Where to find SDR outsourcing for insurtech companies in the UK

Cormac Repman
3 days ago
5 min read

The SDR Crisis in Insurtech

Insurtech founders tell us the same story: they need to fill their pipeline, but hiring a sales development rep costs £25-35k annually plus benefits, and that person takes 90-120 days to ramping. You can't wait that long when you're trying to prove traction to investors or hit quarterly targets.

The alternative sounds obvious: outsource to an SDR service. But finding one that actually understands your product, your buyer, and your market is exponentially harder than it should be.

Why Traditional SDR Outsourcing Fails for Insurtech

Most SDR agencies treat your outreach like they treat everyone else's. They've got templates, they've got dialer software, and they've got a formula. For insurance distribution platforms, underwriting tech, or claims automation, that approach collapses immediately.

Your buyer isn't a generic "VP of Sales." It's a managing director at a Lloyd's syndicate, or a head of distribution at a broker with 20+ employees, or a compliance officer at an MGA. The conversation is about regulatory risk, integration complexity, and revenue impact. You can't template your way into that.

We've analyzed over 2,000 insurtech cold call outcomes, and the difference between a 4% and 12% connect rate comes down to one thing: does the caller understand what your software actually does?

Where Most Companies Look (And Why It Often Fails)

Generalist agencies (think Outbound, Salesloft partners, etc.) focus on volume. They'll book meetings, but 60-70% of them are unqualified because they're not validating the fit before the call.

Freelance SDRs on Upwork or Fiverr sound cheap. You'll pay £8-15/hour. You'll also spend 40% of that time on training and 30% of your qualified leads will disappear because the person left for better pay.

In-house team building is tempting when headcount is cheap, but hiring British SDRs (especially ones who understand B2B fintech) means competing with every other SaaS company in London. Your retention drops below 40% annually.

Brokers and traditional sales consultants understand your market intimately, but they're not built for rapid iteration. You're locked into long contracts and paying 20-30% placement fees on top of salary costs.

The Emerging Model: Pay-Per-Meeting Teams

The insurer and fintech market has shifted toward pay-per-meeting outsourcing, where you only pay for qualified meetings booked, not headcount or hours.

This model works because:

You control the narrative. You write the scripts, approve the data sources, and define what qualified actually means. There's no incentive for the team to book bad meetings and inflate their metrics.

Alignment is forced. If they're only paid when you get a real opportunity, they'll spend time understanding your product instead of sprinting through a call list.

You can scale incrementally. Need 10 meetings this month? Book them. Need 40 next month? You're not paying for headcount you don't use.

How to Evaluate an SDR Outsourcing Partner

Before you commit, ask these specific questions:

On their process:

What's your average call connect rate? (For insurance specifically.) Anything under 5% is a red flag.

How do you validate someone actually works in the industry I'm calling? (They should have a screening process, not just use a purchased list.)

Walk me through your typical call script. If it sounds generic, keep looking.

How many iterations will we do on messaging before launch? (You want at least 2-3 test calls before they scale.)

On their infrastructure:

What CRM do you use? You want it integrated with your own stack, not siloed in theirs.

How do you track call outcomes? (Listen to calls. Not everything can be coded into a dropdown.)

What's your average follow-up cadence? (They should persist, not give up after one call.)

On their team:

How long have your callers been doing B2B outreach in fintech or insurance? (Under 18 months is usually a sign they'll turn over quickly.)

What's your turnover rate? Anything above 30% annually means institutional knowledge walks out the door.

Building vs. Buying for Insurtech

If you've got more than £15k/month to spend on pipeline building, you'll likely want a hybrid approach:

In-house or agency for inbound and partnership development (these need continuity and company knowledge).

Outsourced team for cold outreach (this is where pay-per-meeting makes sense; standardize the work, let someone else handle the execution).

The companies we see winning in insurtech run a dual source model: they're building relationships directly with brokers and MGAs at events and conferences, while simultaneously running cold campaigns to test new geographies and buyer personas.

Real Numbers That Matter

Here's what we see in the UK insurtech market right now:

4-6% connect rate on cold calls to direct lines (not reception).

20-25% meeting-to-qualified-lead conversion (meaning someone from your product team says "this is actually valuable").

£120-180 cost-per-qualified-meeting with an experienced pay-per-meeting provider.

40-50% of meetings turning into pilot conversations if your product actually solves a real problem.

If you're paying more than £300 per meeting, you're subsidizing poor targeting or low-quality research.

Location Matters: UK vs. International

The UK has a concentrated insurance ecosystem. Most of your real buyers are in London, Manchester, and Edinburgh. A good SDR team will know this and focus on targeted research rather than blasting cold lists.

American SDR firms often treat the UK as a secondary market. They're using call lists that mix in receptionists and marketing coordinators. Find a provider with local UK calling teams who understand that "broker" doesn't mean the same thing as it does in the US.

What Nurturance Does Differently

We run cold calling teams through Glencoco, our pay-per-meeting marketplace. Every caller on our team has ran at least two B2B outbound campaigns. We don't hire SDRs; we hire people who've proven they can have real conversations.

Before we pick up the phone on your behalf, we spend two days in your product. We run test calls. We validate our research against your ideal customer profile. We write scripts together, test different openers, and measure what actually moves the needle.

You only pay for meetings we book. If you book 20 and convert 8, your cost-per-customer is transparent. If we're booking the wrong people, you tell us, and we adjust immediately.

For insurtech specifically, we've worked with underwriting platforms, distribution tech, and claims automation companies. We know the language. We know that a managing director at Lloyd's has 10 minutes, not 30. We know compliance conversations happen with the CTO, not the VP of Sales.

If you're tired of hiring SDRs and watching them quit after 14 months, or paying 25% fees to traditional brokers, let's talk. Book a call to map out a cold outreach strategy for your insurtech product. No retainers, no long contracts, just meetings that convert.