Alternatives / vs. hiring an SDR
An SDR costs more than you think. And you build the system anyway.
This is the comparison most sales leaders are actually making, and it is rarely made honestly. The decision is not £1,500 a month against a £35,000 salary. It is one junior person, who still needs a list, a tool stack, a manager and six months, against a system that arrives built. The market has also moved underneath the role: it now takes roughly 1,300 activities to book an outbound meeting, against about 300 five years ago, which is a productivity collapse no individual hire can absorb.
The hire
- £30,000-40,000 base, plus employer NI, pension, laptop, holiday and sick cover
- £500-1,500 a month of data and sequencing tools on top, which you still have to choose and run
- Three to six months to productivity, and the industry norm is that many leave inside eighteen
- Needs managing. If you are the CRO, the management time is yours
- The system lives in their head and their inbox, so it leaves when they do
The operated system
- From £1,500 a month, with a kicker only when a qualified meeting is held
- Sourcing, signals, compliance, drafting and the approval queue included, not extra
- Live in a fortnight, because warm-up sets the clock rather than onboarding
- Ten minutes of your day approving, and no line management
- The machine is documented and transfers to you, so an SDR you hire later inherits it running
These are not really alternatives. The honest version is that the system should come first and the person second: an SDR who joins a working engine is productive in weeks instead of quarters, and an SDR who joins nothing spends their first two quarters building what we would hand you on day fourteen. If you already have SDRs, this is the thing that makes them faster rather than the thing that replaces them.
Decide with real numbers.
The scoping call takes thirty minutes and ends with the first custom signal defined. No minimum term either way.
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