The State of Sales Development: What Does the SDR Prospecting Pipeline Look Like?

We’re putting the final touches on our State of Sales Development Study we did in 2018 in partnership with Tenbound, AA-ISP, SalesBuzz, and Vengresso. I made a quick overview of what companies reported as their prospecting funnel, and highlighted some of the statistics that stood out.

How do you compare?

Here are the surprises for me:

Contacts That SDR’s Are Managing

This is not as big of a number as you may think it is and here is why. The average team reports only managing 103 accounts. However, in those accounts they are going deeper with 5ish contacts. This is why an SDR is actively trying to manage 500+ contacts.

SDR Activities Per Month

These crossed the 100 mark this year per rep per month. That’s a lot, especially as we think about the transition to account-based sales development strategies.

Conversation Rate

I like this. I think it is really close to accurate. 10% of activities lead to a meaningful conversations. It’s scary because there is still a lot of wasted activity, but it goes to show how hard salesmen earn their keep.

Appointments Held Rate

The very high percentage is awesome, when we look at this data (78% appointments held rate). But because this number is difficult to track, I’m actually worried some companies think they are higher than they really are.

Sales Accepted Opportunities

I like this number (14.6 sales accepted opportunities per month). I think it’s a good blend of inbound teams who are doing 20-30 and outbound enterprise teams who are doing 4-12.

Quota Attainment for SDR’s

Probably the biggest surprise from the prospecting pipeline numbers for me was the nearly 70% of SDRs hitting quota, while research says only 53% of AEs hit quota.

Quota attainment is going to continue to be a problem until companies figure out a way to bring SDRs and AEs closer together.

If you missed it, you can get the webinar preview of the State of Sales Development 2018 here.

See the State of Sales Development 2017 to compare to this year’s study.