For a sales team under twenty reps, the shortlist is short on purpose. SalesRoads is the clearest buy if you want a dedicated rep and a published number ($9,950 per four weeks). CIENCE is the only one of the four with a real entry point under $3,000 a month. Belkins is the one to call if you want to buy appointments rather than hours. Martal Group is worth a quote if you would rather pay partly on commission. All four figures below were read off the vendors' own pricing pages in September 2026.
The reason this list is four names and not fifteen is that most roundups in this category are written by somebody selling one of the entries, and the ranking follows the affiliate deal. What follows is narrower and duller: who publishes a price, what the price is attached to, and which of these makes sense when the entire company has six people in sales.
The floor problem, which decides most of this
Outsourced sales development has a price floor and it sits at roughly $5,000 a month. Below that there is no dedicated rep to rent, because the agency cannot staff a trained person, a researcher and an account manager against it. This is the single fact that changes the answer for a small team, and it is the one the roundups skip.
So the real question is not which agency is best. It is whether your monthly outbound budget clears the floor. If it does, the four below are a reasonable shortlist. If it does not, the honest answer is that outsourcing is not available to you at any quality worth buying, and the section further down is the one to read.
What the four publish, checked September 2026
| Agency | Published price | Model | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| SalesRoads | $9,950 per 4 weeks | Dedicated rep | You want one named person and a number you can budget |
| CIENCE | $2,000 a month, reps extra | Strategic team plus optional rep capacity | You want the strategy layer without buying a full rep yet |
| Belkins | Not published | Yearly appointment target | You would rather buy meetings than hours |
| Martal Group | Not published | Retainer, two tiers add commission | You want part of the cost tied to closed revenue |
Read from each vendor's public pricing page in September 2026. Agency pricing changes without notice, so treat these as the starting point of a conversation rather than a quote.
Which one fits which situation
SalesRoads, if you want a rep and a budget line
SalesRoads lists full SDR appointment setting at $9,950 per four weeks, and a two rep package at $16,750 per four week engagement, which is $8,375 per rep. Publishing that at all puts them ahead of most of the category on the only dimension a small buyer can evaluate before a sales call. Thirteen four week cycles a year makes the single rep engagement about $129,000, which is close enough to a fully loaded US SDR salary that the comparison is genuinely a coin flip on cost and a clear win for the agency on risk. You are not the one recruiting, and you are not the one carrying the ramp when the rep quits in month five.
CIENCE, if the budget is the constraint
CIENCE is the only one of the four that publishes something a small team can actually start with: $2,000 a month for a strategic team and $499 a month for their platform. SDR capacity is priced separately and by region, at $1,500 to $3,500 a month offshore, $2,500 to $4,500 in Europe and $4,500 to $6,500 in the United States, with a $5,000 one time system setup and $1,000 onboarding per rep. Read the setup fee twice. On a six month pilot, $5,000 amortized is $833 a month, and that changes the comparison against a subscription materially.
Belkins, if you want to buy the outcome
Belkins does not publish a price. What it publishes instead is a target: three tiers sold against 30, 100 and 200 plus appointments a year, including one explicitly aimed at lean teams and delivered through partner agencies in their ecosystem. Buying an outcome is the right instinct, and it moves the whole negotiation onto the definition of an appointment. Get held rather than booked written into the agreement. No show rates on cold booked meetings are high enough that the difference between the two words is most of the value of the contract.
Martal Group, if you want skin in the game
Martal also quotes privately. Their published structure is four tiers: outbound lead generation on a flat monthly fee, inbound lead generation in three packages, and two larger tiers that add a sales commission on top of the retainer. Commission structures suit a fast closing motion and get expensive on a long enterprise cycle, because you are paying a percentage on a deal your own account executive worked for nine months after the introduction. Cap the commission window before signing. Six months from introduction is a common ceiling and it is worth asking for.
Six questions to send before the first call
- What is the minimum term and the notice period? Three to six months is normal. You will know by week eight whether it is working and you will be committed well past that.
- Does mail leave from my domain or from lookalike domains you bought? If it is lookalikes, ask who owns them at the end of the contract. If it is yours, your spam complaint rate is the number that follows you, not them.
- What daily send volume per mailbox will you run? Get a number. Google's bulk sender guidance asks senders to keep the spam rate in Postmaster Tools under 0.30%, and it is your domain that pays when a campaign crosses it.
- Who writes the emails, and can I see three real ones from a client in my segment? Redacted is fine. A refusal is an answer.
- What happens to the retainer while a rep is being replaced? Turnover in this role is high. Silence on this question means the invoice does not pause.
- Do I get the list, the sequences and the reply data when we stop? Ask for the export format in writing. Some agreements treat the list as the agency's asset.
The longer version of this, including the data provenance questions that catch most vendors out, is in the b2b prospecting software checklist.
If you are under the floor
Say your outbound budget is $1,500 a month. No agency on this page will staff a dedicated rep for that, and the ones that say yes are selling you an offshore researcher with a template. You have two real options and it is worth being blunt about both.
The first is to hire, which is a bigger commitment than it looks: a median US SDR package of about $85,000 on target earnings lands near $130,000 fully loaded once payroll taxes, benefits, tools and a share of a manager are counted. If that is the direction, the sourcing and screening side of it has its own tooling now and you do not need a recruiter on retainer to put a ranked shortlist of candidates in front of you before you spend a week on interviews.
The second is to do the sending yourself and buy back only the hours that are actually expensive, which are research and drafting. That is where an AI SDR sits: it reads the account, writes the first touch, cites each factual claim to a source or marks it unverified, scores the spam risk, and stops at the daily cap you set. It does not dial, it does not qualify a live conversation, and it does not book anything on your calendar. Somebody on your side still reviews and sends. If that person exists, the arithmetic is hard to argue with. If they do not, the subscription is a line item that produces nothing and the agency is the better buy despite the price.
The number to hold all of them to
Cost per held meeting, not per booked meeting, and not per email sent. At the published SalesRoads rate of $9,950 a month, twelve held meetings is $829 each and twenty five is $398 each. Run the same division on whatever the alternative costs you, then compare. The full breakdown, including where an agency still wins on that number, is on the sdr outsourcing page.
Two things distort this comparison and both are worth pricing in. Agencies quote booked meetings because no show rates on cold booked meetings are high, so a booked number and a held number can differ by a third. And software costs look artificially low until you count the hours your own team spends reviewing drafts. A realistic software line is the subscription plus five to eight hours a week of somebody's attention.
How to run the six weeks
Whichever way you go, structure the first six weeks so that it produces a decision rather than a feeling.
- Pick one segment and one offer. Two of each and you will not know which variable moved.
- Write down the number that means yes before week one. Held meetings per month, at a cost per meeting you would repeat. Deciding this afterwards guarantees you talk yourself into the answer you already paid for.
- Watch the complaint rate weekly, not the reply rate. Reply rate tells you about the offer. Complaint rate tells you whether you still have a domain in six months, and the requirements that apply to a commercial email are not optional. The seven of them are set out in the can spam compliance checklist.
- Read ten outbound emails yourself. Not the report. The emails. If there is a factual claim about a prospect's company that nobody can source, you have found the failure mode that scales worst, and you have found it while it is still ten emails rather than four thousand.
The shortlist stays four names because four is how many are worth a call at this size. If none of them clear your budget, that is information, not a dead end, and the answer is usually to buy the hours back rather than the headcount. Either way, price it against a real account before the first vendor call: what an outsourced SDR team costs per meeting is a number you can work out in ten minutes and it will run the whole negotiation for you.