Key Metrics for Tracking Outbound SDR Performance and ROI

An outbound SDR (Sales Development Representatives) team generates meetings for account executives. Unlike inbound SDRs, they don’t process marketing leads or inbound calls. They don’t carry any quota, but their compensation plan usually takes into account the number of scheduled meetings and generated revenue. In this post, I’ll share the main KPIs your outbound SDR team should track. There are two kinds of metrics in my opinion, activity metrics, and performance metrics.

Activity metrics

To generate new meetings, an SDR calls and emails new prospects. Thus, you have to track activity metrics about calls, emails and new contacts.

The first question you should ask yourself is: where do they find these new prospects? Do you buy email lists or do you ask your SDR team to find new contacts on their own? Do you have an existing contacts database in your CRM? In any case, you’ll need to make sure they have a sufficient number of contacts to reach out.

Let’s take a scenario. You want each SDR to schedule 10 meetings a week, and you’re not willing to spend money on emails databases. After few weeks, you observe that an SDR can do these tasks in a week:

• Add 400 contacts to email cadences
• Perform 400 dials

Concerning email cadences, you have the following metrics:

• 400 emails sent
• 300 emails opened
• 200 emails clicked
• 50 opted out
• 10 replies
• 1 meetings scheduled

Concerning dials, you observe the following metrics:

• 400 dials
• 300 calls (> 1 sec)
• 100 connects
• 40 contacts don’t want to be reached ever again
• 5 meetings scheduled

Roughly, 60 contacts don’t want to be outreached ever again. Thus, one of the primary SDR activity will be to add about 60 new contacts a week in the CRM. In this scenario, each SDR has to perform the following weekly activities to be successful:

• 60 new contacts
• 400 dials
• 400 emails

Performance metrics

In the example above, an SDR schedules 6 meetings a week, which is less than the target of 10. In order to increase this performance, you can track ratio KPIs such as:

Concerning calls

• Dials to call
• Call to connect
• Connect to meeting

Concerning emails

• Open rate
• Click rate
• Reply rate
• Opt-out rate

Looking at these figures, you might want to advise the sales director to train the SDR team on how to handle objections whenever your “connect to meeting” ratio is too low. You might want to work on your email cadences subjects whenever your “Open rate” is too low, etc.…

The SDR team ROI

Computing an ROI is the most important KPI to get the big picture. How many opportunities your SDR team generates? How many deals close thanks to your SDR team? To compute an ROI, you need to track KPIs concerning meetings.

• Scheduled meetings to completed meetings
• Completed meeting to new opportunity
• SDR sourced opportunity to new deal

If these ratios are too low, you might want to change your SDR compensation plan. Indeed, if your SDRs are compensated on activity metrics only, they won’t focus too much on quality and your ROI will drop. You could think of paying your SDR team 2% of new deals they source. In this way, they’ll have a long-term vision, they’ll focus on quality, and your ROI will go up.