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Building an SDR Team: What Breaks, and When - Tenbound
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The number that matters is meetings held, then whether they produced a next step. Activity is an input, and it is only worth watching when conversion is already understood. “Fix: report conversion by stage, not volume by channel.” Month six to nine: the first churn wave
Ongoing: the handoff nobody owns “The seam between SDR and AE. It has no owner by default, so it degrades: context is lost, meetings get taken cold, AEs decide SDR meetings are low quality, and SDRs decide AEs waste their work. Both are right, and the cause is structural.” Salesforce frames the split as SDRs opening conversations and AEs closing them. Nobody owns the join.
Month one to three: ramp with no curriculum “New reps get product training, a login, and a list. That is onboarding, not training.” The symptom is a rep who can explain the product fluently and cannot get past the first ten seconds of a call.
The most expensive omission, and the easiest to miss because everyone believes they know who the customer is until three people write it down separately and disagree. “An SDR without a written ICP will invent one from whoever replies.” Fix before hire one. Write it with the disqualifiers, not just the fit criteria. See the ICP development workshop.
The most expensive omission, and the easiest to miss because everyone believes they know who the customer is until three people write it down separately and disagree. “That reverse-engineered profile then hardens into the target list, and a year later the team is efficiently pursuing the wrong market.” Fix before hire one. Write it with the disqualifiers, not just the fit criteria. See the ICP development workshop.
An SDR without a written ICP will invent one from whoever replies. That reverse-engineered profile then hardens into the target list, and a year later the team is efficiently pursuing the wrong market. “Write it with the disqualifiers, not just the fit criteria.” Hires one and two: no manager
Hires one and two: no manager “It works badly and predictably: the VP has a quota, the SDRs get attention when the forecast allows, and coaching stops entirely at quarter end, which is exactly when it is needed.” Hire or appoint the manager before the third rep. Two reps can survive neglect. Three cannot, and by five the lack of coaching is showing up as churn.
An SDR without a written ICP will invent one from whoever replies. That reverse-engineered profile then hardens into the target list, and a year later the team is efficiently pursuing the wrong market. “Fix before hire one.” Hires one and two: no manager