About two years ago I ran the numbers on all of the SDRs I'd hired in my career
At that point, it was about 62 SDRs hired
You can read that here
I looked at how long they all stayed with their companies:
Now a decent good percentage of people who are 2,3 and 4 years in, are still at their current companies.
So the retention percentages are actually even better than they look.
Almost everyone who’s been at their current company for 5+ years is still there!
At the 1 year mark about 4/5 SDRs were still around.
That number "feels" right to me.
An SDR gig isn't for everyone.
That is OK.
I would be wary of an organization with any sort of scale where 95% of people last more than a year in an entry level sales role.
BUT,
Let's look at the dropoff between that first and second year.
That's a much more important number to optimize.
Because if someone has succeeded as an SDR for your company for a year - they're probably worth keeping around.
And if you're serious about scaling up your company, you NEED your SDR team to function effectively as a future talent pipeline for your Account Executive teams.
Without an SDR team to backfill roles, you're going to spend most of your time hiring to make up for natural attrition - forget growth.
I am working on a longer post about how many sales people you need to hit on a "triple, triple, double, double, double" type plan (this is also known as the T2D3 model, which is the growth your Venture Capitalists expect you to hit). You'll get that in your inbox in the next week or so.
But in the meantime, take a look at this post if you'd like an overview of the math.
If nothing else, it's sobering
The most important thing for your SDRs is to get the good ones into other roles within the company, about a year after they join.
This is good for your customer success, marketing and recruiting teams (amongst others).
But most importantly it's good for your SALES teams.
Which gets me to the meat of this email: the #1 reason by far that good SDRs leave:
It's because they don't see a path to promotion.
Or they have a promotion denied for stupid political reasons.
What I have personally done (and seen work very well), is to run the following playbook:
1: Work out what you want an SDR to do in a year
I defined this in a recruiting sense as sourcing $400k in candidate placements. At the time, that meant approximately 20 placements.
The key thing here, is the placements CLOSED.
The way I thought about compensation was to tie commission payments to very short term outcomes (candidate first interviews in this case).
But then tie promotions to medium term outcomes (candidates placed).
For a SaaS company, it'd be qualified demos for commission, and then revenue closed for the promotion criteria.
2: Set the target
For arguments sake, let's assume our SDR makes $65k base, $20k variable, and once promoted moves into an Account Executive role where they'd have a $75k base, $75k variable and a $600k quota.
In my mind, it makes sense to set them a goal of sourcing $600k in closed-won revenue in a single year.
After all, we are training them to do the outbound necessary to generate this number after all.
As I mentioned - we're not linking this with commission
3: Promote the SDR the day they hit that target
If you've done this well, you'll have SDRs hitting this number well before the year mark.
If you're stupid, you'll make them wait.
If you're smart, you'll promote them the day they hit that number.
You might have to make an exception for mega deals (e.g. we only credit the first $50k or whatever).
But you'll work out the edge cases soon enough
A good SDR stays for years.
They go from being a fairly mediocre ROI hire, to a grand slam... if you can keep them around.