Liam breaks SDR cost math
- Liam Sheridan turned a familiar sales budget line into a lifecycle model, arguing one outbound SDR really costs about $187,000 before replacement churn is counted. - His spreadsheet assumes a six-month ramp, 11 peak meetings a month, and 34% annual turnover — landing near $3,400 per qualified meeting. - The point is bigger than one spreadsheet — AI outbound tools are now being sold against fully loaded meeting economics, not salary.
Sales headcount math is having one of those moments where a simple spreadsheet changes the whole conversation. Liam Sheridan’s breakdown landed because it attacks the number everyone uses — base salary — and replaces it with the number finance teams actually feel. Once you price in ramp, manager time, tooling, and churn, the cost of an SDR stops looking like a comp plan and starts looking like a production system. That matters now because AI outbound vendors are no longer pitching “more automation.” They’re pitching cheaper meetings. ### What did Sheridan actually do? He took the standard SDR budget conversation and stretched it across the full hire lifecycle. Not just salary. The whole machine — recruiting, onboarding, benefits, tools, management overhead, underproductive ramp months, and the odds that the rep leaves before the model really pays back. That’s the part most teams blur away when they say an SDR “costs” $60,000 or $80,000. ### Why does that hit so hard? Because the familiar number is technically true and economically useless. A rep may have a $55,000 to $75,000 base, but the loaded number rises fast once you add payroll burden, software, data, coaching time, and the fact that early months produce far less than steady-state output. Recent SDR cost models floating around sales tech land put fully loaded annual cost anywhere from roughly $98,000 to more than $200,000, with many operators using a 1.7x to 2.5x multiplier over base salary as a sanity check. ### Why is ramp the killer? Because ramp is negative ROI disguised as normal onboarding. Sheridan’s model uses six months to reach full productivity. That’s on the slower side, but not crazy for outbound teams selling into complex B2B accounts. During that stretch, the company pays nearly full freight for partial output. If the rep peaks at 11 meetings a month later, turnover changes everything. Because churn resets the clock. Sheridan uses 34% annual turnover, which means a meaningful chunk of the team never stays long enough to fully amortize hiring and ramp costs. One rep leaving is not just one salary disappearing. It means lost meetings, another search, another onboarding cycle, another manager bandwidth hit, and another stretch of weak output before the replacement gets moving. That’s why the loaded cost number can jump from “expensive” to “structurally inefficient” fast. Broader 2026 SDR cost writeups are making the same point — tenure is short, and replacement costs are real. ### So why does cost
