How to find and hire a B2B call center

You’re searching for a B2B call center because your team is maxed out and you needed to fill your pipeline yesterday. Your account executives (AEs) are spread thin, handling both prospecting and closing. Yet, building an in-house SDR team feels too slow.

This is when most companies begin shopping for affordable call centers.

What most companies don’t understand is that the call center that costs $30 an hour but delivers zero qualified meetings is infinitely more expensive than one at $75 an hour that fills your calendar with sales-qualified leads (SQLs).

The difference comes down to how you evaluate partners. If you treat call centers as a commodity — comparing hourly rates, agent count, and pricing models — expect to switch vendors within six months.

But if you ask, "Which metric will you move?" you can find a partner that becomes an extension of your sales team.

This guide shows exactly how to evaluate B2B call centers using a metric-first framework, one that will help you hit your annual revenue targets.

Why most companies hire the wrong call center

Most companies ask the wrong questions during evaluation. When you lead with “What’s your hourly rate?” or “How many agents will we get?” you’ve already signaled that you view this as a purchase instead of a partnership.

Most people think of call centers as people you hire to make calls. You put them on the phone, and that’s it. In reality, it’s not just about the people. It’s about how you deploy those people and what metric you push.

Take GTCX, for example. They provide nearshore call centers for e-commerce brands, but their focus is specifically on conversion and upsell. Their team members are trained to follow up with customers and convert them into members, subscribers, or one-time sales. That’s a good example of what a call center should be: A partner that focuses on the specific metric you’re pushing.

At Belkins, we take the same approach for B2B appointment setting. We convert cold leads into warm leads. We handle objections by leveraging frameworks like Challenger Sales to get attention, qualify prospects, and put them in touch with clients when there’s a genuine need. That’s what our team focuses on. No customer service calls. No follow-ups on existing accounts. Just B2B sales, B2B lead generation, and appointment setting.

Here’s what hiring with a commodity mindset approach looks like compared to a metric-first approach:

Commodity mindset approach:

• Compares per-hour costs across vendors
• Focuses on calls per day metrics
• Evaluates based on which seems most affordable
• Views it as hiring phone agents

Metric-first approach:

• Starts with: “We need X SQLs per month to hit our annual target.”
• Asks: “What’s your conversion rate from cold call to a qualified meeting?”
• Evaluates: “What’s the full system you deploy to hit that metric?”
• Views it as acquiring a revenue-generation capability

The cost of cheap call centers

The tangible cost is wasted money and wasted time during an important selling period.

We’re only going to have Q1 2026 once. Timing matters because market conditions change. Customers may not be as willing and able to pay in the future.

Here’s what failure commonly looks like:

Month 1–2: Honeymoon period

• Onboarding, training, and system setup
• First calls going out
• You’re optimistic

Month 3–4: Reality check

• Meetings are being booked, but they’re not qualified
• Your AEs waste time on calls with non-decision-makers
• No real pipeline movement
• You request changes to the qualification criteria

Month 5–6: Breaking point

• Still no improvement in meeting quality
• You’ve now missed an entire quarter of revenue opportunity
• Your annual target is in jeopardy
• You start looking for alternatives

The wrong partner won’t give you insights into what happened or what can be done to fix it. It could be issues with your value proposition, product, positioning statement, or your competitors, but the right partner would have identified that and generated insights for you to improve.

What you’re actually buying from call centers

With B2B sales-focused calls, it’s not just who’s making the calls. It’s the entire infrastructure behind those calls.

You’re buying access to a complete SDR system. One that includes the strategy, tools, specialists, and frameworks that make outbound actually work.

Generic call center deployment:

• A few phone agents
• A script you provide
• An account manager for reporting

B2B sales-focused system:

• SDR specialists trained in objection handling (not script reading)
• RevOps specialist (CRM integration, tech stack setup, and reporting)
• Lead sourcing specialist (building and enriching your target lists)
• Copywriter (crafting positioning, messaging, and email sequences)
• Account director (strategy, optimization, and performance analysis)
• Strategist (go-to-market alignment and campaign planning)
• Marketing manager (supporting omnichannel campaigns)

All of these people focus on getting prospects converted to deals, or whatever your key goals are. They’re also thinking about what can be done to support the callers.

The omnichannel advantage

Call centers that specialize in making calls can be deployed for various types of campaigns, such as e-commerce, telecommunications, or agencies. You can have them call existing lists, customer lists, new lists, and contacts from web ads. At the end of the day, you’re only deploying a few resources. Probably, a few callers and an account manager.

B2B sales and lead generation companies that offer a calling aspect don’t rely solely on calling. They rely on omnichannel. They have other solutions, systems, tools, and people that complement the calling part. This is what makes calling so much more effective than when it’s used on its own.

Here are some figures from our internal data. Let’s say you just make calls and get two or three meetings in a time period. If you start combining calls with emails, this number increases by 20%. If you do calling, emailing, and LinkedIn, this number goes another 20–25%However, this is only relevant with the omnichannel approach, where conversations and channels interconnect in a seamless experience for the prospect.

To take an omnichannel approach, here are some beginner questions to consider:

• Where are you generating the leads, and how are you acquiring those leads?
• What’s the quality of the leads?
• What script are you using?
• What tools do you have (local calling IDs, whitelisted calling IDs, or verified phone numbers)?
• How many times do you follow up?
• Can you also follow up via email and LinkedIn, or is it just a call?
• What’s your no-show rate and your process for reducing it?
• How are you working with my CRM?

Omnichannel is the entire solution. It’s the Mercedes-Benz of sales and marketing. If you’re thinking about call centers as a simple resource instead of a complex solution, that’s the biggest mistake you can make.

How to evaluate call centers using a metrics-first approach

Start with your revenue target and work backwards. Everything else — pricing model, team size, and technology — should be assessed based on whether it helps hit that metric.

Step 1: Identify the gaps in your pipeline

“We need more meetings,” is not a specific enough target. Here’s a common experience for us at Belkins:

When a VP of sales says to us, “We need pipeline,” what they really mean is they’re looking for an alternative way to generate pipeline, because the sources they’ve been using aren’t working anymore. If the company has a VP of Sales, it’s probably already a mid-market company generating $20–$50 million annually. Typically, they’ve been securing contracts through direct sales, conferences, referrals, existing customers, and possibly through ads or marketing.

At the end of the day, they lack a comprehensive end-to-end playbook to help them forecast, plan, and understand how to scale. They don’t know how to move from here to there. They may not have the right talent or know what kind of leads they need. They might not know what to do with the resources they have or what kind of tactics or strategies are currently working.

That’s where we come in. We determine whether you need 100, 500, or 2,000 opportunities, for example. Then we figure out whether you need one, two, or five SDR teams and more marketing, webinars, playbooks, or ads.

Maybe you need to reposition and update your messaging, website, branding, CRM, or sales enablement content.

Filling your pipeline is the successful outcome of an effective journey. Most of the time, when customers say “We need pipeline,” they just don’t know how to get there.

Do the math to know your revenue gap

1. Start with your annual revenue goal. Where do you need to be by the end of the year? If you’re currently at $8M and targeting $15M, you have a $7M gap to close.
2. Calculate deals needed. Divide your revenue gap by your average deal size. If your average contract value (ACV) is $50K, you need 140 new deals ($7M ÷ $50K = 140 deals).
3. Factor in your close rate. If your AEs close 20% of qualified opportunities, work backwards. To close 140 deals, you need 700 sales-qualified opportunities (140 ÷ 0.20 = 700 SQLs).
4. Account for the current pipeline. If you already have 250 SQLs projected for the year from inbound, referrals, and existing outbound efforts, subtract that from your total need. Your actual gap: 450 SQLs (700 - 250 = 450).
5. Translate to monthly targets. If you’re starting at the beginning of Q1, you have 12 months to complete the task. That’s roughly 38 qualified meetings per month you need from your new call center partner (450 ÷ 12 ≈ 38 SQLs a month).

Once you have something concrete to evaluate, ask, “Can this partner consistently deliver 38 qualified meetings per month?”

Define what “qualified” means

The calculation above only works if you and the vendor agree on what “qualified” means. Before any vendor conversation, document your qualification criteria:

• Decision-maker level: Are you targeting directors or VPs and above? What titles specifically
• Budget confirmation: Do they need a confirmed budget or just budget authority?
• Timeline: Are you looking for deals that close within three, six, or 12 months?
• Pain point validation: What specific problem must they acknowledge having?
• Company fit: Consider revenue range, employee count, industry, and location.

Write it all down. Share it with every vendor you evaluate. Ask them, “Based on these criteria, how many qualified meetings does one of your SDRs typically generate per month for similar clients?”

If they can’t give you a number, or if their definition of qualified is looser than yours, you’ll end up with meetings your AEs can’t close.

Step 2: Ask what metric they will move

This should be the first question in every vendor conversation. How they answer tells you everything about whether they’re a resource provider or a sales-focused partner.

Red flag answers:

• We’ll make 100 calls per day, per agent.
• We’ll reach out to 5,000 contacts per month.
• We have a 5% connect rate.

Green flag answers:

• Based on your ICP and deal size, we typically see X SQLs per month per SDR.
• Our goal is qualified meetings. We define that as decision-makers who’ve agreed to a discovery call and showed up.
• We aim for X% SQL-to-opportunity conversion rate; if your AEs can’t convert at that rate, we’ll help identify whether it’s a qualification or sales execution issue.

If they can’t articulate which specific business metric they’ll move and by how much, walk away.

Step 3: Ask about their entire system

Once you know what metric they’ll move, ask HOW they’ll move it. This is where you separate the dialer shops from B2B sales-focused systems.

Questions about lead sourcing:

• Do I provide the list, or do you build it?
• What data sources do you use?
• How do you verify contact accuracy?
• How do you handle list exhaustion?

Questions about the multichannel approach:

• Is this just cold calling, or do you run coordinated sequences?
• How do email and LinkedIn integrate with calling?
• Do you have local caller IDs and verified numbers?

Questions about CRM integration:

• How do you log activities in our CRM?
• Can we listen to call recordings?
• What does your reporting dashboard show?
• How do we track attribution from first touch to closed deal?

Questions about quality assurance:

• How do you define a qualified meeting?
• What happens if we get a bad meeting — do we still pay?
• How do you handle no-shows?
• What’s your solution when results aren’t hitting targets?

Making a lot of calls is not enough. Successful calling requires sophisticated systems, strategy, and support.

Step 4: Ask about sales ramp time and specialization

You can’t afford to waste time on a lengthy onboarding process. And you definitely can’t afford to be someone’s first client in your industry.

Ramp time questions:

• How quickly can you start calling?
• What does onboarding require from us?
• When will we see the first meetings?

Specialization questions:

• Have you worked with companies in [your industry] before?
• What’s your team’s background?
• Can you show us call recordings from similar campaigns?
• What’s the typical tenure of your SDRs?

Fast sales ramp time plus industry specialization means you’re not their guinea pig. You’re benefiting from proven playbooks they’ve already refined with similar clients.

The hidden cost of building in-house

When people think about calling and call centers, they often focus solely on making calls. The same goes with an internal SDR team. You think, “I need people to make calls.” You will need a freelancer, an agency, an outsourced solution, or something else.

However, besides the actual calls, you will need a person or team who will think about the calling strategy in a way that works with your marketing plan.

Questions you need to answer:

• What else can we do to amplify calling and make it more effective?
• Can we do more marketing, such as email, LinkedIn, social selling, content, sales enablement, webinars, conferences, or ads?
• Do I have a team for that?
• Would that team collaborate closely with the callers?
• How would callers work with them?
• Where will the callers obtain leads?
• How will the leads be enriched and added to my CRM?
• What will the reporting look like?
• What will the messaging look like?

These questions are obvious when you do B2B lead generation, but when companies first start thinking about them, they realize they need all these people and tools, which leads to these questions:

• How do you procure these tools?
• How do you make the contracts?
• How do you find people who think about this with experience and who have done it before?
• How do you recruit, train, and maintain them?
• How will they work with the rest of the marketing team?

Specialized partners have the answers to those questions. Working with one lets you tap into proven solutions rather than having to spend your time, resources, and effort figuring everything out.

Your role in making this work

Assign yourself or a team member as the main liaison and point of contact for your call center partner. Always make time for them. Set a weekly recurring meeting and a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel.

Having a positive and proactive mindset to play the long game cannot be overstated.

Think about your point of contact as, “Hey, this is my new team. They’re working with me to make things happen. This is not their job. It’s our job.”

With this type of attitude, you can actually make this work.

Additionally, stay proactive, not reactive. Don’t sit back on your heels and observe, judge, or look for mistakes.

Most customers put these partnerships with call centers on autopilot. They don’t check in regularly, don’t bother with quality assurance, don’t create feedback loops, and never improve.

The best call center in the world can’t succeed with a client who disappears after signing the contract.

Decision-making checklist

The perfect partner is the one who is right for your specific situation, and you’re also right for them. When you’re ready to pull the trigger on a new partnership, here’s a quick checklist to use:

Before you talk to vendors:

• Calculate your pipeline gap.
• Define what a qualified meeting means for your business.
• Identify your must-have vs. nice-to-have requirements.
• Set your budget range based on ROI, not cost.
• Assign an internal champion who will manage the relationship.

During vendor conversations, here are some things to ask:

• What metric will you move?
• What system will you deploy?
• Show me results from similar clients.
• How quickly can we ramp?
• What do you need from us to succeed?

Before you sign:

• Check references
• Review sample call recordings
• Understand total cost
• Clarify success metrics and reporting cadence
• Map out the first 90 days in detail

You’re no longer comparing hourly rates or number of callers. You’re comparing whether they can deliver the pipeline you need to hit your target. That’s a question with a clear answer.

The right call center is the one that makes the best partner

The biggest mistake companies make when hiring a call center is evaluating the wrong criteria.

When you optimize for the lowest hourly rate, you get cheap calls that go nowhere. When you optimize for most features available, you get complexity without results. When you optimize for the biggest team, you get scale at the expense of quality.

However, when you optimize for a specific metric, you get a partner focused on meaningful outcomes for your business. When you optimize for a complete system, you get infrastructure that actually works. When you optimize for specialization, you get expertise that compounds over time.

When you optimize for partnership, you get strategic insights on how to grow your business.

You’re not looking for vendors. You’re looking for a revenue partner who can help you close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. When you find that partner and show up as a true partner, the pipeline follows.

Ready to find a revenue partner who can close your pipeline gap?  Contact us to discuss how Belkins can help you grow your business.