How to Automate New Client Acquisition With a Virtual BDR

I woke up this morning to an email from one of our Virtual BDRs, introducing me to a potential client who wants to meet tomorrow to discuss working together.

I wasn’t involved in researching the company, figuring out which decision makers to pitch, figuring out how to pitch them, sending any pitches or following up — all I had to was accept the calendar invite.

This article is about how I got to this point.

Here’s a summary of what I‘ll cover:

1. Quick Overview Of My Business Problem
2. Our Quest for The Best Outbound Strategy
3. Impressive Results in The First Month From My Virtual BDR
4. Keys to Success — hiring the right people, proven system, accountability, and incentive structure
5. Important considerations (reasons why this might not work for you)

Quick Overview Of My Business Problem

I own and operate a recruiting agency that helps startup companies hire software engineering and artificial intelligence talent. Hiring managers post jobs online and either get no attention at all or get flooded with hundreds of resumes.

I meet with founders and hiring managers to learn about their tech stack, company culture, and upcoming projects, and then my team sends them 5 highly qualified candidates — and they usually hire one of them.

Our average deal size is around $40,000, we have a well-defined ideal customer profile (ICP), and we’ve repeatedly achieved seven figures in revenue, but one of our biggest challenges over the years has been maintaining a strong enough pipeline of potential clients.

A recruitment agency is essentially a B2B services business, which is notoriously difficult to scale and has become extremely commoditized over the years. We offer an incredible service for our clients and have great reviews, but there’s a ton of noise in our space.

Sound familiar?

While the longer-term solution is building a robust inbound flywheel, we’re not there yet, and we need an affordable way to grow our immediate pipeline.

Our Quest for The Best Outbound Strategy

1. Do it myself: As a small business owner, this is usually the default option. After all, I started my company because I was willing to bet on myself. The issue is that a business that depends on the owner’s performance isn’t a business…it’s a high-paying job. Doing everything myself doesn’t scale.

2. Outbound agencies: We gave this a shot and worked with a well-known email marketing expert, a couple of LinkedIn lead generation companies, and another firm that did a combination of both. I learned a lot in the process, but the results were terrible.

All of these companies essentially have the same strategy, which involves segmenting your target audience based on high-level buyer personas, A/B testing different subject lines, templated message bodies with basic personalization, social proof, and variations of similar calls-to-action. There’s a clear emphasis on the fundamentals of an effective message, combined with a high volume of outreach.

This strategy might have worked if we had a novel product or service offering, but there are a ton of recruitment agencies and our white glove service is tough to substantiate through cold outreach.

Additionally, B2B buyers are getting pitched more often every year, so the usual outbound channels (email and cold calling) are getting clogged, and cookie-cutter outbound processes don’t work as well as they used to.

Ultimately, what has consistently worked well for us is an account-based sales approach(ABS), where we customize our pitch and process for each prospect. Our primary channel is LinkedIn and email is secondary. The challenge is that this requires actual humans (maybe AI can do this in the future…despite LinkedIn’s ban on automation tools) to analyze several variables and choose the best approach.

3. Full-time BDR/SDR in the States: So I hit up one of my favorite sales recruiters and we put together a job description, comp plan, interview process and started talking to candidates.

We interviewed dozens of candidates and ran into a few recurring issues

• BDRs and SDRs have very high turnover rates. Most of them don’t last more than 1–2 years at a company, either because they get fired, quit and moved into an entirely different role, or get promoted into an account executive role. As a business owner, it’s extremely tough to project a positive return on investment for someone who will only be in the role for 1–2 years. The risk of losing money is very high.
• Most BDRs and SDRs want to work for SaaS companies. This makes total sense — large SaaS companies offer the best compensation packages, training programs, career growth opportunities, etc.
• The best ones are expensive. The average salary range for an outbound Business Development Representative (BDR)or Sales Development Representative (SDR) in the USA is $50–60,000 per year with an average on-target earning potential (OTE) of $80,000 per year. The best ones can command a higher base with an OTE of $100,000 per year or more. This was outside of my budget, and combined with the short tenures, it didn’t seem like a good investment.

4. Virtual Business Development Representative (BDR): Picture three overlapping circles (Venn diagram) between a virtual assistant, traditional BDR and offshore hiring — the end result is a Virtual BDR.

I was very skeptical about offshore hiring for several reasons, but after I saw it work firsthand on the sourcing and recruiting side of my business (more about this in a future article), I decided to explore what kind of virtual talent was available for business development.

Long story short, I was completely blown away.

The Philippines is 13 hours ahead of CST, but they are the best location to hire Virtual BDRs from due to their lower cost of living, fluency in English, cultural similarities with the USA, and impressive work ethic. The job market in the Philippines and employment culture tend to favor employers — in recruitment, we call that dynamic a “client-driven market”.

About half of the offshore candidates I spoke with were very flexible and willing to work during my business hours.

I explored (and am still exploring) hiring folks in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and other parts of Asia — the cost was either comparable to hiring people in the USA, or the language and cultural barriers were too high for my liking.

Impressive Results in The First Month From My Virtual BDR

The first Virtual BDR I hired had a bachelor’s degree and 4 years of BDR experience at the same company. In her first month, she helped us to break into 4 new clients and close a $50,000 deal!

We now have two experienced, full-time Virtual BDRs for around half the cost of a top-performing BDR in the USA.

Our Virtual BDRs send customized pitches to 40 companies each day, targeting an average of 3 decision makers per company. That’s 600 pitches per week and 2,400 per month. Our response rates fluctuate as we tweak our approaches but we’ve maintained a 50% conversion ratio between meetings and signed clients.

Keys to Success — hiring the right people, proven system, accountability, and incentive structure

1. Hiring the Right People: There are a lot of people who advocate for hiring part-time virtual assistants on freelancing marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr, but if you want top performers who will be fully committed to your business, I recommend avoiding those platforms.

Virtual assistants on freelancing platforms are usually juggling multiple clients, will take much longer to ramp up, and don’t usually produce consistent results. Also, sales is a full-time job — it takes a person 40 hours per week (or more) to see relatively quick results with any customized business development strategy.

From an individual standpoint, the best BDRs tend to have strong verbal and written communication skills, a high aptitude, a strong work ethic, and natural curiosity.

Some of the other qualities I look for are:

An eye for detail — I like to hire people who are good at spotting patterns or small things that they can latch onto to build rapport with prospects

Coachability — People who aren’t just receptive to constructive criticism, but actively seek it out and look to constantly improve

High drive — Everyone is motivated by different things, but they need to have an intrinsic zest for the role. This can be tough to spot at first and is usually confused with extroversion, but some of the most productive people I’ve worked with are introverts.

2. Proven System: You need to have a good system in place for onboarding and training Virtual BDRs BEFORE you hire them. It’s much less complicated to set proper expectations upfront and set your BDR down the right path versus pivoting multiple times early on.

You also need to have a proven client acquisition strategy that your Virtual BDR can run with. Don’t hire a Virtual BDR with the expectation that they’re going to be an amazing creative problem-solver and will somehow figure out how to win clients for you. In my experience, good Virtual BDRs are exceptional when it comes to execution, but they’re seriously lacking when it comes to creative thinking and independent problem-solving.

If you don’t have a proven client acquisition strategy, do some research and A/B testing on your own first to figure out what works for your target customers.

In the last 4 years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of offshore virtual candidates (BDRs and recruiters) from over 20 different sources. I’ve narrowed it down to 2–3 trusted sources and developed a screening process that weeds out average performers. Through lots of trial and error, I’ve also put together step-by-step onboarding and training processes that help my virtual staff ramp up in 2–3 days. Send me a note and I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.

3. Accountability: Both of my Virtual BDRs keep a consistent work schedule, send me two daily reports in Slack, log all of their work on a shared spreadsheet, and present their workflows with the team during our weekly team meetings. This built-in accountability means that I can log into Slack and our spreadsheets at any time and see what progress has been made. It also empowers each Virtual BDR to self-manage, based on their targets.

4. Incentives: Every salesperson wants to be incentivized to meet and exceed their targets — it’s how we’re wired. Due to the cost of living difference between the USA and the Philippines, it doesn’t take much. But there are right ways and wrong ways to do this. You need to ensure that incentives are aligned with the activities you’re holding BDRs accountable for, along with the results they can directly influence.

I’ve seen some BDR comp structures that pay bonuses for deals closed/revenue, and while this can be lucrative for a top performer, there are two issues with this

1. BDRs don’t directly influence which deals are closed
2. Depending on the length of your sales cycle, it can take a long time for BDRs to receive a payout. This means that, psychologically, it becomes tougher for the BDR to associate their short-term efforts with the incentive.

We’ve had the best results with structuring BDR incentives around meetings booked. Here’s why this works

1. This is something they can directly influence
2. The reward cycle is very short, which makes it easier for them to associate their actions with the incentive, which motivates them to do more of the right activities. It’s a quick dopamine hit.

When we started structuring our incentives this way, I noticed an almost immediate response from our Virtual BDRs. They were already driven and hard-working, but improving the incentives kicked things into a completely different gear.

It almost goes without saying, but for incentives to be effective, the KPIs or targets need to be reasonable. We currently have minimum and stretch targets for our BDRs.

Important considerations (reasons why this might not work for you)

1. Hiring Virtual BDRs is an excellent, cost-effective solution if your sales process requires actual humans to pitch prospects. Otherwise, you’re probably better off using email sequencing tools and multiple domains to pitch a high volume of prospects. There’s lots of content out there regarding best practices for cold outreach.
2. As mentioned before, the system I described won’t work well with freelancers. If you only need a BDR to work part-time, then you may want to reassess why you’re hiring in the first place and thoroughly explore automation tools. Some great AI tools have recently been developed which may be a better solution for you.
3. Equip and train your Virtual BDRs the same way you would if they were a local, full-time employee. Otherwise, you’re probably setting them up to fail. This is a cost-effective option, not magic.
4. Although there are a lot of commonalities, there are also cultural differences between the USA and the Philippines. One of the biggest things I’ve noticed is that Filipinos don’t like to ask questions, ask for help, or share frustrations — they would much rather try to figure it out on their own. This can be problematic, especially if your industry/product/service is highly technical or specialized. You need to create psychological safety for your virtual team and build a relationship with them to get around this — once again, treat them the same way you would if they were local.

Have you hired a Virtual BDR before or is it something you’re considering? I’d love to hear your feedback and compare your experiences with mine.

Feel free to reach out at george@kofi-group.com

If you found this article useful, then you may want to also read about How to Double Production With Half The Cost in Recruitment