Hiring your first SDR is the slowest way to find out.

Once a business accepts that prospecting is its own job, the next move is almost always the same: hire someone junior to do it. It is the obvious answer. It is also the one that takes longest to tell you whether it worked, and the one whose true cost is hardest to see from the job advert.

This is not an argument against ever hiring an SDR. It is an argument for knowing what you are buying before you buy it.

What the hire actually costs

1. Months before the first meeting.

   Recruit, notice period, onboard, learn the product, learn the market, then learn to hold a conversation with someone who did not ask for it. Nobody is good in month one, and the first meeting a new SDR books is usually in month three or four. That is a quarter of salary and a quarter of pipeline that never existed, before you know anything.

2. Resilience is the thing you cannot interview for.

   The job is refusal, all day, in public. Plenty of capable, likeable people find out in month two that they do not want it, and you find out at the same time they do. The interview process that predicts this has not been invented.

3. Somebody has to coach them.

   An SDR without a manager listening to their calls does not improve, they settle. Real coaching means hearing the calls, correcting the opener, rewriting the email, weekly, for months. That is a proper job, and in a small business it falls on the person who was already closing - which puts you back where you started.

4. The stack is yours to buy and wire.

   Data, enrichment, a dialler, a sequencer, deliverability, reporting. Bought separately, joined by exports, paid for whether or not anyone is using them well. A single SDR on a full stack carries a tooling bill most people never add to the salary line, and the setup is a project in itself.

Add it up and the cheap option is a six-month experiment with one participant, run by someone who has not run it before, on tools they have just bought. If it works, you have one SDR. If it does not, you have learned that one particular person did not work out, which tells you very little about the market.

When the hire is still the right call

There are cases where it is, and pretending otherwise would be a poor way to start a blog.

• You already have someone who has run outbound properly and has the time to manage it. Coaching is the constraint, and if you have it in-house the maths changes.
• Your sale needs deep domain knowledge to even open a conversation - clinical, regulatory, heavily technical - and you can hire that knowledge.
• You are past the first SDR. A second and third hire into a working process, with a manager and a stack already in place, is a different decision from the first one.

If none of those describe you, the first hire is mostly a way of finding out, slowly and expensively, what a specialist could have told you in three weeks.

The other way to find out

The alternative is to plug into a function that already exists. The ramp happened somewhere else, on somebody else’s time. The reps already know the job and have already proven they can stand it. The manager is already over the calls. The stack is already wired, and the queue is built before the rep sits down.

That is what we do, so discount the paragraph above accordingly. But the underlying point holds whoever you use: the question you actually want answered is whether your market responds to outbound, and how. A working engine answers that in weeks. A first hire answers it in quarters, with the answer tangled up in whether the hire was any good.

One test worth applying to either route: ask who will listen to the calls. If the answer is nobody, or the person already closing, the route is going to underperform whatever the salary line says.