#33: You Think the Client Knows Better? They Don't. Why In-House Teams Are Losing to Specialized Service Providers
How in-house teams lost their edge to specialized providers who turned complexity into their competitive advantage and why the smartest companies are now choosing hybrid.
There was a time not that long ago when outreach was easy.
It was easy to source leads, just use PhantomBuster to scrape LinkedIn or, if you were rich, get a ZoomInfo license.
It was easy to email people, you’d probably get 2-3 responses out of 10 emails sent to the right people.
It was easy to book meetings because, really, we didn’t have that many meetings.
At that time, outsourced SDR as a service was considered the more affordable option with less output. The really easy option to discontinue when needed just stop paying. Companies didn’t buy outsourced SDR services because they couldn’t do it in-house. They just thought it was simpler:
No recruiting people
No training them
No daily management
No health insurance
No supporting them if pregnant, sick, or else
It was a transaction.
It also meant you couldn’t expect the same level of engagement from someone working outside your organization. So companies put SDRs on a playbook that not many people changed if it worked and just got them booking meetings. These companies knew they’d get OKAY results at a considerably lower rate.
The trade-off worked for everyone.
How could outsourced SDRs compete with in-house SDRs?
If someone spends 8-10 hours a day thinking about your product, deepening product knowledge, understanding customer pain points, personally curious about the industry, this person can come up with more original approaches, test more things, and build a pipeline that leaves outsourced SDRs far behind.
Meanwhile, outsourced SDRs, either working with multiple clients or moving from one client to another when campaigns fail, did exactly what was expected: execute the given playbook, make fewer mistakes, deliver minimum viable results, and maximize their own income by working with more clients or doing less work.
No marketing or sales agency became successful by working with one client, but by a smaller team working with a larger number of clients.
The Remote Revolution Changed Everything
We rolled with this model until COVID hit and remote work entered the lives of most businesses. Before the pandemic, only the fortunate few worked remote. Now it’s expected to have at least 2-3 days a week working from home.
Remote work opened doors for more international talent to enter the US market. If before 3 out of 5 clients asked us “where are your SDRs based?” now it’s only 1 out of 5. A new wave of fresh Tier A players entered more global and unified markets.
Remote work brought in a more data-driven, outcome-based working culture.
Before, you were required to engage in company life, and businesses spent budgets on HR. Now those budgets have been revisited toward remote work environments, opening more productive time.
If before people didn’t track meetings much, after being booked out with Zoom meetings, it became clear we needed to manage our time better.
This transformation made it obvious that some companies are run inefficiently:
Their recruitment playbook weakened after COVID
They don’t have outcome-based company culture
They tolerate missed targets
They give too much time for people fixing mistakes
If these were barely noticeable in 2021 and 2022, then 3 years fast forward, this became a huge problem for the majority of businesses—missed targets, missed revenue, low innovation, decreased engagement.
The Great Marketing Shrinkage
Meanwhile, the rising cost of marketing, particularly anything acquisition-related, made companies review budgets, cut costs, restructure.
Pre-COVID: Marketing teams had 20 people
Post-COVID: Shrunk to 10 or even 5 people
I’ve had many clients complain that now one person needs to do the work of three.
Companies started tolerating and bringing on generalists, encouraging people wearing many hats to maintain what’s been working and try to move the needle as much as one can, which naturally means slowly and with no real results.
Years of such policies, plus remote work encouraging people to revisit their priorities, created a lack of in-house expertise, especially in outreach.
The Complexity Explosion
Definitely worth mentioning that outreach became more complicated.
Before: You could get a few junior SDRs to do the job
Now: Only possible with seniors
Before: ZoomInfo was enough
Now: You need advanced enrichment playbooks to get the same or even lower results
LinkedIn became more complicated.
Email deliverability impossible without external solutions like Folderly or external consultants.
The overall tool stack grew tenfold.
Now people talk orchestration and AI enablement.
Small teams with budgets that should cover all these tools, in this overly complicated outreach world, cannot handle being experts in all these nuances.
Companies who tried usually overpay. Then, when missed targets become a regular occasion, they start talking to specialized solution providers.
Further, in-house teams chasing nuanced games usually miss the bigger picture. They rarely have time to zoom out—that’s why they require guidance and feedback.
The Specialist Advantage
Luckily, there are specialized agencies like Belkins who’ve spent 10 years refining their playbook.
Teams like these have built relationships with the best tech stacks. While in-house teams are just learning about Expandi.io, Nooks, or Reply.io, Belkins has provided feedback on which features to build. While in-house teams look for benchmarks or insights, Belkins and partners are designing them.
This enabled us to grow both in depth while keeping eyes open for broader strategies. This approach lets companies build specialist expertise and grind their teams through these playbooks for years.
An SDR who’s been with Belkins for 2-3 years, worked on 10-20 accounts, having access to the best of the best, is equipped to solve any problem.
Now with more thinking on this: You can’t just hire out these SDRs because they’re rarely the ones doing all the work.
Specialized SDRs have:
Access to best tools implemented by other people
Leads sourced in unique ways
Content written by specialized writers
CRM maintained by RevOps who are the best at CRM
If specialized service is done right, it’s done by the team, not an individual, making it difficult for in-house teams to replicate. You simply cannot hire all 10 people involved in each client account.
Years of such refinement led to accumulation of knowledge, best practices, approaches, and playbooks that have 9 out of 10 answers to any problem in hours or days, where the in-house specialist could spend weeks researching.
The Technology Chess Game
If before it required manual work to send, listen, write, review, fill out, follow up, which in-house teams had 8 hours/day to do, tech became irreplaceable in each task. Now 40-50% of work is done with technology.
It became a game of chess: Who will use technology better? In-house SDRs who need to use 10 tools and get paid the same whether they’re okay or great? Or agencies who make their living using these tools?
AI was the last enabler for specialized companies.
Before, only in-house teams could access industry knowledge, client’s unique information, market or competitor insights. Now, with deep search and $200/monthly for Claude Pro, ChatGPT Pro, Anthropic Pro, Gemini Pro, and other pro tools, the speed and efficiency with which specialized teams like Belkins can access data has exploded.
All the advantages in-house teams had are lost. Meanwhile, technology became more important, and specialized service providers just got too good with it.
Any clear pros of in-house teams now seem too costly. Imagine building a team of 10 Senior SDRs in the U.S.—how much would you need? $1M/year or more? Furthermore, will they have all the answers, or would you still need to bring on consultants?
The Hybrid Reality
Although I wore the hat of a pro-specialized agency supporter in this newsletter, I want to emphasize: The hybrid model of in-house + specialist is the best model.
It combines only the best of both worlds, keeping each party accountable, pushing boundaries, and challenging collaboration. Because we have two org charts, the client pushes the limits of the service provider, which keeps us on our toes. Meanwhile, we’re always critical about what we need and the lack of it from the client, which results in more thoughtful decision-making and progress.
The New Partnership Dynamic
If before we could rely on the client to tell us their ideal client profile, differentiations, what buyers are looking for, expecting this to be our guiding principles, now we question everything. We know it’s not done according to our standards and there are often missing parts.
If before we expected client teams to take ownership of some parts of the customer journey, now we share these responsibilities. We’re engaged in both marketing and sales, making sure no stones are unturned.
If before our north star metric was a lead, SQL, or appointment, now it’s new revenue / closed customers.
If before it was okay to have your CRM and our CRM, now there should be only ONE CRM with updated data, which means both teams do the work.
This has been a natural progression. No one expected we’d get here. It wasn’t calculated, nor am I trying to sell anyone on any idea here. I’m simply sharing the point of view of someone who for the past 10 years went from following clients to leading clients because I care about clients and my business. To make my company and clients successful, the status quo had to change. From where I sit, it’s clear: Clients need more help than ever.
The Opportunity
There’s no one to blame. Rather, use this as an opportunity to be better at client service.
Instead of relying on clients to provide something, we should have the courage to suggest it, analyze, implement new things, push clients to be better versions of themselves.
Education and knowledge sharing should be part of the specialized-vendor and client relationship.
Where it’s obvious to us, we should explain it.
Where we think we just need to do the work, we should speak more about how and why we do it.
Only by having more conversations can we provide clients more than results, we can provide a new way of looking at things.
This has always been my objective with this newsletter: opening the closed doors.
The Bigger Picture
What’s happened with outreach has transcended other industries. The majority of businesses don’t need in-house competencies for most marketing parts—website development, branding, design, SEO, content.
By closing your area of competency within in-house capabilities, the speed of change and adoption of new things puts these companies behind the market.
Only by opening your organization to vetted external help can you get the injection of new competencies needed to move faster and more robust.
The Uncomfortable Truth
While that’s the case, the big problem I’d like to report on and acknowledge: the majority of service providers offer mediocre service with considerably low levels of competency.
Why is that? Probably because these agencies aren’t challenged enough. They’re swimming comfortably in their business model and industry-wide accepted standards, and clients just go with it.
Outreach is probably one of the more dynamic categories of marketing. We’re used to clients expecting quick wins, and if not delivered, they turn their gaze to our competitors. So these competitors try to outdo each other, overpromising but still trying to be quick on their feet, which creates a sort of natural evolution of the fittest.
My personal recommendation: spend considerable time researching and vetting your future partner. It takes an extra 3-5 hours to meet more people than just your Account Executive, plus a good deal of personal curiosity toward the subject you’ll partner on. But once done right, it provides the data needed to drive smarter decisions: develop patience or press for urgency or challenge the pacing or focus on building foundations.
At the end of the day, failed agency collaboration is 50% the agency’s fault and the other half is definitely on the shoulders and budgets of those who hired them.
That’s why in this business transaction, clients spend money without getting results, while agencies lose customers and get 1-star reviews. Both earn their scars.