Here’s the uncomfortable truth about SDR metrics: most teams are measuring the wrong things, or worse, measuring everything and understanding nothing.
I’ve seen countless sales leaders pull their hair out over SDR performance. Their dashboards look like NASA control centers, tracking fifty different metrics, but they still can’t answer the basic question: “Why aren’t we booking more meetings?”
The problem isn’t a lack of data. It’s a lack of clarity about what actually matters and how to use metrics to improve performance, not just measure failure.
Understanding the SDR Metrics Framework
Think of SDR metrics like a funnel. At the top, you have activity—the raw inputs your team puts in every day. That activity flows through efficiency, which shows how well they’re converting those inputs into conversations. Those conversations turn into output, specifically meetings. And finally, you measure quality to understand if those meetings actually turn into pipeline.
Activity leads to efficiency, efficiency creates output, and quality determines if that output is worth anything. Miss one layer, and your entire measurement system falls apart.
Here’s what happens when you only focus on one category. Teams that obsess over activity metrics end up with SDRs who dial all day but book nothing. They’re busy, sure, but they’re not effective. On the flip side, teams that only care about efficiency might have great connect rates but not enough volume to hit targets. And teams that celebrate output without measuring quality? They book tons of meetings that never show up or immediately disqualify.
You need all four layers working together.
Activity Metrics: The Foundation
Activity metrics tell you if your SDRs are actually doing the work. This sounds basic, but you’d be surprised how many teams assume everyone’s prospecting eight hours a day when in reality, they’re spending half their time in Slack or “researching accounts.”
The core activity metrics are straightforward. Track how many calls each SDR makes, how many emails they send, and how many LinkedIn touches they complete. But don’t stop there. Also measure how many unique accounts they’re working and how many different contacts within those accounts they’re engaging.
For a standard B2B SDR role, you’re looking at roughly 50 to 75 dials per day, 50 to 100 emails, and 20 to 30 LinkedIn activities. On a weekly basis, that rolls up to about 250 to 350 calls, 250 to 400 emails, and 100 to 150 LinkedIn touches. They should also be opening 25 to 50 new accounts each week.
Now, before you start treating these numbers like gospel, understand they’re guidelines, not commandments. Your specific targets depend on your market, deal complexity, and what channels actually work for your ICP. An enterprise SDR targeting CIOs at Fortune 500 companies will have completely different activity patterns than someone selling to small business owners.
Here’s what I tell every sales leader: activity metrics are diagnostic tools, not success metrics. High activity with poor results tells you something’s broken in the approach. Maybe the messaging is off, maybe the targeting is wrong, or maybe your SDR needs coaching on their talk track. Activity for activity’s sake is just expensive theater.
Efficiency Metrics: Where the Magic Happens
This is where most teams find their biggest opportunities for improvement. Efficiency metrics show you how well your SDRs are converting their activity into actual conversations and meetings.
Let’s start with calling metrics. Your connect rate is simply how many of those dials actually reach a human. In most B2B environments, you’re looking at 10 to 15 percent. That means if your SDR makes 100 calls, they should be connecting with 10 to 15 people.
Once they connect, the conversation rate tells you how many of those brief pickups turn into actual conversations. You want 60 to 80 percent here. Not everyone who answers will talk, but most should if your SDR has a decent opener.
Then comes the meeting rate: how many of those conversations turn into scheduled meetings. Target 15 to 25 percent. Put it all together, and you get your dial-to-meeting rate, which typically lands around 1 to 3 percent. That means roughly one meeting for every 50 to 100 calls.
Here’s a real example. Sarah, an SDR on a team I worked with, was making her 75 dials per day religiously. But she was only booking two meetings a week when her target was eight. We dug into her efficiency metrics and found her connect rate was normal at 12 percent, but her conversation-to-meeting rate was only 8 percent when it should have been closer to 20 percent.
The issue wasn’t effort. It was objection handling. Once we role-played her responses to common pushbacks and tightened her qualification, her meeting rate jumped to 18 percent within two weeks. Same activity, double the output.
Email efficiency works similarly. Your open rate should be 40 to 60 percent, though this metric is increasingly unreliable thanks to email clients that pre-load images. Reply rate is more important, and you want 5 to 15 percent of delivered emails getting a response. Of those replies, aim for 40 to 60 percent to be positive or neutral (versus outright objections), and then convert 30 to 50 percent of positive replies into meetings.
If you’re seeing low reply rates, the issue is usually one of three things: poor targeting (you’re emailing the wrong people), weak messaging (your value prop isn’t resonating), or deliverability problems (you’re landing in spam). Each requires a different fix.
LinkedIn efficiency metrics are less standardized because the platform keeps changing the rules, but generally you want a 30 to 40 percent connection acceptance rate and a 10 to 20 percent response rate on your messages. If you’re well below these benchmarks, your profile probably needs work, or your connection requests are too salesy.
Output Metrics: What Actually Matters
At the end of the day, SDR performance comes down to one thing: meetings booked. Everything else is just a leading indicator.
But not all meetings are created equal. You need to track both meetings booked and meetings held, because the gap between them reveals a lot about meeting quality. If you’re booking 20 meetings but only 12 actually happen, you’ve got a 60 percent show rate, which is below the 75 to 85 percent you should be seeing.
Monthly meeting targets vary wildly based on your market. Enterprise SDRs targeting complex deals might book 8 to 12 quality meetings per month. Mid-market teams typically aim for 12 to 18. High-volume SMB teams often target 18 to 25 or more. The more transactional the sale, the higher the volume expectation.
Here’s the critical insight most teams miss: quality-adjusted targets matter more than raw volume. Let’s say you have two SDRs. The first books 20 meetings a month with a 70 percent show rate and 50 percent SQL conversion. That’s 14 held meetings and 7 SQLs. The second books 15 meetings with an 85 percent show rate and 70 percent SQL conversion. That’s 13 held meetings and 9 SQLs. The second SDR is outperforming despite booking fewer meetings.
You should also track meetings by channel. Knowing that 40 percent of your meetings come from cold email, 30 percent from phone, 20 percent from LinkedIn, and 10 percent from multi-touch sequences helps you allocate effort appropriately. If phone is only producing 15 percent of meetings but consuming 50 percent of your SDRs’ time, you need to either improve phone efficiency or shift time to higher-performing channels.
Quality Metrics: The Truth Behind the Numbers
This is where rubber meets road. You can book all the meetings you want, but if they don’t turn into pipeline, you’re just wasting AE time and burning your SDR out.
Show rate is your first quality check. If less than 75 percent of your booked meetings actually happen, something’s wrong with how SDRs are setting expectations or confirming attendance. I’ve seen teams improve show rates by 20 percentage points just by implementing better confirmation sequences and qualifying harder upfront.
SQL rate (Sales Qualified Lead) tells you how many of your held meetings actually meet your qualification criteria. You want 60 to 80 percent. If you’re well below this, your SDRs are either booking anyone with a pulse or your qualification criteria are unclear. If you’re well above it, you might be qualifying too strictly and leaving pipeline on the table.
Then comes SQO rate (Sales Qualified Opportunity), which measures how many SQLs turn into actual opportunities in your pipeline. Target 50 to 70 percent. The gap between SQL and SQO usually reveals sales process issues more than SDR quality, but it’s still worth tracking.
Let’s run through the math on a typical month. Say your SDR books 20 meetings. With an 80 percent show rate, that’s 16 held meetings. At a 70 percent SQL rate, you get 11 SQLs. With a 60 percent SQO conversion, that creates 7 opportunities. If your average deal size is $50,000, this SDR just generated $350,000 in pipeline. Their pipeline-per-meeting-booked is $17,500.
This is the metric sophisticated sales leaders actually care about. Not dials, not emails, not even meetings. How much qualified pipeline is each SDR creating per month? That’s the number that pays the bills.
You also want qualitative feedback from your AEs. Are they excited to take meetings from certain SDRs and dreading others? That tells you something important about meeting quality that no quantitative metric can capture. Create a simple feedback loop where AEs can flag meetings as “great fit,” “okay,” or “why was this booked” within your CRM. Patterns emerge quickly.
Building Dashboards That Actually Get Used
Most SDR dashboards fail because they’re either too complex or too simplistic. The NASA control center approach overwhelms everyone with data. The single-number approach hides all the diagnostic information you need to coach effectively.
Your individual SDR dashboard should show daily activity against target, rolling seven-day efficiency metrics, and month-to-date output. Keep it simple. Each morning, an SDR should be able to glance at their dashboard and know exactly what they need to do today and how they’re tracking against monthly goals.
For team leaders, you want a weekly roll-up that shows total team activity, average efficiency metrics across reps, and a breakdown of who’s performing above and below benchmark. This helps you identify who needs coaching and what type of coaching they need.
Leadership dashboards should focus on output and trends. Total meetings, total SQLs, pipeline created, cost per meeting, cost per SQL. Month-over-month trends in all key metrics. Projected end-of-quarter numbers based on current run rates. This is strategic information, not tactical data.
Benchmarking: Industry Standards vs. Your Reality
Every sales leader wants to know if their team’s metrics are “good.” Here’s the uncomfortable truth: industry benchmarks are useful for directional guidance but terrible for evaluating your specific team.
The often-cited benchmarks—10 to 12 percent connect rate, 6 to 10 percent reply rate, 12 to 18 meetings per month—come from averaging data across wildly different companies, markets, and sales motions. A cybersecurity company selling to CISOs operates in a completely different world than a marketing software company selling to small business owners.
What matters more is your own historical data and internal benchmarking. Track your metrics month over month. Understand what “good” looks like for your specific market, your specific ICP, and your specific sales motion. Then benchmark individual reps against that standard, accounting for factors like tenure, territory, and seasonal variations.
Here’s a real example of why context matters. I worked with a company that had two SDR teams. Team A targeted enterprise and averaged 10 meetings per month per rep with an 85 percent SQL rate. Team B targeted SMB and averaged 22 meetings per month with a 55 percent SQL rate. Looking at meeting volume alone, Team B crushed it. Looking at quality-adjusted output, they were roughly equal. Looking at revenue per rep, Team A generated more because their deals were larger.
Benchmarking without context is worse than not benchmarking at all.
Using Metrics for Coaching, Not Just Measurement
This is where most sales leaders miss the opportunity. They track metrics religiously, put them in spreadsheets, talk about them in team meetings, but they don’t use them to actually improve performance.
Metrics should drive your coaching conversations. When an SDR is underperforming, the metrics tell you where to focus. Low meetings with high activity and low efficiency? That’s a messaging or targeting problem. Low meetings with high efficiency but low activity? That’s a time management or motivation issue. Low meetings with good efficiency and okay activity? They might just need help with volume.
Let’s walk through a real diagnostic. Marcus was a new SDR who’d been ramping for two months. He was making his 60 dials per day and sending 80 emails, but he was only booking 6 meetings a month when his target was 12. We looked at his metrics together.
His connect rate was 9 percent, slightly below benchmark. His reply rate was normal at 7 percent. But his conversation-to-meeting rate was only 10 percent when it should have been closer to 20 percent. The issue was clear: he was getting conversations but failing to convert them.
We listened to a few call recordings and found he was getting flustered when prospects pushed back. He didn’t have crisp answers to common objections and would often just accept “not interested” without probing. Two coaching sessions on objection handling later, his meeting rate doubled. Same activity, same targeting, better execution.
Different performance profiles require different coaching approaches. High-activity, low-efficiency reps need skill development. Low-activity, high-efficiency reps need accountability and time management help. High-activity, high-efficiency reps need to maintain their performance and share what’s working with the team. Low-activity, low-efficiency reps need intensive coaching or might not be a good fit for the role.
Common Metric Mistakes to Avoid
The biggest mistake teams make is measuring activity in isolation. They celebrate the SDR who made 100 dials today without asking if any of them turned into meetings. Activity is necessary but not sufficient. You need activity plus efficiency plus quality.
The second mistake is ignoring quality entirely. Teams that only track meetings booked without measuring show rates and SQL conversion end up with inflated pipelines full of junk that wastes everyone’s time. Your AEs will start complaining, your close rates will tank, and your SDRs will get demoralized when none of their meetings close.
Third, comparing reps without context. Your enterprise SDR and your SMB SDR have different targets, different activities, and different quality expectations. Measuring them against the same benchmarks is useless and demoralizing.
Fourth, creating environments where reps game the metrics. If you only measure dials, don’t be surprised when SDRs rack up voicemails without leaving messages. If you only measure emails sent, expect to see blast campaigns with zero personalization. Measure what actually drives outcomes, not just activity proxies.
Finally, tracking too many metrics. If your dashboard has 50 data points, no one’s using it for anything except compliance. Pick the 5 to 10 that actually matter, track them consistently, and use them to drive decisions. Everything else is noise.
Getting Started with SDR Metrics
If you’re starting from scratch or overhauling your existing system, take it step by step. Spend your first week or two auditing what you’re currently tracking and identifying gaps. Set up dashboards in whatever tools you’re using, whether that’s Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, Salesloft, or a combination.
Next, establish your baselines. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, but you also can’t benchmark against numbers you don’t have. Run your current metrics for a few weeks to understand where your team actually stands today, not where you think they should be.
Then train your team on what you’re measuring and why. SDRs need to understand that metrics aren’t about micromanagement, they’re about giving everyone visibility into what’s working and what needs work. The best SDRs are data-driven about their own performance.
After you have a month or two of data, start using it for coaching. Look for patterns. Identify best practices from your top performers and teaching opportunities for everyone else. Refine your benchmarks as you understand your specific market better.
The tools don’t matter nearly as much as the process. Yes, platforms like Outreach, Salesloft, and Apollo make activity tracking easier. Yes, conversation intelligence tools like Gong and Chorus provide incredible insights into call quality. Yes, robust CRM reporting in Salesforce or HubSpot helps you connect SDR activity to revenue outcomes.
But I’ve seen teams crush it with basic CRM reporting and spreadsheets, and I’ve seen teams with every tool under the sun accomplish nothing because they didn’t have clarity about what to measure or how to use the data.
Start simple, measure consistently, and use the data to coach and improve. Everything else is optimization.
Key Takeaways
Effective SDR metrics require balancing activity, efficiency, output, and quality. You can’t focus on just one category without destroying performance in another. Activity without efficiency is wasted effort. Efficiency without volume doesn’t hit targets. Output without quality just clogs your pipeline with garbage.
Connect rates and reply rates reveal more about the health of your prospecting than almost any other metric. They tell you if your data is good, your messaging resonates, and your targeting is tight. When these numbers drop, fix them fast.
Meeting quality matters as much as meeting quantity. Fifteen high-quality meetings with 85 percent show rates and 70 percent SQL conversion will always outperform 25 low-quality meetings with 60 percent show and 40 percent SQL conversion. Stop celebrating quantity at the expense of quality.
Use metrics to diagnose and coach, not just to measure and judge. Every underperforming SDR has a specific reason for underperformance, and the metrics will tell you what it is if you know how to look. Bad data, weak messaging, poor objection handling, time management issues—each shows up differently in the numbers.
Finally, benchmark against your own historical data more than industry averages. Your market, your ICP, your sales motion, and your team composition are unique. What works for other companies might not work for you, and what “good” looks like in your context is more important than what some survey says is average.
Need Help Building Your SDR Metrics Framework?
We’ve built measurement and coaching systems for dozens of high-performing SDR teams. If you want better visibility into what’s actually driving performance and a framework for coaching your team to consistent results, let’s talk.
Book a call with our team and we’ll walk through your current metrics, identify the gaps, and build a plan to give you the visibility and control you need to scale your SDR function.