How to Hire SDRs and Outbound Experts That Succeed (+Why Most Companies Face a Bad SDR Hiring Turnover)

Most businesses don’t know how to hire SDRs.

As part of our daily outbound campaigns for ourselves at Utmost Agency, we have an automated workflow that monitors and scrapes LinkedIn for SDR job posts every day. 

We then reach out and talk to a lot of business owners and organizations wanting to hire SDRs or BDRs. Fun fact, it’s how we get most of our clients here at Utmost Agency. 

One thing we’ve learned is that the SDR or outbound sales devs role has a crazily high bad turnover rate. 

Businesses and start-up owners create a solid job description and then hire some hot-shot that used to work at a big company and achieved awesome results. 

A few months in, they are unable to repeat the success. The few following weeks, they either burn out or do what most notoriously do, jump ship and leave you unable to sleep. 

You’ve wasted time and money to bring them. You’ve had your hopes up and promised your leadership great things, and now you’re back to square one having to do it all over again. 

The worst part is that you’re not even sure you can do it right this time. We’ve heard organizations and start-ups complain about this far too many times. 

With so many tech tools and new ways to capture sales opportunities today, building an effective sales team is super important for:

• staying relevant in your market 
• keeping up with the competition
• and achieving sustainable growth. 

Yet, hiring the right SDRs and outbound experts remains a persistent challenge (for organizations of all sizes) because even though the landscape has transformed dramatically, your hiring practices haven’t kept pace. 

In this post, we’ll discuss the common hiring pitfalls you need to keep in mind and avoid. 

More importantly, we’ll tell you what you need to look out for in an SDR and whether or not you should consider working with an agency instead. 

Note: Struggling to connect with decision-makers in your target market? We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign to transform your sales pipeline with prospects ready to engage. Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.

Top 3 common hiring pitfalls to avoid and how to fix them

Here are the three main hiring misconceptions and pitfalls we see that plague most businesses’ hiring processes:  

Misalignments between what your company needs, the requirements of the job description, and the talent you hire

Most job descriptions fail to accurately reflect the necessary skill sets or mindset required for success in SDR roles. 

When we sit with sales or RevOps leaders and dig deep, this disconnect usually comes from companies being wrong about what they think they need and what they actually need. 

And this practically sets them up for failure before the first interview even begins.

This problem becomes particularly acute in startups where they target candidates with impressive enterprise backgrounds, hoping to import success from established brands.

The thing is that this logic fails in practice and we’re not the only ones who think so. The image below is a snapshot from a Reddit thread from two years ago. 

Hiring someone from a big corporate background, like a chief sales officer (CSO) who is used to managing million-dollar budgets or even a regular SDR who’s used to being part of 20-person teams for a scrappy, early-stage startup won’t work. 

Why? 

Because enterprise success mostly comes from orchestrating existing systems rather than building from scratch. 

Also, you’re most likely offering a resource-constrained situation and their beautiful and impressive CV doesn’t tell you how they perform in such environments.

Many executives from large organizations often lack the hands-on hustle and flexibility that startups demand. 

The ability and even the mindset to roll up your sleeves, write email copy, text prospects manually, and quickly make changes with minimal data isn’t typically cultivated in corporate environments with abundant resources and established processes.

Being an effective sales leader or representative at Oracle or Salesforce doesn’t automatically translate to thriving in a seed-stage startup with limited resources and no brand recognition.

The lack of tech fluency

One of the most overlooked aspects of sales hiring today is tech fluency. We are talking about both the ability to leverage tech tools as well as build a solid sales tech stack. 

Back to the point we were making in the introduction, the sales landscape has transformed dramatically. 

It’s no longer the “find contacts, smile, dial, and cutesy your way into a deal” that so many salespeople are used to. 

With so many automation tools, data-driven approaches, and even new ways of finding sales opportunities, taking action in time is heavily reliant on tech tools and your sales reps’ ability to understand tools, leverage them, and be creative about them. 

Think about the LinkedIn outreach automation we mentioned in the first few lines, for example. The ability to find such intent data at the right time and act upon it right then is paramount and contingent on tech tools. 

Yet many hiring managers, especially non-technical founders, fail to properly evaluate candidates’ tech fluency. Most don’t even know to ask candidates about their familiarity with tools beyond their CRM. 

Organizations and startups hire salespeople who sound good or have a good track record of closed deals but don’t understand the technology that is arising now in the sales environment.

This oversight creates a massive competitive disadvantage as teams struggle to leverage modern, AI tools and strategies (and thus miss unique opportunities) that could dramatically improve their efficiency and effectiveness.

Today’s elite SDRs aren’t just charming conversationalists like the likes of Jordan Belfort, they’re tech-savvy professionals who understand how to:

• orchestrate complex workflows for prospecting and data collection, 
• design automated outreach sequences, 
• analyze engagement data and optimize their approach based on metrics and audience behavior,
• be able to set up systems that do so on autopilot
• and more. 

Without this technical foundation, even the most personable sales reps will struggle to compete in today’s market.

Role-based over outcome-based hiring approach

Most companies simply hire people to do a job, not to achieve a specific outcome. This role-based rather than outcome-based approach leads to unnecessary headcount and missed opportunities for optimization.

The problem here is that businesses think about growth the wrong way. The need for growth doesn’t necessarily translate into hiring more sales reps. 

We believe instead of automatically assuming you need to “hire two more SDRs because you need to grow”, you should ask more targeted questions like: 

• how do we get to five qualified meetings per month?
• how can we improve our operations for better efficiency?
• how much time do our current SDRs spend on administrative work?
• is there a way we can free our salespeople from the prospecting work so they can focus more on selling?

This subtle reframing opens up creative solutions beyond simply adding more people. Perhaps you need just one good system thinker who is good at automation and knows how to leverage tools that can outperform multiple traditional SDRs for less cost. 

Or maybe the answer lies in fueling an existing sales team by eliminating all the manual work so they can focus on what matters most i.e. having conversations and closing deals.

Bringing more SDRs into your team isn’t always the answer. Sometimes, strategic investments in the right people with the right skills can deliver exponentially better results than traditional hiring approaches.

Note: Struggling to connect with decision-makers in your target market? We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign to transform your sales pipeline with prospects ready to engage. Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.

How to hire SDRs and what questions to ask them (a framework to qualify candidates beyond the general interview questions)

This will be a structured approach to qualifying candidates beyond traditional resume reviews and generic interviews. 

We’ll also discuss some red flags you should watch out for to ensure you end up with professionals who will drive outcomes rather than simply fill seats.

Evaluate their familiarity, experience, and creativity with tools.

Here, your candidates must demonstrate an ability to use modern tools for prospecting, automation, and data analysis beyond popular tools. 

They should be able to describe specific tools used in previous roles and tell you how they’re constantly keeping up with new systems and tools in the sales industry. 

Here are questions you can ask:

• Walk me through how you’d set up a multi-channel outreach sequence using our tech stack.
• What tools have you used to automate repetitive tasks in your previous role, and what was the impact?
• If our CRM data was incomplete, what steps would you take to enrich it before beginning outreach?

Try to understand their execution mindset.

This is particularly important if your business is an early-stage company. You need self-starters who can operate with minimal guidance and thrive.

Excessive reliance on established processes rather than studying your unique situation to create new ones and adapt is a red flag here. They should also possess and show you self-directed work examples.

Here are a few questions you can ask here:

• Tell me about a time when you had to build a process from scratch with minimal direction.
• Describe how you’d approach prospecting if you had no defined ICP and limited market data.
• What’s your process for testing new messaging when current approaches stop working?
• How do you manage your day when dealing with competing priorities and limited resources?

Assess them for outcome orientation.

Your goal here is to understand if the candidate is coming in to generate business outcomes or just complete activities.

First thing here, they should be able to connect their daily work to your broader business objectives. 

The biggest red flag you should watch out for here is someone who focuses on tasks or activities (calls made, emails sent) rather than results and business impact. 

Here’s what you need to ask: 

• What specific business outcome were you responsible for in your last role, and how did you achieve it?
• If we needed to generate five additional qualified meetings per month, what approaches would you consider beyond simply increasing activity volume?
• Tell me about a time when you shifted your approach to achieve a goal when the original plan wasn’t working.
• How do you determine which prospects deserve more of your time investment?

Assess their resource optimization capability.

If you are tight on resources, then the sales reps working for you should be able to maximize the return on time and effort invested. 

Here, you should look for someone with:

• strategic thinking about resource allocation,
• thinking or approaches that can scale beyond personal capacity,
• ideas for automation or process optimization,
• the ability to build a lead qualification workflow or system that’s not heavily reliant on manual qualification.

Here are the questions you should ask here: 

• How do you decide when to use automation versus personal outreach in your prospecting process?
• Is there any way you’ve improved efficiency in a previous role?
• What’s your approach to qualifying prospects quickly to avoid wasting time on poor-fit opportunities?

Note: Struggling to connect with decision-makers in your target market? We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign to transform your sales pipeline with prospects ready to engage. Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.

Why you’re better off hiring an outbound sales agency like Utmost Agency

Building an in-house SDR team might seem like the natural next step in growing your sales pipeline—but it’s not as straightforward or cost-effective as it looks on paper. 

The reality is that it’s a complex, expensive, and often disappointing process for companies that don’t have the right infrastructure, talent, and strategy already in place.

Before you go down that road, we want to show you an alternative more and more companies are embracing: partnering with a specialized outbound sales agency.

Here’s why that choice often leads to better results, faster—and with far less risk.

Hiring an SDR isn’t just about paying a salary. It’s about building and managing an entire system around that person. And most companies underestimate what that really costs.

Let’s break it down.

• Base salary: The average SDR earns around $52,000–$60,000 a year according to Glassdoor.
• Benefits and employment taxes: Add another 20–30% to that.
• Sales tech stack: Expect $500–$1,500/month per rep for tools like Salesforce, Apollo, Outreach, etc.
• Ramp-up time: SDRs typically need 3–6 months to become fully productive, depending on your industry and sales cycle.
• Managerial overhead: You or someone else needs to train, coach, and review their performance regularly.
• Attrition and replacement: SDR roles have high turnover—each time someone leaves, you lose momentum and restart the cycle.

When you add all of that up, you’re easily spending north of $80,000–$100,000 per SDR per year—and even then, you have no guarantee that they’ll generate a consistent pipeline.

Why specialized agencies like Utmost Agency deliver better results

Agencies like us aren’t just cheaper labor or outsourced reps. We’re a team built specifically to solve the operational and strategic challenges that make in-house SDR teams so difficult to scale.

Here’s how we’re different:

You get a team that takes care of the entire outbound function and possesses technical expertise that goes beyond sales skills.

Most SDRs know how to send emails and make cold calls. But that is the very problem right there. 

The best of their expertise is only at the very end of the sales cycle to close the deal and win new businesses. But they struggle with the outbound side of the work. 

According to research by HubSpot, 52% of outbound marketers don’t see any results in their outbound efforts and only 16% percent of them were seeing successful results.

Also, in-house SDRs often run short, linear campaigns that end when the list runs out or the quarter ends. Then they start over. It’s a stop-start rhythm that kills momentum.

Modern outbound is much more demanding and requires technical know-how, automation, and data sophistication.

At Utmost Agency, we do the outbound work so that your current SDR team can just sit back, relax, smile, and dial.  

We’re specialists in:

• ICP targeting (so you’re not guessing who to reach out to) and data enrichment
• Entire sales workflow automation across tools like Clay, Instantly.ai, Periodix, N8N, CRMs, and more (and you don’t have to worry about the price of each tool)
• Intent signal tracking and trigger-based outreach
• Sales tech stack integration and optimization
• Inbound leads qualification automation so that you or your team doesn’t waste any more time on it.

You can learn about our entire process and work in this post: 

This level of technical execution is far beyond what you can expect from a single SDR. And it’s what gives our clients an edge from day one.

You pay for structured systems, not just individual effort

First of all, here is a quick representation of our system and the tools involved:

When you rely on individual SDRs, your entire outbound function depends on one person’s skill, memory, and habits. If they leave, their knowledge walks out the door with them and you’re back at square one.

With us, everything is systemized:

• We document processes and campaign strategies
• We centralize data and performance tracking
• We ensure continuity and consistency no matter who’s working on the account
• We can even train your team and build systems for them

You get better and faster execution.

A typical SDR has to juggle everything—research, list-building, writing messages, sending emails, qualifying leads, scheduling meetings, and reporting performance. That’s a lot to put on one person.

Working with us, we will:

• handle lead sourcing and enrichment
• write messages that actually get replies
• build and maintain your outreach automation
• focus purely on conversations and booking qualified meetings so that your salespeople can take it from there.

This allows you to grow better and more efficiently—because everyone is working in their zone of genius. The best part is that we do it all by designing a single automation workflow. 

When does partnering with an agency make sense?

Hiring a specialized outbound agency like Utmost Agency makes especially good sense when:

• You need results quickly. No 6-month ramp-up—we launch in weeks.
• You don’t have time or budget to build and manage a team. We handle the heavy lifting.
• You’ve struggled with SDR turnover or underperformance. We bring experience and stability.
• You want technical sophistication and automation. We deliver way more than just cold emails.
• You want to scale without multiplying your headcount. Our systems scale efficiently.

The real ROI is that you now have:

• fewer hires, less overhead,
• more meetings with higher lead quality,
• systems that can scale without extra effort,
• data and learnings that compound over time,
• predictable pipeline without burnout or churn. Plus we can scale up or down based on your needs. 

Note: Struggling to connect with decision-makers in your target market? We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign to transform your sales pipeline with prospects ready to engage. Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.