Martal Group and Belkins Alternatives for Small B2B Teams

A small B2B team looking beyond Martal Group or Belkins has more options than a second agency. There are seven ways to get outbound meetings.

For the full vendor-by-vendor breakdown, see our Martal Group alternatives and Belkins alternatives pages.

The seven: a smaller specialist agency, a pay-per-meeting vendor, a freelancer, a fractional head of outbound, an in-house SDR, founder-led outbound with tools, or AI SDR software.

In cash, they range from about $167 a month in tools you run yourself to $25,000 monthly at the top of Clutch's agency range. In general, the less cash you pay, the more of the work lands on you.

Pick the model first. Then compare names inside it.

Prices and profile figures below were checked in September 2026. Where a number is my own arithmetic rather than a published figure, I say so.

Who Martal Group and Belkins are, according to Clutch

Both firms have public profiles on Clutch, the B2B review platform, and those are the only source I use for them here.

Martal Group's profile lists it as founded in 2009, headquartered in Oakville, Canada, with 250 to 999 employees. Sales outsourcing makes up 70% of its listed service mix, with AI agents, call center services and email marketing at 10% each. It holds a 4.8 rating from 109 reviews.

Belkins' profile lists it as founded in 2017, headquartered in Denver, with 50 to 249 employees. It also puts sales outsourcing at 70%, alongside CRM consulting, call center services and email marketing. It holds a 4.9 rating from 234 reviews. Both profiles show a minimum project size of $1,000+.

Those are strong ratings, with the caveat that applies to any profile: a review confirms the client, not the result. Nothing below says either firm is a bad choice. The question here is narrower: what kind of help fits a small team.

A disclosure, because it matters on a page like this. Smirnov Consulting Group is a Prague-based B2B outbound lead generation agency that runs cold email and LinkedIn campaigns for founder-led B2B companies and books qualified sales calls.

I have a stake in this market, so this page names no agency to hire, mine included.

Seven ways to get outbound meetings without a large agency

1. A smaller specialist agency

Here that means a smaller team that runs the whole thing for you and focuses on fewer channels, regions or industries. You pay a monthly retainer. It fits a company with a proven offer, nobody inside who has run outbound before, and no wish to build that function first.

2. A pay-per-meeting vendor

You pay for each booked appointment instead of a monthly fee. It looks like the safest deal on paper. Everything depends on how the contract defines a meeting, and whether a no-show still costs you.

3. A freelancer

One person, hired by the hour or per meeting, who builds lists, sends and books. Cheap in cash, and it works if you can manage them and give them a clear offer and a clear buyer.

4. A fractional head of outbound

A part-time senior person who designs the system: who to target, what to say, which tools, how to measure. The role is design and management, so unless the contract says otherwise, you pay separately for whoever sends.

5. An in-house SDR

A full-time employee whose job is booking meetings. You own everything they build. You also carry recruiting, management, and the gap when they leave.

6. Founder-led outbound with tools

You, a sales data tool, a few mailboxes and a sending tool. The cheapest option in cash and the most expensive in hours. It is also the most direct way to hear whether strangers want what you sell.

7. AI SDR software

A platform that researches contacts, writes and sends sequences, and handles part of the follow-up. The machinery is cheap and fast. It still needs a good list, a clear offer, and a person reading the replies.

The seven models side by side

Every cost figure below is published by the named source; the in-house and founder-led totals are my own arithmetic from those figures, marked as planning numbers. Several figures are published by firms that sell in this market, so read them as ranges.

Where these numbers come from

Clutch's lead generation buying guide, last updated in March 2025, puts the cost of a lead generation agency anywhere from $1,000 up to $25,000 a month.

The same guide notes that most B2B lead gen companies do not publish their prices. So treat any price you read online for a specific agency as an estimate until it is in a written quote.

The narrower retainer and per-appointment ranges come from Prospeo's appointment-setting pricing guide. Prospeo is a B2B contact data company. Its retainer range repeats one agency's published figures, and its ranges carry no stated method.

The freelancer rate is from Upwork's appointment setter cost page, which shows a median band of $10 to $20 an hour. Those are listed rates; what a buyer pays can differ.

Knex, a marketplace for fractional executives, lists a typical fractional VP of sales at $4,000 to $12,000 a month.

For a company setting up its first sales process, the page puts the starting point at around $4,000 to $7,000, and pipeline-building work at $5,000 to $10,000. Enterprise SaaS backgrounds in major tech hubs run $12,000 to $18,000. That is the closest published role to a fractional head of outbound.

For the SDR, Payscale's data (324 profiles, updated September 1, 2026) shows an average base of $43,709, with total pay ranging from $36,000 up to $77,000 yearly.

In the BLS employer cost survey for June 2026, wages are 70.0% of private-industry compensation cost and benefits 30.0%. Dividing the pay range by 0.7 gives the $51,000 to $110,000 planning figure.

That figure may run high, because Payscale's total pay already includes bonus, commission and profit sharing.

The founder-led floor adds LinkedIn Sales Navigator Core at US$119.99 a month to Instantly's Growth plan at $47 a month on monthly billing. Domains, mailboxes and contact data cost extra.

The AI SDR tiers are AiSDR's own published prices. Cleanlist's AI SDR pricing roundup uses the same two tiers as the ends of its market range: $250 a month up to $2,500 and more.

On AiSDR's pricing page, Solo is $250 monthly with no commitment and covers 200 contacts, while Explore ($900) and Scale ($2,500) need a quarterly contract and cover 800 and 2,500 contacts.

Even the $250 tier bundles a domain and three mailboxes, which is why the ownership question matters here too.

What six meetings a month costs under each model

Now the arithmetic a small team actually needs. Assume you want 6 held meetings a month. That number is my own assumption for a small team, and the models will not all produce it. I hold it fixed so the cost difference is visible. Pay-per-meeting vendors bill per booked meeting, so that row assumes every booked meeting is held.

For the freelancer I assume 80 hours a month, about 20 a week, working on the $167 tool stack. The in-house SDR row adds the same $167 in tools to the yearly cost with benefits divided by 12. Everything else uses the ranges above.

The cheap rows are cheap because you are the missing line item. Founder-led at $28 a meeting assumes your evenings are free. The freelancer row assumes you can hand over an offer and a buyer description good enough to act on.

Fixed costs shrink per meeting as volume grows. Per-meeting prices do not. Double the meetings to 12 and the retainer falls to $250 to $667 a meeting, the SDR to about $371 to $778. The pay-per-meeting price stays exactly where it was.

The fractional row is incomplete on its own. Add the freelancer to execute and the pair costs $4,967 to $8,767 a month, or $828 to $1,461 a meeting at 6.

The AI SDR number that gets quoted

You will see lower AI figures online. The same Cleanlist roundup (July 2026), from a company that sells data enrichment, works out about $88 to $125 per booked meeting in its main AI platform examples, against $533 for a human SDR.

Look at the inputs before you use it. The model assumes 85% of emails delivered, a 3% reply rate on delivered emails, and 40% of replies turning into meetings.

Cut the reply rate to 1% and the meeting count falls to a third, so the cost per meeting triples, to about $264 to $375. Your list and your offer decide most of that reply rate, whichever software sends the emails.

Which model fits the way you sell

The simplest split is the shape of your sale.

A short, simple sale into a large market rewards volume and speed. Software and per-meeting deals can carry a lot of it, as long as someone reads replies daily.

A long, consultative sale into a few hundred accounts rewards judgment. Every conversation is expensive to lose, and the person answering has to understand the business.

The rule I use on AI is to automate what the buyer never sees and keep a person on everything they do, and I explain the line between automation and people in a separate post.

One check applies to every row. Outbound multiplies an offer that already works and cannot create one that does not. If you cannot tell where your own offer stands, run the self-checks in who outbound works for before choosing any model.

What a new name will not change

This is the part of the decision no table shows.

One founder in the US came to us after three agencies. All three had overpromised and under-delivered, and all three had started at the same point: sending.

Nobody had fixed the offer, the message, the website or the profiles first. I told the full story, with the numbers, in the piece on lists over copy.

In a LinkedIn post in February 2025 I put it this way: "Lead generation is like adding fuel to a fire - but it doesn't create the fire." It is the same point behind the eight questions I would ask if I were the one hiring an agency.

Every model on this page is fuel. A fourth agency, a freelancer or an AI tool will each send more of whatever you already are. So when you shortlist an alternative, ask what will be different this time, and be honest about whether the answer sits with them or with you.