How many SDRs do you need to hit your pipeline goal?

Most teams decide how many SDRs to hire by budget or gut feel. A better way is to start from the revenue you want and work backwards. It takes five numbers and about ten minutes.

Start from the goal, not the headcount

Here's the chain. Every step depends on the one before it:

Revenue goal divided by average deal size gives you the deals you need.
Deals divided by your win rate gives you the qualified opportunities (SQLs) you need.
SQLs divided by the share of meetings that qualify gives you the meetings you need.
Meetings divided by what one SDR books per month gives you the team size.

A worked example

Say you want $1.5M a year in new revenue from outbound, and your average first-year deal is $50,000.

Deals needed: $1.5M ÷ $50K = 30 deals a year.
SQLs needed: at a 20% win rate, 30 ÷ 0.2 = 150 SQLs a year, or 12.5 a month.
Meetings needed: if 70% of meetings qualify, 12.5 ÷ 0.7 = about 18 meetings a month.
SDRs needed: at 3.5 held meetings per SDR per week, one SDR books about 14 a month. 18 ÷ 14 = 1.3, so you need 2 SDRs.

Then add the cost

Two SDRs aren't just two salaries. In this example we use about $120K a year per SDR for salary, commission and benefits. That's a full year for an experienced, ramped rep, which is why it's higher than the first-year cost of an entry-level SDR. Add $700 a month each for tools and data, and $8,000 a month for leadership and management.

That's about $353K a year in outbound cost.

Two SDRs at full speed produce more than the minimum you need: about 235 SQLs and 47 deals a year instead of 150 and 30. Spread across that output, it works out to roughly $1,500 per SQL and $7,500 per closed deal.

Don't forget ramp and sales cycle

Revenue doesn't start on day one. New SDRs take about three months to reach full output. Then each opportunity still has to work through your sales cycle before it closes. In this example, with a three-month sales cycle, the model shows outbound paying for itself in month five. Until then, you're spending ahead of revenue.

This is the part most plans skip. A budget that looks fine on paper can feel like a loss for the first half of the year. Know your payback month before you start, so nobody panics in month four.

The catch: every input is a guess

The model is only as good as its inputs. Meetings per SDR, the share that qualify and your win rate on outbound deals are usually guesses until you've run outbound in your market.

Change one of them and the answer changes a lot. If your SDRs book 2 meetings a week instead of 3.5, you need nearly twice the team for the same goal. If only 40% of meetings qualify instead of 70%, the same thing happens again.

That's why we suggest testing before you hire. Our Proof Sprint runs live outbound for you for 11 weeks and replaces these guesses with your real reply, meeting and win rates. Then you size the team on real numbers.

Run your own numbers

Our free Outbound Pipeline Model does this math for you. Start from a revenue goal or an SQL goal, change any assumption, and it shows the SDRs you need, the cost, and the month outbound pays for itself.