The SDR SECRET to Scaling Revenue in 2025!

Hello. Hello. I'm so excited for today's interview. If you're listening on the podcast or you're watching on our YouTube channel, welcome into our seven figure MSP community. We have one of our awesome, awesome clients here with us today, Jamie Busick. Jamie is pretty cool, dude. I've had the honor to meet you a couple times in person. Now you got some cool hobbies, cool business that you're growing. So I'm really excited to have you here with us today. And yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit about you, Jamie, where you're at, what kind of MSP you have, just a little bit yourself.

Yeah. My name is Jamie, CEO, CTO, founder of Virtual Sprout. We are a Midwest MSP focusing primarily on regulated businesses. Around $10 million of annual revenue and then growing at about 20 to 30% a year on slow years.

So I love it on a slow year, fast growth, growth train. Love it. So the reason why I have Jamie here with us today is a lot of our clients as well as a lot of our folks. A lot of the folks in the MSP community in to bring in an appointment center. Or maybe you've tried an appointment center in the past and you've tried hiring a dialer. You've outsourced this, Jamie. Have you ever outsourced this to like, agencies?

Yeah, money.

Okay. Okay, cool. So we'll talk on that. And I get this a lot. We were at it Nation in November and literally had a hundred, over a hundred people in the room. And, and I was literally speaking to, oh, you've outsourced this before. And the whole room is like, nodding their head of like, we spent a lot of money on it and didn't get a lot of roi. I think the thing about marketing and lead generation is that it is the long game. And it is a game too, right? Like, we can't, we can't forget the business is a game. It's all a game. We just got to play it, play it right, play our cards. There's really no finish line. So I would love to hear, Jamie, a little bit about your experience in hiring the dialer SDR for the folks that are wondering, is this for them, what are the things that help make them successful? You came into our Mastermind Leads Mastery couple months ago, about six months ago, I would say, I think it was May of this year. Yep, something like that. And you already had an SDR at that point. And you had her going and you said, hey, we want to get her some coaching and training. A couple months later, we brought in your second. And we're really seeing. Now six months in, we're actually seeing that momentum pick up. And it takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. Yeah. Love to hear. Jamie, whenever you first started with the appointment setting, let's say you outsourced it. What was that experience like?

Yeah, that's probably two years ago. We actually outsourced to a firm and I think last I counted, I don't like looking at it, but I think we paid about $250,000 in total and got almost nothing from it. And I would say the big disconnect was we could never get them on the same page for the dollars that we were spending for the output that we wanted. I think you're exactly right. There. There is a. There is a pre stage to all of this where you're. You're warming everything up and you're loading in the. All the leads, and it takes a lot of time to get the funnel built and to sit there and just burn and burn and burn through and really not have the visibility into the process, the ability to understand the output. Having these SDRs that we were paying all this money for with two or three clients and competing for resources, it was just really hard. And that kind of coincided at the same time that we decided to flush our entire sales process. We actually joined seven figure about the time we flushed it all and then rebuilt from the ground up with the sales process that Cindy does and then the marketing process that you do and then really rehiring the SDRs at that point.

So a rebirth.

Yeah, we ended up bringing in our. We. We had a couple of SDRs that did not work out. So I think we went through two or three internal hires, and then we ended up with one person that we liked, and then we brought in, like you said, a second person. And it's been a lot of. A lot of dials, a lot of tweaking, a lot of adjusting, but it's just rep after rep after rep, and then you just make small incremental changes and figuring out where you're blocking in the process and then making changes and seeing if that part of the process. So we started off with just trying to get people to the briefings. Right. So our process is. I think it's the process that you developed originally is get people into a briefing where it's a neutral, nurturing area. And then if we can, then moving them into an FTA and then running through the typical play that we all like to run, we Were having challenges originally just getting people into the briefing. We worked about, I would say four months to really get a consistent show rate where we get four to 10 people into a briefing every time. There were many, many weeks that we had zero people in the room. We would record it anyway. We send it out to the people that didn't show to keep those warm leads running. But we had many weeks where no one was there. I would say we have fixed that problem. So our show rates are improving all the time. We're at a 25 to 40% show rate based upon who we're inviting. And then from there we started focusing on. We were having problems getting people out of the briefing and into FTAs problem with getting people from FTAs into discovery. So we kept tweaking the process over and over again until the point now it looks like this month we probably are going to end up with 4 to 6 CSRAs of various sizes. And we are now just seeing the fruit of all the tweaks and getting a consistent deal flow and a consistent lead flow. We're probably sitting on 300, 400 warm leads that we are constantly farming. But we're. The goal is add to that pool of warm leads every week that we can keep going back to and marketing to and getting those folks to pop into an FTA at some point even if they didn't show up at the briefing.

That's right. That's right. You just. That was so much gold. That was an entire marketing plan right there. That is the plan I think that people miss. Because we look for the instant win. We look for the instant gratification that comes with the dollar sign or a signed contract. But what most MSPs discount is that to get there, I got to make all these other things happen first. And so I really like what you said. We did this and then we made small tweaks. You said we made small changes. You would fix, you find one problem and I would solve that one thing instead of throwing the entire strategy out the door. It's. I'm going to find the one thing first. Let me get them to the briefing. What made you choose a briefing? What made you choose like the briefing campaign?

The briefing for us was something that we could repeat very easily week after week after week. For us, it's all about volume and cadence. So our dialers are doing 600 dials minimum a day each. And so the amount of volume that we had, it's tough to stack it up against a webinar or anything. Else like that or an in person event. We, we struggle with the in person events and the investment in them. We're very high. So we decided to not do that and focus 100% until we figured it out on the briefing. But we could have the same meeting every week and we could get a lot of reps in so that we can make the adjustments. If we're waiting a month, two months for a webinar to occur, it's tough to understand, okay, we didn't do this. Now we've lost two months and now we have to make a change and now we have to wait another month or two to figure out the changes are working. We can iterate very quickly with the briefing format.

Yeah, it's super simple. I'm in a round of Marketing Machine right now, which is like what comes before leads mastery. In most cases, if there's zero marketing going on, which whenever you and I started in conversation, you already had a lot of this marketing stuff going. You were not new to this. I think it was just getting the game plan in place, like just creating the consistency really. But this morning in Marketing Machine we were talking about the briefing and, and the group is like, well, what do we do first? And we need a campaign. I don't. What do, what do I talk about? And I said the briefing is the easiest way to just get people into your world, just to get them into your ecosystem. Because like you said, every Single week it's 15, 20 minutes. How long do your briefings run?

They're supposed to be 15, they never last that long. They're generally half an hour because we have a long Q and A session at the end of it.

There you go. And that's the whole point, that's the exact point is to get people talking to you, get them into your world, the neutral landing space. And I'm not trying to get them to get immediately to an fta. That's actually where a lot of these outsourced third party agencies drop the ball because maybe you have calls on the books, they'll fill your calendar because that's how they get paid. But when they get on the call with you, they're like, I don't really know why I'm here, or this guy told me that you were going to beat my current provider's pricing or something crazy. And you're like, yeah, I don't think this is going to work. And so you're really just spinning your will. So the briefing is such a great way to get them into your world whenever you get them into the briefing, then you just run the play from there. And really, it's just creating that rinse and repeat process. So one of the questions that came through from our client group today was how did you actually. How do you train the sdr? What do you do to get them to be successful? Is it a daily meeting? Is it clear scripts, is it videos? Like, all these things? Anything specifically, Jamie and I can share from my perspective, but I would love to hear from your perspective, what do you think has really set your team up for success? Because this is a hard role. Like, let's be honest. Yeah, it's hard. I wouldn't want to make cold calls all day. I've done it. I want to. So what would you say sets them up for success?

So I would say first we try to deliver a message to the SDRs, of the SDRs, then to the prospects that we're not trying to sell anything. So when they're calling into these, these lists, they're not trying to sell an appointment, they're not trying to sell a service, it's not selling anything. The message is, we're. We're here to deliver education. We want you to understand what's happening, come into this, this briefing, so that we can inform you. We promise that when you get there, we're not going to sell you anything at all. So there's a lot of that, because people don't want to be sold to. They don't want. They really don't care what we're selling. And so that's the first message. The other thing that we're doing that I think has helped a lot with getting everybody comfortable on the phone and getting everybody comfortable to push people into these briefings is that we talk about adding value. Like, how much value can we add as fast as humanly possible to the relationship, to build rapport, to build confidence and for those folks to want to take the next step. So we're offering, and this was actually, I think, a suggestion that John made in one of the masterminds. He had talked about offering up free cyber training. So we offer free cyber training, we offer free checkups, we offer free dark web scans. We have all this stuff that costs us very little money, except for time.

Yep.

Then we just offer it, and then when they get into the briefing, then we take them. And at the end of the briefing, we use, hey, you want to get all this stuff set up? We need to get an engineer involved, come to the fta, which we've now recrafted to be fta plus setting up all these free things that we offer them the hump. And then as they, they go into the FTA and we're going through all the, the FTC checkups, which is like a mini csra, then it's starting to turn people's light bulbs on, right? Getting them aware that, hey, maybe we're not as buttoned up as we thought we were. Maybe my buddy who's doing it isn't the best. So we, we spend a lot of time in the mornings. We meet every morning before they go to leads Mastery, talk about what happened the prior day. We talk about clearing the deck. So like our, my role, Ryan's role, everyone's role here that's in the management chain is route creating opportunities for the SDRs and for the sales team. So what are the blockers? What do they need? How can they have a successful day? What happened yesterday, that was a blocker. And so we talk about all that stuff and then we make adjustments. Do we need to bring in the marketing team? Do we need to bring in someone to write better copy? Do we need to get a new list in because your list isn't performing the way you want it? We had problems. We were calling into accountants and we were running into tax season issues and so rotating a different profile and work on that for a little bit longer or we've had problems where show rates, where we need texting to be able to improve show rates. We want to get a video explainer, video out ahead of the briefing so that there's another warm touch point before the briefing so that we increase show rates again. All that stuff is coming back from feedback from the sdr. So we have a very quick feedback loop that allows us to make adjustments on the fly all through the week. And then we're just constantly doing that iterating, iterating, iterating. So that's, that's really what we do with them. And then I would say the other piece is we pay really well. We want to encourage people that when they have success, when we have success. And we, we had management discussions very early on that our cost of acquisition was going to be very high. We set ourselves up to be able to stomach it. We're, we're overpaying right now, understanding that as we get more leads and the leads come in faster, their cost of acquisition goes down over time. So that's part of it. Because once you get somebody trained in, you want them to stay, you really need to pay them because they're going to take a while. To have success too. Right. It might be six months to a year before they really hit where they want, but you don't want someone jumping ship four months before they really hit their clip.

Yeah.

For us, it's about making sure that everybody's happy. Everybody feels like they're part of a team, very connected. We have people in London, people in Denver, people all over the place. So those. Those team huddles, set the. Set the cadence, make sure everybody feels connected.

Yeah. To the bigger picture. Right. Like, so they feel like they're truly a part of the team and they're really contributing to the business. It's not just, I have to check off my calls for the day, then I clock out. It's they're truly invested. That's actually one of the character traits of the best dialers, best sales team that we have is whenever they're truly engaged in their problem solving and they're seeking outside support and they're seeking advice and they're asking, if they come to me and they ask for me to review their calls, I'm like, I like that. That because most people are, like, running in the opposite direction. I don't look at my calls. I want you to go review my calls. But they're asking. They're like, Lindsay, listening to this. I think I did really well here. Listen to this. And then we find ways to rinse and repeat that. So I think all of that contributes. So you mentioned something that you learned from another person inside the Mastermind, from John in the Mastermind. What would you say the power of the Mastermind, having these conversations daily, having these owners meetings, just having this place where you're like, this is what we focus on in years, lead generation. What's been that effect on your success or even the speed at which you all are moving?

Yeah. I would say as powerful as a great idea is, people's mistakes or the things they're stubbing their toes on are equally beneficial. If we can avoid a pitfall because someone else has experienced it, we can win. Stop. So we've invested. I would say our philosophy is to iterate quick, which is why we've invested so heavily in our technology stack, which is why we invested in our coaching programs. We're doing all this stuff so that we can make the mistake quick, learn from it and go and go and go. So the masterminds, as valuable as all the. All the golden nuggets are, I think the failures are probably even more valuable to us because we know, okay, that was tried. I think we talked about Yesterday. There's so much you could do just narrowing down the field of this. This is the four things that we're going to be really good at this quarter. And we're going to do it not, not volume times one. We're going to do it volume times ten.

That's right.

That we can figure out. Okay, this thing really isn't working. Which is why if we're making 1200 phone calls a day, you can very quickly understand this message doesn't work. This message.

So yeah, yeah, we have enough data, the data set's large enough that we can look at it. We can make decisions really fast. 100%. That's what from a coach's perspective, I'm able to see that across the board. So I talk about collapsing time. This is how collapsed time in there because we can see trends across the market in general. So I can see, okay, what's happening over here in Jamie's business. I'm seeing, let's say a drop off in opt in rates to this call to action. Oh, wait, I'm also seeing it over here in A, B&C's business as well to this one call to action. And then we can all make a collective decision. Let's try something else. Let's push them to this thing instead. Boom, we try it. And so then that takes us having to do four times the amount of mistakes or four times the amount of effort to come to that conclusion when I can see it across the board. And that's why we are so huge on the data, numbers, end of day, KPIs, metrics, all those things. I sound like a broken record about it. But it's so important for us to be able, like you said, I need to fail, then we can fail fast and then we can move, then we can pivot, then we can make another decision. We can do something else. And that's the game of marketing. That's, that's the game of sales. The same problems that we have right now of how do we get more leads, how do we increase our show up rates, how do we increase the conversion rate to the show up to the fda, the discovery, it's the same problems we're going to have five years from now. So I might as well learn to act and act fast and pivot quickly. It's the same problems now as it's going to be then. It's always going to be the same problems. And I think that a lot of people are looking for the one secret, give me the one campaign that's going to convert leads in 24 hours. Yeah, it doesn't exist. It's not a thing.

Yeah, no, it's a grind. And it's small changes. That's. I really can't say that enough. We make a lot of small tweaks, but you have to be able to see if it worked. You have to be able to run the reps to be able to see if it actually works. That's the one thing for us is how fast can you test out a theory and how fast can you see if it works or not and then make a small new change? But you can't make a lot of changes and you can't just implement something day one and expect it to work.

That's right. And you got to be involved in the process. I think that that's something that I've really. I've not like this, this is very notable of you and your team is that you're so involved in the process. We're having conversations, we're like, oh, I'm trying this dialer. We're doing this system or we're going to do this. You were just so involved in the process. Any mastermind or any group program or any of the stuff, it's not done for you. And if it's done for you, it's probably not done well. So you have to be invested in the process. From a coaching perspective, I think that that is like catapulted the rate at which you all have moved because you're invested in that process. So I have one final question for you, Jamie.

Sure.

12 months from now, one year from now, let's say we come, we come back, we have this conversation again a year from now. Where do you see a virtual sprout 12 months now?

Well, I could tell you what our, our 25 plan is. So we're. We're aiming for around 24 CSRAs a month. So that's where we're trying to get to. We're going to end up with probably two or three more dialers to continue pushing top of funnel. And then we're going to just move the bottleneck. The bottleneck will then move to the closing side of the house, and then we'll have a fulfillment problem. So I think we're. We're very aware that we're just creating new bottlenecks around the business. But we've loaded up this year. All the tech, all the coaching, all the process, we feel very good about. We just need to do more. Just have to do whatever we're doing now. We need to multiply it by 10 to really get where we want, because we know that we're going to miss. And so we want to be able to have enough things going well for us that the misses don't hurt.

Yeah, that's good. Awesome. Jamie, thank you so much for this. Anything else that you want to share?

No, it's the marketing stuff. I think you hit it on the head. It is absolutely a grind. But once it starts paying and then we're going to be adding more on, like we're doing in person speaking. We're doing LinkedIn ads, we're going to be doing a lot of other incremental things that are all designed to amplify what we're already doing top of funnel. So everything right now is designed to drive warm or drive semi warm back into the SDRs, not start a new strategy. It's all.

That's right.

It's already working.

Yeah. It's like a snowball. We start with something small, and then we just build and build and build and we compound on all of that. And I love that. Give. Give your SDR some warm lists, and they're gonna rock it. If they've done this with cold lists. Yeah, they're gonna. They're gonna go wild.

This is the hard stuff.

That. This is the hard stuff. Yeah. You have an awesome team. Jamie. You are rocking it. I am so glad to be a part of the process. And we are just getting started, so, yeah, we're going to come back a year from now. We're going to have this conversation again.

Fantastic.

Awesome. Thank you so much for being here, Jamie, and we will see you soon.

All right, see you later. Thanks.