The alternative to hiring an SDR

You need more pipeline and the obvious move is to hire a sales development rep. Before you post the role, it is worth knowing what that hire actually costs you, and what you can get instead.

A first SDR is a real bet. You pay a base salary plus benefits, plus the tools they need, plus the time you or your head of sales spend managing them. Then you wait. Most SDRs take six to eight weeks to ramp before they send anything good, and a chunk of new hires leave inside the first year. If yours is the one who leaves in month eight, you start the whole thing again.

For a company doing one to fifteen million in revenue, that is a lot of cost and risk to carry for one channel.

What you are really buying when you hire an SDR

Strip it back and an SDR does four things: builds a target list, researches each account, writes the outreach, and sends it. The first three are the work that makes outbound land. The fourth is a button.

The problem is that the research and the writing are exactly the parts a junior hire does least well and least consistently. They have ten other accounts to get through today, so account number seven gets a templated email with the company name swapped in. That email looks like every other templated email in the founder’s inbox, so it gets deleted. You paid for a system and got a spreadsheet with a mail-merge on top.

The alternative: done-for-you outbound, built per prospect

The alternative is to have the list, the research, and the outreach built for you, per prospect, by a system that does the deep part properly, with a human checking the quality before anything goes out. You press send.

This is what Conduit does. For each account on your list we do the real research and build a custom asset for that one company, the kind of thing they would normally only see after they signed. You review it, then you send it. Nothing runs on autopilot, and nothing leaves without your approval.

The reason this works is simple. The bar for outreach has never been lower, because everyone is automating the same templated message. Sending something that clearly took real work is almost embarrassingly effective, precisely because almost nobody does it.

How the two compare

Cost. A loaded SDR (salary, benefits, tools, management) runs well into five figures a year before they book a single meeting. Done-for-you outbound at our level runs a fraction of that, and you can stop month to month.

Speed. An SDR ramps over six to eight weeks. A done-for-you engine sends its first researched assets in days, because the research and drafting are already built.

Risk. An SDR can leave, get poached, or simply not be good at the job. A system does not resign, and a bad month does not cost you a rehire.

Quality. This is the real difference. A rushed junior writes a templated email. A system that does the research properly, with a human gate on quality, sends something made for one company. One of those gets replies. The other gets deleted.

When an SDR is still the right call

Hiring is the right move in a few cases, and it is worth being honest about them.

If you are past ten million in revenue and want a full go-to-market team, an in-house SDR who can also handle inbound, qualifying, and follow-up calls gives you a person inside the building that a delivery system does not. If outbound is one of eight things you need that person to do, hire. And if you genuinely enjoy running outbound yourself and have the hours, keep doing it.

Done-for-you outbound is the better call when you want the channel working fast, you want to compare it cleanly against the cost of a hire, and you would rather start with a one-month commitment than a salary.

What a sensible first step looks like

You should not have to take any of this on faith. Before you commit to anything, ask for proof on your own list.

We will pick one of your real target accounts, do the research, and build the asset we would send, free. You look at it and decide whether it is the kind of thing that would get a reply. Most agencies show you a wall of client logos because they cannot do that. The work tells you whether it is any good; a logo only tells you who else paid.

If the sample lands, a one-month pilot runs the same thing across twenty-five to fifty of your accounts, with weekly reporting on what went out and what came back. You see the channel work before you decide whether to keep it.

If you are weighing up a first SDR hire and want to see the alternative on your own prospects first, that is the place to start.

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