The sticker price is misleading
When founders budget for their first SDR hire, they usually start with the base salary. In most US markets, that's somewhere between $45,000 and $60,000 for a junior rep. Add variable comp and you're looking at $65,000 to $85,000 OTE. That feels manageable. But that number is the beginning of the cost, not the total.
The hidden multipliers
Tooling alone adds $300–$800 per month per seat: dialer, CRM, email sequencing, intent data, enrichment, and list-building. Then there's the ramp period — most SDRs take 2–3 months to reach productivity, during which they're generating cost but not pipeline. Management overhead is real too: someone has to coach calls, review activity, and handle the performance conversations.
The turnover tax
Average SDR tenure in B2B SaaS is 14 months. That means every hire comes with a built-in restart cycle: recruiting costs, onboarding, ramp, and the productivity gap while the seat is empty. When you annualize the fully-loaded cost including turnover, a single SDR seat costs most companies $120,000 to $160,000 per year — roughly double the base salary.
What this means for early-stage companies
For a pre-Series A company, one SDR seat is a significant bet. Two seats start to feel like a department. The question isn't whether you need outbound — it's whether building the capability in-house is the right first move, or whether you should buy the output while you figure out the motion.