u/RealPerri

Before I started my own thing, I managed a small SDR team at a previous company. We were missing activity targets constantly and everyone kept saying "I need more time to prospect," so I actually had the team log their day in 30-min blocks for two weeks. Not proud of some of what we found, but sharing because I think it's more common than people admit.

Average breakdown across 6 reps:

• Actual selling activity (calls, LinkedIn messages sent, follow-ups): 2.1 hrs/day
• Building/finding lead lists: 2.6 hrs/day
• Researching individual prospects before messaging: 1.4 hrs/day
• CRM admin/logging: 1.1 hrs/day
• Internal meetings/standups: 0.8 hrs/day

So almost half the day list building plus research was going into "getting ready to sell" rather than selling. And it wasn't because reps were slacking. Manually filtering LinkedIn Sales Nav, cross-checking against companies already in CRM, figuring out who's actually a decision maker vs just has the right title... it adds up fast per lead.

The part that got me: reps who spent MORE time on manual research per lead didn't have meaningfully better reply rates than reps who spent less time and just sent more volume to a rougher list. The research time felt productive but didn't show up in the numbers.

We ended up restructuring so one person did bulk list-building/scoring for the whole team once a week, freeing everyone else up to just execute. Reply rates didn't drop, and total meetings booked went up almost 30% in the following month, mostly just from reps having more hours to actually message and follow up.

Not sure if this is universal or just a "our process was bad" thing. For reps or managers here what % of your day would you honestly say goes to list-building/research vs actually reaching out? Curious if the split looks similar elsewhere or if I just had a uniquely inefficient setup.

Spent the last few weeks going through outreach sequences from other agency owners (some clients, some just people who shared theirs in DMs after a thread I posted). Wanted to figure out why some agencies get 15-20% reply rates on cold LinkedIn and others get crickets with seemingly similar offers.

The pattern surprised me.

Every high-performing sequence broke the "personalize every message" rule that gets repeated constantly in this sub and others. Instead they did something almost lazier looking:

1. They segmented by trigger event, not by persona.
Not "VP of Marketing at 50-200 employee SaaS companies" instead "companies that just posted a senior marketing hire in the last 14 days" or "companies whose founder just posted about hitting a funding milestone." The message template was nearly identical across the segment. The targeting logic did the personalization work, not the copywriting.

2. First message never asked for a call.
The winners asked a question that was easy to answer with one line. Almost a survey, not a pitch. Something like "curious — are you handling outbound in-house right now or is it outsourced?" Call requests came in message 3 or 4, after the person had already replied twice.

3. They scored leads before writing anything.
The ones with the best reply rates weren't writing more messages, they were writing fewer messages to better-picked people. One agency owner literally said "we send half the volume we did last year and book more calls." They were ruthless about ranking who was worth a message before spending time on copy.

4. Follow-ups did the heavy lifting.
First message reply rates were mediocre everywhere (3-6%). The gap showed up entirely in follow-up sequences. The winning agencies had 4-5 touch sequences with each message adding new value/angle, not just "bumping" the thread.

None of this is revolutionary. But it made me realize most of us (me included, for years) were optimizing the wrong variable writing better first messages instead of building better targeting/scoring/follow-up systems.

Curious if others have noticed the same thing. What's actually moved your reply rates better copy, better targeting, or better follow-up cadence? Genuinely trying to figure out where to put more effort next quarter.

They spend weeks building websites, logos, pricing pages, and service packages before talking to a single prospect.

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The agencies I've seen grow fastest usually do the opposite.

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They start conversations first.

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Even if your service isn't perfect yet, talking to real prospects teaches you more in a week than months of planning.

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If you're just getting started, how are you currently finding leads?