Buying

Cold email agency vs hiring another BDR

By Travis Heurtelou · 6 min read · October 10, 2026

The short version

A BDR is good at conversations. At companies that prospect by hand, much of a BDR's week goes to building lists and writing emails instead.
An agency is good at volume and deliverability: the domains, the inboxes, the list, the sending. It can't sit on a call for you.
If your reps spend more time in ZoomInfo than on the phone, the gap is the sending system, and another hire adds more of the same week.
Most companies end up with both: the agency fills the calendar, the reps run the calls.

What a BDR's week actually looks like

Ask a BDR at a company that prospects by hand where the hours go. Most of the week is pulling names from ZoomInfo or Apollo, checking titles on LinkedIn, copying emails into a sequence tool, and writing first lines. The part you hired them for, talking to buyers, gets what's left.

That's a reasonable setup at 20 emails a day. It breaks at 200, because one person can't research, write and send that many and still answer the replies the same afternoon.

What each one is good at

Job	In-house BDR	Cold email agency
Building the list	Slow, by hand, one account at a time	Built in bulk from signals, verified before sending
Sending infrastructure	Usually sends from the company domain or a shared tool	Dedicated domains and inboxes, warmed, never your main domain
Daily volume	Dozens	Hundreds to thousands, spread across many inboxes
Knowing your product	Learns it over months	Learns it in an onboarding call, and only to the depth an email needs
Running the call	Yes	No
Leaving	Takes the habits and the pipeline knowledge with them	The domains and the playbook stay with the system

How to tell which one you're short on

Look at last month's calendar for your reps. If they had open slots and nobody to fill them, you're short on conversations started, and that's a sending problem. If the slots were full and deals still stalled, you're short on people who can run a sales call, and that's a hire.

A second test: count how many new accounts your team emailed for the first time last month. Teams that prospect by hand usually land in the low hundreds. A cold email system reaches that many in a day or two without anyone on your team touching a list.

What changes if you hire an agency

Your reps stop building lists. The replies that come back are people who answered an email and said they want to talk, with the thread attached, so the rep starts the call knowing why the buyer replied.

You also give up some control. The agency writes the emails, and they'll be shorter and plainer than what your marketing team would write. Read every one before it goes out and push back on anything that doesn't sound like your company. A good agency will want that.

When a BDR is still the right call

If your buyers number in the dozens, every one of them deserves a researched, hand-written note and a phone call. Cold email at volume doesn't help when the whole market fits on one page. The same goes for deals that need a technical conversation before anyone will reply: an agency can open the door, but your rep has to be ready to walk through it the same day.

If your reps have open calendar time and spend it in a data tool, fix the sending before you add headcount. If their calendars are full, hire.

Questions

Can we run an agency and an in-house BDR at the same time?

Yes. Split by account so the same person never gets two cold emails from you in the same month. The agency sends to the new accounts, the BDR works the named accounts and every reply the agency passes over.

Will an agency send from our domain?

A good one won't. Cold email goes out from separate domains so a bad week never touches the address your customers and invoices use.

How fast does an agency start sending?

New inboxes need about four weeks of warm-up before they send cold at full volume. An agency that already keeps a warmed pool can start sooner.

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