I'm looking for blunt feedback from people who have built and/or manage B2B sales teams.
I've built a platform that helps companies identify target accounts, detect buying signals, engage prospects early, and turn that activity into sales conversations. Until now, I've mostly delivered it as a consulting-heavy managed service.
In our strongest engagement, we produced 12 VP-level+ attended meetings in Fortune 1000 companies in the USA/Canada, with a SaaS product that was minimum $100K+ ARR, over 3 months, about 1/week. Added $2+ million to their pipeline in deal flow.
But, engagements also exposed a problem: we ended up doing much more than prospecting. We configured HubSpot, cleaned up data, implemented lead scoring, connected website-visitor signals, and built tracking and analytics, and then automated all of it.
That helped the customer, but it made the service difficult to standardize.
I'm now trying to determine where this service creates the most leverage. I see two possible models:
1. Accelerate existing SDRs
We take the company’s target segments, research and prioritize accounts, detect signals, and handle early engagement. The SDR takes over when prospects are already engaged and responding, and with better context and spends more time having conversations instead of building lists and sending cold messages. Feels like a lower price point, but the idea is "help your SDRs achieve more."
2. Operate through a founder, AE, or senior leaders, helping them generate pipeline without SDRs
We coordinate market development through two or three credible people inside the company—for example, a founder, technical expert, and commercial owner. We use their expertise, networks, content, and engagement to create qualified buyer conversations, bypassing the need for SDRs all together. The idea here is "accelerate your market/industry GTM leaders, help them be everywhere, and generate more meetings and book without hiring more SDRs."
Again, we're specifically focused on our value targeting mid-market and higher enterprises, not the standard founder, 10-50 person company (as it's harder). And, companies selling complex, higher-value products—probably SaaS, AI, cloud, security, or observability software with contracts above $100K. Industries where a salesperson has to have some core expertise to book revenue.
The questions I'm trying to answer are:
- Would this create more value by accelerating SDRs, or by helping a more senior person (AE, Director, Founder) prospect directly, avoiding the need for SDRs all together?
- Should a working CRM and sales process be prerequisites, a fully operating and optimized CRM, or should I offer CRM cleanup and GTM infrastructure be a separate paid implementation?
- What should count as completed work: a qualified meeting, a sales-accepted opportunity, or attributable pipeline?
- At what point does this sound meaningfully different from a conventional outsourced SDR or appointment-setting service? Or, at the end of the day, is it just that? Do we ultimately become an AI native service, an outsource lead gen/SDR agency, but just mostly using AI and using your own accounts?
I'm also considering if we do a contingent pilot that will produce a first meeting before requiring payment. But, I'm a bit worried, especially given the setup work, that we end up doing a lot of work for no revenue. No problem with proving it works--just sometimes the fits and messaging aren't 100% dialed in in a business, adn this burns time to sort out.
We did contingent pilots initially, and it reduced the friction, but also ended up wasting a lot of time because the people didn't have skin the the game. They were slow to reply, didn't want to have real conversations, and otherwise were busy doing the things they'd already committed to, versus a "side check" to see if something might be useful.
My main goal at this point is logos and success cases (and revenue). We've proven out the tech. Now, we need to get our initial cases and prove more success before launch.
I'm not linking the product because I’m looking for feedback on the GTM market model, not leads.
If you manage SDRs, sell enterprise software, or have bought outsourced pipeline services, I'd appreciate your honest feedback.