and week out across a year (not just for a three week stint), will yield something similar to the following Results metrics:

• 6.7 Completed Meetings per Week / 1.3 Meetings per Day

I highly suggest writing down these weekly controllable input metrics, set goals based off of them, and measure your performance against those goals. Remember though, it’s not about the 700 dials you made this week, the 35 conversations you had last week, or the day 3 weeks ago where you made 300 dials. Instead, I can guarantee (based off of 3+ years of our data), that consistently averaging the inputs noted above over the course of 1 year, will put you in the top 5% of SDR performers, unless every single one of you does this. Ha! I know a lot of you are probably looking at this data and saying, “That is not possible.” The fascinating thing is these top performing outbound SDRs tell me that they can do this in about 25 hours per week. The BDA / SDR job is one of sprinting and taking a break. The ones who learn how to put their heads down and crank out intelligent activity end up becoming like the Navy SEALs who love what they do. It seems strange to love cold calling companies, but I know a LOT of people who do. It’s pretty awesome to achieve what most others fear and think is impossible.