How to hire your first SDR at a SaaS startup

Decide who will coach the hire before you decide whether to hire a graduate or an experienced rep, because that single choice shapes almost everything else about the search. Budget £32,000 to £35,000 base for a graduate SDR, with OTE around £45,000 to £50,000, and expect roughly 10 days from brief to offer accepted.

Graduate or experienced: the question that actually matters

This is the hire most often got wrong, and the mistake is usually sequencing rather than selection. 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. Graduates especially need that. If you have a founder who will spend real time coaching, a graduate works well and tends to stay longer than an experienced rep would. If nobody has the time to coach, hire someone who has done the job before and can run without supervision.

What to screen for at graduate level

Degree classification tells 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 graduating tell us more than a transcript does.

What to budget

Graduate SDRs run £32,000 to £35,000 base, with OTE around £45,000 to £50,000. Published benchmarks tend to skew higher because they draw on larger, more established employers than a company making its first SDR hire. The number that should shape your model either way is attainment: 57.9% of UK SDRs currently hit quota, according to RepVue as of September 2026. Build your pipeline model on that, not on full attainment.

How long it takes

SDR and entry-level hires average 10 days, brief to offer accepted. We hold 30,000 GTM professionals in our network and do not post and pray, so for a graduate search we have usually already spoken to the shortlist before you brief us. Three CVs per placement is the standard.

Plan the next seat before you make this one

SDR to AE usually runs 12 to 18 months. SMB AE base salaries start from £55,000, which is close to what a strong senior SDR already earns. If you cannot fund an AE seat by around month 15, you are paying senior SDR money to someone whose next logical move is to a company that has one. Plan the seat before you make the hire, not after.

For the full UK cost table by level and what we screen for in an experienced SDR hire, see our SDR & BDR recruitment page.