stop hiring SDRs.

I was on a call last week with a founder whose sales team was clearly struggling.

They had five SDRs on payroll. Between them, they were producing five qualified leads a week. Not five each — five total.

He didn’t try to spin it.

“It’s not working,” he admitted. “But we don’t know what else to do.”

That’s the part that stuck with me. Not the performance. That’s fixable. It was the lack of a plan.

Because in most companies, when pipeline stalls, the default reaction is always the same: hire another SDR, buy another tool, send more emails.

Push harder. Scale faster. Hope something sticks.

But when the system is fundamentally broken, more reps don’t help. They just multiply the chaos.

What we’re seeing across the board right now is simple. Companies are trying to brute-force scale with an outbound engine that wasn’t designed to scale.

The SDRs aren’t lazy. They’re not unskilled. They’re trapped in a GTM system that’s outdated, bloated, and duct-taped together with legacy tactics.

It looks like this:

– Reps manually sourcing data instead of focusing on conversations
– Campaigns sending the same messaging to everyone in the ICP
– No segmentation, no signals, no lead scoring
– Warm intent being ignored while cold contacts are overworked
– CRM cluttered with junk replies and dead-end accounts

And through all that noise, someone in leadership says:
“Let’s hire another one.”

But more reps aren’t the answer.

What you need is to burn the entire process down and rebuild it. This time, with system design, not desperation.

Scaling isn’t about adding headcount. It’s about creating leverage.

You don’t need 10 reps doing 10 tasks each. You need one system doing the right 3, and removing or automating the rest.

That’s exactly what we helped this client do.

Instead of hiring two new SDRs, we rebuilt their outbound engine. We tracked warm leads using tools like RB2B and Trigify. We enriched contacts in real time through Clay, segmented messaging based on pain signals, and delivered high-quality campaigns through infrastructure built to land in the inbox.

Replies were routed to a trained inbox manager with a 15-minute SLA. No leads were lost. And within three weeks, they had more pipeline than the previous quarter, with fewer people involved.

And we didn’t stop at email.

We placed trained callers inside their business. Their only job? Dial warm leads, qualify interest, and hand off meetings to AEs.

Each one costs around three-quarters the price of a full-time SDR. No tool stack. No overhead. No internal management headaches.

They just show up, follow the system, and book.

So if your team is burning time, money, and morale trying to force results out of a broken GTM motion…

Stop hiring SDRs.
Start fixing the system.

If you want to see how that rebuild works, reply and I’ll walk you through it.

No fluff. Just the real playbook.