Why Your SDR Hire Will Probably Fail (And What To Do Instead)

So you're thinking about hiring an SDR. Makes sense, right? Your inbound is inconsistent, referrals are slowing down, and you need a predictable way to fill your pipeline.

Here's what usually happens.

You post the job. You get 100+ applications. Most are garbage, but you find someone who seems solid. Good energy on the call, decent experience, says all the right things about "hunting" and "crushing quota."

You hire them at $60-70k base. Maybe you throw in some commission structure. They start on Monday, excited and ready to go.

Week 1-2: They're learning your product, your ICP, your market. Fair enough.

Week 3-4: They're "building their lists" and "researching prospects." Still no outreach.

Week 5-8: Finally sending emails. The copy is mediocre. They're using your best prospect lists to "test" their messaging. Half the emails bounce because they didn't set up their domains properly.

Month 3: They've booked 4 meetings. Two were completely unqualified. One no-showed. One might actually turn into something.

You're $17,500 in (salary alone) and you've got basically nothing to show for it.

Why This Keeps Happening

It's not always the SDR's fault. Most of them just don't know what they're doing with cold outbound. They come from BDR roles at big companies where they had:

• Proven playbooks already built

• Warm inbound leads to follow up on

• An entire sales ops team handling their tech stack

• Months of training and coaching

You're asking them to build a cold outbound machine from scratch. That's a completely different skill set.

And even if you find a good one, they're expensive and they take forever to ramp. You're gambling $70k+ per year on someone who might not work out.

The Smarter Play

Look, I'm not saying never hire SDRs. If you're at the point where you're booking 20+ qualified calls a month and need to scale, absolutely build a team.

But if you're just trying to get consistent pipeline flowing? There's a better way.

Get someone to build the system first. Let them prove it works. Then, if you want, hire someone internal to run it.

That way you're not paying someone $70k to figure it out on your dime. You're paying for results—actual showed appointments with qualified prospects.

No ramp time. No training costs. No risk of burning your best lists while someone "learns."

Just meetings on your calendar with people who actually want to talk to you.

If that sounds better than rolling the dice on another SDR hire, let's talk.