First-time or experienced SDR: which should a SaaS startup hire?

It depends on who will coach them. A first-time SDR with a founder or sales leader investing real time outperforms an experienced hire on cost, and tends to stay longer. A first-time SDR with nobody watching drifts for months and then leaves. If there is no coaching capacity, pay for experience.

Why this is a sequencing problem, not a selection problem

An SDR with no sales leader above them has nobody to review their calls, nobody to fix their messaging, and nobody to tell them when a week has gone badly. First-time SDRs especially need that. If you have a founder who will spend real time coaching, a first-time SDR works well. If nobody has the time, hire someone who has done the job before and can run without supervision.

What to screen for in a first-time SDR

Degree classification and CV keywords tell you less than you would think. We look for evidence of hard things done voluntarily, whether they will actually pick up a phone, how they handle being told they are wrong, and what they did in the week after a rejection. Sports played, jobs held during study, and money earned before starting work tell us more than a transcript does.

What to screen for in an experienced SDR

Three things carry most of the weight: meetings booked against target across several quarters, not just one good patch; call volume, and whether they still actually pick up the phone rather than running on sequences alone; and why they haven't moved to AE yet, which is often the single most revealing question in the whole screen.

What each choice costs

A first-time SDR runs £32,000 to £35,000 base. An experienced SDR runs £35,000 to £45,000 base. The gap is smaller than the difference in ramp time and management overhead, which is why coaching capacity, not budget, should decide this.

For the full cost table and how we assess SDRs before putting them forward, see our SDR & BDR recruitment page.