Two bad options.
Here's the third.
Most companies choosing outbound help end up picking between an in-house team that takes months to ramp, or an agency that rents you activity and keeps the infrastructure when you leave. See exactly how ScaleForce compares, including head-to-head against specific agencies.
In-house team
Outsourced SDR shop
ScaleForce
What you're actually buying
Headcount and management overhead
Rented activity: dials and opens
A system you own, senior operators running it
Time to first result
3–6 months to hire and ramp
4–12 weeks, often shallow
2–4 weeks, and it compounds
When the engagement ends
You keep the people, if they stay
You keep nothing: no domains, no data
You keep the infrastructure, always
Strategic thinking
Depends entirely who you hired
Rarely included, execution only
Senior strategy, built in
Cost structure
$250K+/yr fully loaded for a real team
$3K–15K/mo, often opaque
Scoped to the leak, not a headcount plan
Flexibility
Hard to resize once hired
Long minimums, hard to exit
Built to prove value fast, then compound