Bridge Group put out a great survey of 351 SaaS business on the state of their SDR teams. It is well worth the read and can be found at bridgegroupinc.com. Some key findings are below:
Report to sales. “Since 2012, we’ve found the vast majority of SDR teams reporting to Sales. This year the trend continues with 60% of groups sitting within the Sales organization. It’s worth mentioning that roughly half of all inbound teams report to Marketing, and experience and interest trump all other factors in determining the reporting structure.”
Fill calendars. Some SDR teams focus on setting introductory meetings for sales reps/account executives while others take it a step further and try to provide interested prospects, known as ‘qualified opportunities’. Bridge makes the point that the decision to provide one or the other should be based on how full the sales reps’ calendars are: if your sales reps have full calendars, then the SDR’s should focus on qualified opportunities until you can hire more sales reps. If the calendars are empty, then focus on getting sales reps less qualified introductory meetings as well as qualified opportunities. In other words, fill their calendars.
Separate inbound qualification and outbound prospecting if your flow is that strong. Only separate the SDR team if you’re getting enough inbound deal flow such that you need to staff at least two SDR’s on the task full time. Otherwise, the SDR team should handle both inbound and outbound deal flow.
The average ratio is 1 SDR for 2.4 account executives. This ratio has been consistent since 2018. Smaller companies tend to have a higher ratio of SDRs to AEs, meaning one SDR supports even fewer AE’s.
The typical SDR has only 1.2 years of experience. That number had declined every year since 2010 when the number was 2.5 years. 2022 was the low at 1.0 years. Of course, the more complex the product and the higher the ACV, the more experienced the SDR needs to be. Average ramp time of an SDR is 3.0 months and the average tenure is only 1.9 years, so you get ~17 months of full productivity. To improve these metrics, promote your SDR’s frequently (junior, associate, senior SDR) and give them the opportunity to become AE’s. Note that median annual turnover is 40%.
The base salary of an SDR is $55k and OTE is $80k. “We find median on-target earnings of $80K and a 68:32 (base:variable) split. This remains unchanged since 2022.”
On average, SDR’s make 44 dials per day and 41 emails per day, with 4.1 quality conversations. Obviously if your group is more email centric, dials come down. On average, SDR’s make ~10.6 attempts per prospect. According to Bridge, 9 to 12 attempts is the sweet spot.
Use dialing technology. The median sales tech stack consists of CRM plus ~4.5 additional tools. High growth companies report more tools, on average, compared to laggards. Groups using dialing technology report more dials and more quality conversations per day. This is because dialing tech promotes efficient routing, sets a nice cadence, provides analytics, and can even gamify the process of outbounding.
On average, 1 manager oversees 6.4 SDR’s. “The median number of SDRs reporting to a single first-line leader is 6.4. This is down sharply from our 2021–2023 finding of 8 SDRs per leader”
Overall, this blog post doesn’t do the study justice. It’s well worth the read and can be downloaded at http://www.bridgegroupinc.com/. Thanks to Bridge Group for putting this together.
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