What founders quote vs what it actually costs
hen a supply chain software founder decides to build outbound in-house, the number they usually quote is an SDR base salary — somewhere between seventy and ninety thousand dollars depending on market. That number is not wrong. It is just about forty percent of the real one.
A fully-loaded SDR in a supply chain or logistics software business, including tooling, management pro-rata, and the replacement cycle, runs between $135K and $190K per year. One SDR cannot realistically cover Europe alone — you need at least two for timezone and language coverage, and a third once you care about any US calling. So the real annual number you are underwriting is closer to $400–570K, not $200K.
What the money buys you, ramped, after a 3–6 month dead zone, is somewhere between 5 and 9 qualified meetings per SDR per month. That is the right benchmark to plan against. Anything above it is a top-decile operator; anything below it means a staffing or targeting problem you have not diagnosed yet.
Line-by-line, per SDR, per year
Sources.Bridge Group SaaS AE & SDR Metrics Report 2024; RepVue SDR compensation benchmarks; public CRO/RevOps surveys from Gong and Pavilion. Ranges reflect EU and US blended; EU payroll adds the top of the range on tax.
What fully-loaded SDR spend actually produces
Here is the meeting math, working top-down from activity. These are ramped numbers — not first-month output, not cold-start output. What a productive SDR looks like, steady-state, dialling pan-European supply chain software in English.
Two SDRs producing 5–9 meetings each, eleven months of productive output, is between 110 and 200 qualified meetings per year. At a $45K deal size and 15% close rate, that is $740K to $1.35M in booked ARR from a $300–400K SDR spend. The economics work. The variance does not — the ceiling is 2.5× the floor, depending on execution.
The ramp nobody plans for honestly
Ramp time for a supply chain software SDR is three to six months, not the thirty days the job description implies. It is that long because supply chain software has a specific learning curve: the difference between a TMS and an OMS, what a Direttore Operativo actually owns versus a Responsabile Logistica, why Gartner's Magic Quadrant position changes how you open a call with Oracle incumbents. An SDR who can sell observability tools cannot sell S&OP software by month two.
The practical cost of that ramp is roughly thirty percent of year-one output. An SDR hired in January produces at five percent of steady-state in February, twenty percent in March, sixty percent by May, and holds the line from June onward — if they stay. Meaning the first person you hire costs you a full SDR salary for four meetings, not sixty.
Hiring one SDR "to test outbound" and judging the channel on their first-quarter output. That quarter is structurally broken — you're measuring ramp, not the channel. The channel decision needs at least nine months of steady-state output to be honest, which means you cannot make it with one SDR.
SDR tenure is 14 months, and you pay for that
The other cost most in-house models underplay is the replacement cycle. The Bridge Group's longitudinal data puts median SDR tenure at around fourteen months — six ramping, eight productive, then promoted or gone. Which means if you are running a two-SDR team, you are recruiting and onboarding someone at least once every nine months on rolling average.
Every replacement cycle costs you another ramp period and another round of recruiting spend. In steady state, one of your two seats is producing sub-ramp output about one-quarter of the year. Budget for it. It is not a failure of management; it is the structural nature of the role.
When in-house is the right answer
None of this is an argument against in-house. It is an argument against underwriting in-house without counting the real cost. In-house is the right call when:
You have a single-market ICP.
One SDR, one language, one product line is easier to manage internally than to outsource.
Your sales cycle depends on deep product conversation.
If the opening call needs technical depth the caller cannot fake, train internally. Agencies will never get there.
You can commit to 12+ months runway.
The ramp math does not work on a six-month test. Half that runway and the answer is always "it did not work."
You have a senior operator to manage them.
An unmanaged SDR is worse than no SDR. If you do not have a VP Sales or head of outbound in-house, you are not ready.
Bottom line
The honest comparison is not "an SDR costs $90K" versus "an agency costs $8K a month." It is "$400–570K of fully-loaded spend producing 110–200 meetings, with a 3–6 month dead zone and a 14-month tenure cycle" versus whatever an agency actually delivers on a guaranteed basis. Both models have a place. Neither is cheap. Neither is free of risk. The one thing no supply chain software business can afford is to underwrite the cheap version of the in-house number and get caught out on month nine.
- Bridge Group — SaaS AE & SDR Metrics Report 2024
- RepVue — SDR compensation benchmarks, mid-market SaaS
- Gong — State of Sales Development 2024
- Pavilion — CRO Benchmarks Survey, outbound team economics