Another SDR won't help

Hey there,

Kevin here from Astris with something you need to hear.

I was on a call last week with a Head of Revenue at a fast-growing company. Smart operator. Knows his numbers. Outbound was struggling and his company was pushing him to hire another SDR.

He knew it wouldn't work.

"Another SDR isn't going to really help me out with that," he told me. "I need expertise, not more bodies."

He's right. And if you're in the same position, here's why.

The Math That Nobody Shows You

When you hire an SDR, the timeline looks like this: 3.2 months to reach full productivity according to Bridge Group research.

But here's what that actually means. For those 3.2 months, you're paying full salary while they're producing maybe 30-40% of what you need. They're working, they're trying, but they don't have the knowledge yet.

They haven't built the confidence. They're learning on your dime and burning through your prospect list while they figure it out.

And then there's tenure. Average SDR stays 1.8 years.

So you get 3 months of ramp, then 15 months of productivity if you're lucky, then they leave for an AE role and you start over.

Now let's talk real cost. You see an $80K-$100K salary and think that's the investment.

It's not.

Factor in recruiting, onboarding, training, benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, and the technology stack they need. You're looking at $110K-$150K true annual cost for that one SDR position.

What Your New SDR Actually Needs

Your new hire walks in on day one. What do they need to succeed?

They need infrastructure. Secondary domains, 500+ mailboxes, proper DNS authentication. Without this, their emails land in spam. You'll blame them for low reply rates when it's actually a technical problem they have no control over.

They need data. Not just ZoomInfo access. They need to know which 500 companies to target this week and why. They need enrichment across multiple data sources to actually reach 70% of your market instead of the 30% a single database gives you.

They need strategy. Should they lead with ROI? Pain points? Social proof? They'll spend weeks testing randomly when someone with experience could identify message-market fit in days.

They need reply management frameworks. Objection handling scripts. Meeting qualification criteria. Someone to review their first 50 calls and tell them what's working.

Most companies give them a laptop, a database, and say "go book meetings."

Then wonder why it's not working.

The Real Problem

If your current outbound is getting 1% reply rates and booking 4 meetings a month, hiring another SDR doesn't double your results.

It's not that linear.

You might go from 4 meetings to 6. Maybe 7 on a good month. But you've just added $110K in annual cost for 2-3 extra meetings.

Why? Because the system is still broken. The infrastructure is still wrong. The messaging still doesn't resonate. The data quality is still poor.

You're scaling a broken process. And broken processes don't scale, they just get more expensive.

The companies crushing outbound right now aren't doing it because they have more people. They're doing it because they solved the infrastructure problem, the data problem, and the strategy problem first.

What Actually Works

If your outbound isn't working, you need expertise before you need headcount.

You need someone who's run thousands of campaigns and knows that 500 mailboxes sending 3 emails each outperforms 50 mailboxes sending 30 emails. Who can tell you Tuesday mornings get better response than Friday afternoons because they've tested it 100 times.

You need someone who can test 5-10 campaigns per week, not someone who sends the same message to everyone for 3 months and hopes something changes.

Once you've got that system working and you're consistently booking 15-20 qualified meetings per month with a proven playbook, then hire the SDR. Give them the winning framework. They'll succeed because the system works.

But hiring another person to figure out a broken system? That's just expensive experimentation with your prospect list.

Talk soon,

Kevin

P.S. If you're planning 2026 headcount and wondering whether to hire SDRs or fix the system first, let's talk. I'll show you what working outbound actually looks like.