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What else can I be doing to drive revenue? How do I optimize our go-to-market strategies to ensure effectiveness and ROI? If questions like these keep you up at night and occupy your thoughts by day, have we got a podcast for you.
Welcome to Market Mastery presented by The Bridge Group, the podcast where sales professionals learn to advance their careers. Join host and revenue expert Kyle Smith as he talks to elite B2B sales and revenue experts about the strategies they're using to win in the market.
From cultivating a killer company culture to navigating compensation questions, we'll provide you with the insights, education, and strategies you need to thrive.
For more from The Bridge Group, visit www.bridgegroupinc.com.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:00:00]:
In my opinion, if the ask is as an example, get me someone director level or above that has a security title, a pain that we can solve. That's on the list of 5,000 accounts that I can get you. If that meeting is completed and checks those boxes, then there is, I'm not saying 100% of the comp trigger, but you have crossed over the threshold of a significant compensation trigger. You did and delivered exactly what was asked of you. You should be compensated.
Kyle Smith [00:00:27]:
Welcome to Market Mastery, the podcast dedicated to uncovering revenue driving strategies for sales leaders in B2B tech. All right, the 2025 Sales Development Metrics and Compensation Report is ready and I'm joined by our Head of Research, Matt Bertuzzi to talk through a couple different things. We want to lay out what the data told us in the latest research report and then also expand the conversation to talk a little bit about why we think some major changes have happened in the SDR data that we're looking at and why we think that could be the case based off of the experience that we've had with our clients over the past year and two years.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:01:08]:
Okay. The first thing just to kind of context set is who takes the survey. Like what is the data based on? It's if memory serves, 350 ish liters of B2B tech companies, 85% North America based, 80 plus percent SaaS companies. But I think for everyone just to understand is this me? Does this relate to me? We like to look at this kind of heat map of who took the survey, who participated that shows you there's a broad range of as ASPs or ACVs and a broad range of titles. So info sec it heavy because I mean that's the market then operations, HR finance falling down through like the, the specific silos, marketing, product sales. So good swath across who the buyer is and the size of company.
Kyle Smith [00:01:56]:
And less and less every single year. What I would consider low ASP respondents sub 25k. Really low in the sub 5k. Which makes sense because typically when you have a more transactional sales process with a product that is less than 5k, you even making its way up to close to 10. It doesn't necessarily support a sales development function. The sales process just moves so quickly you're talking one, two, call closes. So makes sense that most of the respondents who have a built out sales development function skew on the higher end of ASPs.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:02:30]:
Yeah, absolutely. So the next piece we wanted to call out is kind of what Kyle was just talking to. It's a IT'S a compositional change of who has, who does sales development, what we've seen over time. So here are Data comparing our 2018 data, which is the 2019 release, with this release, the 2025 release. So I have adjusted these numbers for inflation. So sub 15k ACVs were 20% of the survey participants in 2018, and they're roughly 21% adjusted for inflation now. So that 15 is like $19,000 now in $2024. So they're roughly the same amount there.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:03:12]:
And sub 25k, we're actually seeing a shift to Kyle's larger point down from 37% to 34%. But the most interesting thing to me is the big ACVs. So north of 100K was 12% of respondents in 2018. And that 100K is like 125 now with inflation. And north of that mark was 20% of respondents. So this is 20% already adjusting for inflation. And north of 100K went from like 1% less than 1% to 8%. So like that is a compositional change in just six years.
Kyle Smith [00:03:44]:
Yeah, and I think really the last two years, 2023 and 2024, was really challenging for tech companies in general. And what I think we saw was yes, there were some layoffs, but there were slowed growth, significantly slowed growth in headcount within the sales development function. And so if you have less SDRs within your to me it makes sense that you're going to point them at the highest deals because for every single opportunity, you are increasing the pipeline sourced per rep so significantly that if you can't cover everything, you're going to cover the larger deals or the larger accounts that will yield larger deals. And so that shift, especially over these past two years, makes a lot of sense to me. And we've seen it even within our client base to focus SDRs up market where each opportunity has such a significantly higher value.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:04:37]:
Yeah, and we'll actually talk about it. There's so many follow ons there in terms of model, in terms of motion, in terms of career path. There's so much that follows on from that and we'll get to it. So we think of motion as like, what do the teams do? Right. So inbound, outbound, specialized, meaning I have one inbound team and I have one outbound team which are discrete and then all bound, which is a team or a single rep has both inbound and outbound. So this is the change from our 2022 data to our most recent data. The thing to note, at least for those who are just listening is 26% outbound only teams in 2024, up from 16% in 2022. And where did that delta come from? A fall in specialized group.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:05:18]:
And again, a specialized means discrete inbound and discrete outbound. So that fell from 33% down to 24%. So those teams, those companies of respondents that once had two organizations, potentially if they're the same, if they're participating, maybe now they only have one organization and that organization is outbound only.
Kyle Smith [00:05:37]:
This one to me is really hard to pin down the why. Because it could be five to 10 different factors that would influence people moving away from the idea of role specialization or inbound versus outbound. I think marketing is getting a lot better at targeting the accounts that sales would put on their target account list anyways. So the overlap. And who am I going to point an SDR at with outbound proactive prospecting efforts and who are we driving inbound through the marketing funnel start to have a more significant overlap when they overlap more. Having two distinctly different people managing inbound and outbound with essentially the same set of accounts introduces a ton of channel conflict and infighting. That's just unnecessary. So when that demand gen engine is dialed in and focused on the same accounts you point outbound at, it doesn't really make sense to specialize the roles.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:06:26]:
Yeah.
Kyle Smith [00:06:26]:
So that could be one thing, and I think we've seen plenty of that when we actually have more intimate knowledge of how the account is working. And then one other thing that I think about is if you just don't have an inbound volume to support dedicated headcount, which happens lots of times if you've increased your scoring threshold or you're just getting your demand gen motion kind of kicked in, then you can't fully dedicate a headcount when those resources are so finite to our earlier point. So you just need to say everyone does a little bit of everything and you choose a different way to segment the accounts.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:07:02]:
Yeah, there's no reason that if I have. If we have, like you're saying lower inbound demand, our options are spread that inbound demand thinly across the existing SDR org, or just skip the org and go straight to AEs with better scoring, whatever, you know, higher quality go, right? So you do whatever the math says to do, whichever produces the greatest output and pipeline and revenue.
Kyle Smith [00:07:24]:
Right. And we saw some of that too, where the AEs and this is a conversation we've had a dozen times even in the last quarter, never mind the last two years, where AEs are being asked to generate a higher percentage of their own pipeline. And if they are going to need to do that, the AE's immediate reaction and very human response is to say okay, well then give me the inbound. I would rather focus on the inbound then do my own cold strategic account prospecting. So that could be playing into this as well. But regardless, massive shift on those formally specialized inbound versus outbound SDRs towards more either all bound or in many instances outbound only.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:08:05]:
Yep, absolutely. So what hasn't changed? We always like to talk about this one because this is like the one constant in sales development. Is it 60% of SDR organizations report into the sales funnel or the sales silo and that excludes those like with C suite titles. So a CRO, some respondents might consider that sales, some might consider it C suite. So there's 10% of respondents said they the sales development org sits under a CXO. But 60%, 64%, that's what we saw in 2022. It is a generally a sales-centric function.
Kyle Smith [00:08:41]:
Yeah. And not to say that it can't be extremely successful or in certain instances shouldn't report into marketing. I personally have not found that the success or failure of the sales development team lies in where they report. Organizationally, it's just who is going to pay for it. And then typically that ties to who cares the most about how the team operates and who cares the most or who knows the most about what it takes to be successful as an SDR team is who they should report to.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:09:12]:
No question.
Kyle Smith [00:09:12]:
So it just so happens that the data proves out that more often than not that is sales.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:09:17]:
Right, absolutely. Like the best most interested person is way better than whatever organization like other people are doing.
Kyle Smith [00:09:25]:
There's not a rule, it's what's right for your org by based off of who cares the most and who knows the most about what it takes to be successful as an estate SDR?
Matt Bertuzzi [00:09:33]:
100% okay, this is data. This is not us pontificating or saying what is morally right. But SDR is returning to the office we saw in our 2019 reports or 2018 data. Single digits of teams were fully remote, maybe not even, Kyle, low single digits, 3%.
Kyle Smith [00:09:52]:
It wasn't a thing.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:09:53]:
It wasn't a thing. Yeah, 100% it was not a thing in 2018. Then COVID. Then the post COVID SaaS-plosion where people moved from the major metros and then the companies that were hiring just needed more headcount so they expanded beyond the major metros Basically, we ended up with roughly 45% of groups being fully remote in 2022. That number has fallen 8 percentage points. We're now at 37%. And another bucket is return to office has gone from 41% in 2022. And again, this is post COVID 2022 to 58% partially or fully returned to office in our 2024 data.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:10:34]:
And you can see on the left that like those respondents that weren't sure where their next hires are going to be has gone, it's fallen by 2/3. People have made a decision where either we like this operating model of fully remote or we want people back some or all of the time. If it's some of the time, that's still essentially hiring local offices.
Kyle Smith [00:10:53]:
I think about two factors that impact this. One, subpar performance.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:10:59]:
Yep.
Kyle Smith [00:10:59]:
And so if the company's not doing that well, you grasp at anything and everything you can think of to think about. How do we improve productivity? And if one of those things is we need to get people back in the office so we can more effectively manage, coach, train them, develop them, whatever, fine. Then you grasp at that and you say we can pull them into the off, pull them back into office, see if that works to improve our performance. The second piece would be you can get away with it. So we are in a market that favors the employer versus the employee or the applicant. And so this really wasn't the thing during the period of 2021 and 2022 where you had to offer the world to get a barely qualified applicant. That's not the situation we're in now. So every single job posting related to sales at a tech company has a hundred plus applications within four days.
Kyle Smith [00:11:47]:
And so you can be a little bit more picky about not just who you choose, but what you ask of them. So I think we're seeing that here.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:11:54]:
Okay, so this is where it gets really interesting. This to me is like something I'm super interested in. This pulls together everything. What's the macro economy? What is the labor market? What is the future in past of the role? What are people's expectations when they start as an SDR? What is the reality when they want to become an AE? So this is three data points. 2020 data, 2022, 2024 on attrition. And we think in three buckets starting from the bottom. Voluntary. Voluntary attrition is, meaning it is at the rep's initiation is voluntary to them.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:12:26]:
So I resign. That's voluntary attrition. We saw a, not surprisingly, a little bit of a of a bump in 2022 and then a fall off into 2024 data. So in 2020 we still had that post-COVID combination of no one wanted to leave when it was unclear what the future was. And then as the rise really blew up in 2022 of kind of that SaaS explosion, we saw that rise fall into 2024. Involuntary is essentially just wobbling. It's been flat. That is initiated at the company's discretion.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:12:59]:
So layoffs, terminations, riffs, things like that. One of the good things about this tight job market is that layoffs really haven't spiked. There's a big prediction that thankfully has not come true. But the interesting bucket and you can see is this downward swoop is what's happened to promotions. So roughly companies were budgeting or reporting 34% it's attrition but 34% promotion in 2020 and that has fallen to 16% in 2024. That's a halving. Half as many class of 2023 reps will be promoted to or were promoted to AE as those within the class of 2018, 2019. You can see that frustration in a lot of places.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:13:40]:
You can see it on Reddit, you can see it on repview, you can see it on Glassdoor, you can see it in all those kinds of spots.
Kyle Smith [00:13:47]:
It's really interesting but makes logical sense. Where are you going to put them? There's not a bunch of open roles within the AE org. It's not we're going to go higher. 30 AEs this year. Let's make 20 of them, 15 of them internal promotion so that we can continue to promote outwardly that career pathing story and we can make sure that we have homegrown talent and potentially get a discount on it. But it's just there's the role doesn't exist. It's not that the organizations don't have an appetite to promote exclusively. It's just that they don't have the ability to take on additional AE headcount. And those AEs aren't going anywhere.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:14:29]:
There's a backup everywhere. There's a bunch of SMB who want to become mid-market and if they don't become mid-market AEs, where are the SDRs going to come in? Companies that have multiple segments, it is rare. You know, SDR, mid market SDR, Enterprise SDR. They don't go to enterprise AE. That's just like enterprise AE is up here. So that if this spot is blocked, there's nowhere to go. You can't skip that SMB or lower mid market commercial AE role.
Kyle Smith [00:15:00]:
Right. And what it does is it makes things better and worse. If you're a sales development leader, it means that you have less attrition, so you're not dedicating as much of your time playing the role of recruiter and enablement onboarder and you have more tenured people on your team. But on the flip side, you have to deal with some of the softer skills of management, which is managing frustration and expectations for people who feel as though they should have been already given the opportunity to take on the AE or whatever role they, they want to segue into next.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:15:36]:
Yep.
Kyle Smith [00:15:36]:
And so there's pros and cons to this. It's just the current reality, which is you're seeing less attrition mostly from that promotion bucket.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:15:46]:
So where is that showing up? This is just data on what percentage of respondents have an SDR to a career path have it at all. Not what percentage are they promoting, but what percentage have that as an option. And in 2022, 80%, which is a lot considering average sales price was probably in the high 40,000 in the 2022 data. It's in the low 50,000 now. But we've seen that fallback and it's the first fallback since we've been tracking the metric. So 1 in 10 fewer respondents are even offering an SDR to AE career path, let alone doing the promotion.
Kyle Smith [00:16:21]:
Actually, I think that part of this also ties back to the AE Report we published last year, which is we saw for 20 years we would assume a win rate of 22 to 24% somewhere in there. And then the AE Report last year showed that win rate was 18%. And so when we peel back the layers on that, we find that the sales cycle has gotten significantly longer and more difficult. There's more stakeholder involved. You just need essentially 10 wins to get one. You got so many people to sign off and so much to communicate. And so if you have this complicating factor of a more challenging and sophisticated sales process, even on like a 50k deal, you could be less apt to promote an SDR into that role. Because it's not just show up, run a disco call with the questions that I give you in a tight 30 minute structure that I provide to you, push them to a demo that includes an SE and then send the proposal and then we just win.
Kyle Smith [00:17:21]:
It's so much more complicated than that. There could be less confidence to say the person who's been great at prospecting for me will be great at running this very complicated, drawn out, sophisticated sales process that is our current reality to, to capture dollars.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:17:39]:
100%. So what does that mean for average tenure? Well, if there's fewer people being promoted and there's less opportunities to be promoted, obviously average tenure is up. So I think off the top of my head, we saw something like maybe 1.9 years. Let's say 22 months is the average tenure. Now for an SDR where it was maybe 1.4. So let's say that's 15 months in our 2022 data, this is the thing, it's like it's not a lot, seven months, but A, that's the average and B, over 25 year career, it's not a lot. But if this is your first job, first job in tech, first job in sales, that extra seven months, and that job is SDR, that seven months feels like a long time.
Kyle Smith [00:18:19]:
And it's a lot of scale for the sales development function. So if you zoom out beyond even just a manager or the rep perspective, and you say as a business, we have 20 SDRs and average tenure rose by seven months, that means seven more months of fully ramped, fully productive across all 20 of those reps on average. And so what that means in terms of your productivity, it means that it goes up significantly because you're not dealing with constantly open seats and ramping seats.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:18:54]:
Yep.
Kyle Smith [00:18:54]:
So at any given time, you're not looking at eight of your people are in month one and two of your seats are just open. So that has a pretty big impact on what the overall total pipeline production looks like across sales development as a function.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:19:10]:
This is my most hopeful, I think of all the charts callous if you agree. We've been tracking QCs per day for a decade plus and we define a QC as a conversation or email reply or LinkedIn reply or WhatsApp reply, a conversation or something where at least one piece of qualifying or disqualifying information is learned. So if you never talk to anybody ever, and they never respond to your emails and you never connect with them and they never call you back, you'd have zero QCs per day. That number, you know, if you ignore 2024 here was trending down from 8 per day in 2014 to 5 and change to 5 and change to 4 and change to 3.6 in 2022. So before we actually busted open the data, I was very interested to see if that trend line was going to continue, because that trend line would be like 3 qcs per day, which is tough. It's a tough business model to make work when you're talking to fewer than three and a half people a day meaningfully. But we saw a rebound in 2024, so 4.1 QCs per day. So for me that's a bright spot.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:20:13]:
My fear had been it's been easy to email at scale. Now it's easy to personalize at scale. Now it's easy to personalize email at scale where you don't even have reps doing it. You know, now there's AI SDR. So I was wondering, like, what is this actually going to mean? How much harder is it going to be to have these conversations? But the answer seems to be sales development has adjusted. We haven't just taken the reality and said, well, we're on a downward trajectory forever. We've rebounded just good.
Kyle Smith [00:20:40]:
I think the whole story of this personally is a technology story, which is we see this steady decline in how many quality conversations are being had per day based off of the emergence of, I don't know, 12, 15 core technologies being consistently used by sales development. And then we see a rebound when email gets really torpedoed, really for the last four years, that being accelerated in the past year with the emergence of AI. And so where email becomes this channel that is so noisy and so easy to, as Matt said, personalize at scale, then all of a sudden the phone makes a comeback and you can start having meaningful voice based conversations with people again. So the market responds to the broader actions of the sales efforts or sales development efforts. And it was great to see in this instance. It means that we can actually still invest in human capital to drive conversations with our target market through sales development.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:21:42]:
Yeah. So actually just drilling down into that, we essentially bucket the respondents into three categories. Those which are email centric, meaning roughly 1.5 as many emails per day as dials per day. And then phone centric, which is the reverse, 1.5, as many dials per day as emails. And this is just showing, obviously the people who are email centric do fewer dials per day than those that are phone centric 28 versus 56, which if my math is correct, that's twice as many dials and then the QCs per day for each bucket. So email centric 3.4 QCs per day neutral or those in the middle 2/3, 4.1 QCs per day. And those that are phone centric 4.6 QCs per day, which is 4.6 is 2018, 2019, 2020 numbers. Those are good.
Kyle Smith [00:22:28]:
And it doesn't seem like A huge delta. And to Matt's point, you're making double the dials per day for 1.2 conversations more per day. But if you compound that over, round down 20 business days in a month, 12 months in a year, next thing you know, you've had 250 more quality conversations. Really quickly, you convert those even at a mediocre 10%, that's 25 more meetings, 12 more ups. Like you're talking about a half million plus with really bad conversion rates everywhere else down the funnel and pipeline per SDR per year. And so really, this is a guiding light metric that we use when I work more intimately with sales development teams, is how many of our prospects are you engaging with in a meaningful way? And so something to think about when you're setting expectations on what the mix of activity should be and how heavily to lean on the phone.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:23:23]:
Yeah, absolutely. And the reason, I think, Kylie, if you agree we love this metric so much, is you can track it in a week.
Kyle Smith [00:23:29]:
There's an instant feedback loop. You don't have to. To your point, wait six weeks. Did that work? Did it not? You get feedback in real time and this is where you can have the, the greatest influence as both a manager and a rep.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:23:45]:
Right. Yeah, 100%. Okay. So now, again, we talked about compositional changes, changes in tenure, changes in a lot of different things. But what are the reps delivering? What is the model? What is the output of sales development? So essentially what we're seeing and we're trying to communicate with this is there's a shift, a shift down in the qualification level of the meetings being passed. Like, if you think of fully qualified as like band plus Social Security number, an introductory being somewhere beyond, I don't know, pulse, fog, the mirror. We used to say, you know, meaning they're breathing. We're seeing a shift down in qualification from 2022 data.
Kyle Smith [00:24:25]:
To me, it makes perfect sense. It's harder to get people to take the meeting, so you loosen the criteria required for the SDR to actually book that meeting. And also, if you're not sitting there with 5x pipeline coverage as an AE and you're just worried about working the deals that are already actively engaged and pushing them deeper towards close one, then you say, give me, give me everything.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:24:53]:
Yeah.
Kyle Smith [00:24:54]:
And so I think everyone's on board with this. SDRs want to book more meetings, AEs want to take more meetings with the hopes that they actually convert into meaningful opportunities. So it all checks out and lines up with what we've seen in the market. More broadly, I think this is a comment on what's happening in the market more than anything else.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:25:11]:
Right. You can't say, well, we're going to now do fully qualified at the same level. Like it's not up. One does not control that. You can influence it, but you can't tell. You can't make the market give you 10 fully qualified meetings per rep per month.
Kyle Smith [00:25:24]:
I also think that budget and timeline going back to the traditional BANT framework has gotten pretty dicey.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:25:32]:
Yeah.
Kyle Smith [00:25:33]:
And so people who used to have their own budget don't anymore. We talked a little bit ago about how many buyers are involved in a sales process at this point. And a huge component of that is, let's just say a VP of sales. A VP of sales that used to have $2 million of discretionary spend to do whatever they want with. It's not exactly that same way at this point. They might have to go to finance or somebody else for approval on every single deal. Which means how are you checking the boxes on budget and timeline if there aren't all these nice pretty line items that tie to your tech?
Matt Bertuzzi [00:26:08]:
Right.
Kyle Smith [00:26:08]:
And if the authority is now really fuzzy and you're like, technically this is the person who always has historically signed off on our deals. We don't know if they're going to anymore. So I think both of those things factor in. There's less pipeline coverage, so AEs want more meetings. And checking those boxes got significantly more complicated based off of how people are making purchases.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:26:31]:
Now here's where it gets interesting. If we agree, if we look at the data and we say, okay, companies are shifting from fully qualified or more companies are shifting from fully qualified to semi qualified, semi qualified to introductory. How are we paying the reps? From pure reason, we would say, well, on the fully qualified model, we're paying them on either meetings converted or maybe close one opportunity. So these dark, dark shade boxes say roughly 2/3 of being paid that way and fully qualified. Now if we look at introductory, we're asking for introductory meetings, Fog the mirror pulse, right? Title, something like that, Interest, pain, whatever that thin criteria is. But we're still half of companies are paying them on meetings, converted and close one opportunities.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:27:16]:
Is that a disconnect?
Kyle Smith [00:27:18]:
100%. And so what you're doing here is just get me on the phone with whoever I can talk to and spend your time doing that and put your effort there. But I need financial downside protection. So you're only going to get paid if this actually materializes and also is more significantly reliant on the skill sets, ability, level of focus, attention, whatever. It's more reliant on the ae. And so there's a significant disconnect. We're asking what we are saying. Your objective and your goal is, is one thing, how you're being paid does not directly align to that.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:27:58]:
Which leads to actual frustration, right?
Kyle Smith [00:28:00]:
Yeah.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:28:02]:
What the comp plan says to do and what my, my job descriptions say to do are in disalignment, it is not optimal.
Kyle Smith [00:28:09]:
Yeah. In my opinion if the ask is as an example, get me someone director level or above that has a security title, a pain that we can solve. That's on the list of 5,000 accounts that I can get you. If that meeting is completed and checks those boxes, then there is, I'm not saying 100% of the comp trigger, but you have crossed over the threshold of a significant compensation trigger. You did and delivered exactly what was asked of you. You should be compensated. Now if you ask that of me and then say oh, and you'll be paid when it's closed to one, which is not my job, that that's where that frustration really starts to increase. And I think we always have to be careful of how hard we can push because it's an employer market, employer friendly market today.
Kyle Smith [00:29:01]:
But that doesn't last forever. It's always cyclical. There's ebbs and flows in that power dynamic. And so you just have to be careful on how hard you push and squeeze people.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:29:12]:
Right. In 2020 this model would not have done well. You would have seen a lot of voluntary attrition.
Kyle Smith [00:29:19]:
Yes.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:29:19]:
Yeah.
Kyle Smith [00:29:20]:
Like that comp plan stinks. And there's 10 other people in my LinkedIn inbox offering me jobs for more pay and assume that they're going to actually do what they say they're going to do. So something to be aware of. Completely understand why companies do it. You're protecting the downside of overpaying incentive compensation for things that don't materialize. But you always have to be cautious of what's the behavior you're trying to drive. Because if you actually want them to just book as many intro meetings as possible, but the comp plan tells them that they should qualify more, hang around in deals longer to make sure that they convert. Then they're going to do what the comp plan drives them to do.
Kyle Smith [00:29:56]:
Compensation drives behavior. So make sure that the comp plan and what you actually want them to do are in alignment.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:30:02]:
Absolutely. So maybe XQCS isn't my favorite data point from this one. Maybe this is My favorite data point. So we always track annual median, meaning 50% below, 50% above respondents pipeline per rep. So this is a chart that is shockingly high. So roughly in millions annually per rep in pipeline created, not sourced, not one rather, but created pipeline 2018, we're roughly at 2.7 million, 2023 million. We hired a lot through 2022, so it went down to 2.8 million. And we are nearly at 3.8 million per SDR annually in pipeline sourced for 2025 data set.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:30:47]:
It's a lot.
Kyle Smith [00:30:48]:
It's a massive, massive jump. And if you use round numbers, basically we were hovering for a long time around 3 million of pipeline per SDR per year and then jumped to four. It's a pretty massive shift. And we didn't see that come really in the form of the meeting numbers.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:31:12]:
We haven't shared it here. But quotas did not go up. Quotas have not risen 32%.
Kyle Smith [00:31:17]:
Right. So only two things can happen then at that point. Either the deals are bigger that SCRs are focusing on or they're converting at a higher rate.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:31:27]:
It's not that more reps are hitting their number. I can tell you concretely that's not the case.
Kyle Smith [00:31:31]:
Right, so if more are converting, then you say why? Well, we just had the whole conversation around how the qualification is loosened. So it doesn't necessarily make sense that more would be converting because the SDRs are teasing out more information that provides the AE with ammunition to push them farther along through the sales process. So it could be just the natural human reaction to say when my pipeline is empty, we let more in. Yeah, give me in 2022, the bar was at capacity, the door was locked and it was one in, one out. We're at capacity. I'm not letting something in unless it is perfect. And now the bar is empty. Welcome anybody.
Kyle Smith [00:32:17]:
We're outside trying to call people in to the pipeline. So I think you just have less pipeline coverage, which means the AEs, they're not doing their SDRs favors. They genuinely are just trying to get more deals in that have a hope and a prayer of potentially closing at this point just based off of the coverage gap.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:32:35]:
Right. Like if stage, whatever stage one is 23% probability of closing, maybe in 2022 they only took one in three and now they're taking one in four or one and four and a half. It's the nature, like if my pipeline coverage is not sufficient, even I'll take a worse win rate just to get the number closer.
Kyle Smith [00:32:56]:
The next question will be so if that is true, do we need to reset expectations on the total pipeline production for the sales development function and will we see a correlating drop on revenue sourced per SDR per year?
Matt Bertuzzi [00:33:10]:
Right. Yeah. You can't, you can't use 2025's pipeline numbers with 2023's win rates.
Kyle Smith [00:33:18]:
Exactly.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:33:19]:
Yeah.
Kyle Smith [00:33:20]:
Yeah. So those two things just have to line up. We have to make sure that we are pairing together like data and not mix and matching to make it look the best way possible on our spreadsheet. We're actually gonna get 4 million in pipeline and win at 30%. Like those two numbers don't align. It's either the 3 million and 25 or if you're going to go to 4 million in pipeline source, you need to be realistic about what the win rate is going to be on the other side of that, which is down closer into the high teens.
Matt Bertuzzi [00:33:47]:
Yep. Well, I think the report, we have a ton of other interesting stuff, least interesting to me. Tech stack. People care about conversion rates, people care about quotas. Obviously comp is a huge one, some interesting stuff in comp, but I think that these were like, I think the headline stuff. At least we could provide more context and our thinking around with the, with the video.
Kyle Smith [00:34:04]:
Absolutely. Read the whole report, Reach out if you have questions or want to talk through how your team aligns to some of the benchmarks provided in the report. But hope you enjoy.
Kyle Smith [00:34:27]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Market Mastery brought to you by The Bridge Group. If you're a revenue leader in the B2B sales space or know someone who is, connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget to subscribe to stay updated on future episodes.