Hire an SDR, or run the outbound yourself?
It is the first real go-to-market decision a small B2B company makes, and most of the writing on it is published by someone selling one of the two answers. We sell one of them. Here is the comparison anyway, including where the hire is the better call.
Should you hire an SDR or buy outbound software?
If your deals are large, few and won through relationships, hire — and give that person software. If you sell a repeatable product into a broad market and the bottleneck is that nobody has time to send the follow-ups, buy the system first and hire once there are more meetings than you can take.
The two costs have completely different shapes. A hire costs base pay plus on-target commission, payroll taxes and benefits, the data and sequencing tools that rep needs, the cost of recruiting them, and two to four months of ramp before the pipeline is real. Software costs one subscription — Agent360 runs $99/month to $997/month at 325 emails a day.
What each one is genuinely better at
- A human SDR: judgement on a live call, named-account selling where every company needs a different angle, and multi-stakeholder deals where the path in is a person rather than a sequence.
- Software: running every day including the weeks the company is on fire, changing volume with a slider instead of a hiring plan, and logging every touch without anyone remembering to.
- A hire scales by adding another hire and can leave in month seven taking the ramp investment with them. Software scales by moving a slider and is cancelled rather than terminated.
The third option most people miss
Hire versus buy is a false binary. A done-for-you service sits between them: the platform runs the motion and a senior operator writes the copy, builds the campaigns and optimises them week to week — billed as a monthly fee plus a fee per booked meeting, so part of the cost only lands when a meeting does.
