Hiring an SDR, or an agency that works LinkedIn

Cold calls and cold emails to strangers get very few answers, whoever sends them. You're choosing between putting a person on that job full time and making your name familiar on LinkedIn first.

The pay figures are Glassdoor's reported averages from May 2026, read in September 2026 and covering base pay only, and ExpertGen quotes its one flat plan on the first call.

What an in-house SDR is

An SDR is a sales development representative, a person on your payroll whose whole job is to open conversations with new buyers. They build the list, call, email, send messages, work out who is worth your time, and hand those people to whoever closes. They sit in your meetings, hear your customers, and learn your product in a way an outside vendor rarely will.

The pay is easy to look up. Glassdoor, reading 1,863 reported salaries in May 2026, puts the average SDR base at $94,647 a year. The middle half of those salaries sat between $76,122 and $120,399. That figure is base pay on its own. Benefits, tools, management time and ramp all sit on top of it.

Ramp is easy to leave out when you compare a salary to a monthly fee. A new SDR needs a list, a script, a phone system, a data tool and an inbox. They also need a manager sitting with them while they learn what your buyers care about and how to answer the same three objections. None of that shows up on the salary line, and all of it costs money and hours.

What an in-house SDR does well

An SDR can do things no service can. They pick up the phone and handle a live objection while the buyer is still talking. They can chase one account four ways in a single week. They can sit in on a sales call, hear the exact words a real buyer used, and put those words in tomorrow's outreach. Over a year they learn your product deeply, and that knowledge stays in your company.

They're also yours to point wherever you want. You can move an SDR onto a new market on Monday, have them call lapsed customers on Tuesday, and put them on event work on Wednesday, and nobody has to renegotiate a scope to make that happen. If your buyers answer the phone and you have a manager who can coach, an SDR is often the right hire.

Where an in-house SDR stops

What holds an SDR back is who they have to call. A new SDR spends most of the day contacting people who have never heard of your company. A good one gets more out of that list, but the list is still cold.

• The list is built from filters. Those are people who look right, not people who know your name.
• Base pay averages $94,647 a year, and benefits, tools, management time and ramp sit on top.
• You carry the risk. If they leave, the notes, the list and the ramp leave with them.
• They don't write your posts, and they can't make your own profile familiar to buyers.
• One person can only work so many accounts in a week.
• Someone has to manage them every week. In a small company that someone is often you.

What ExpertGen does instead

ExpertGen is a LinkedIn scaling agency in Portland, Oregon, and we're not a replacement for a salesperson. We work one channel, and we start with the network instead of the message, because people reply to names they already know. We build your LinkedIn network out of your exact buyers, chosen by title, company size and industry, and you approve that list before anything sends. Then 600 connection requests a month go out from your own profile, which is 20 a day.

The posts are next, and they come out of your own voice. Twelve of them go out on your profile each month, written from what you said. You do one 45 minute voice call at the start, then a 10 minute voice memo each week, and that memo becomes the week's posts. That's our answer to the usual complaint about LinkedIn writing services, which is that the posts read like a machine wrote them. Setup also includes a rewrite of your profile so it reads for buyers.

Messages only go to buyers who accepted a connection request or reacted to a post. Those start in week 3, in your voice, and we send three at most. Then you take the call with the ones who reply. Every week you get a scoreboard with buyers added, buyers reacting, messages sent, replies and calls. We report buyers reacting instead of connection counts, because more connections doesn't mean more reach. LinkedIn's feed decides what gets shown.

Across campaigns we've run, messages to a sender's own first degree network of buyers got 11 to 28 replies per 100, with five campaigns at 27.7, 23.4, 21.7, 11.9 and 11.0 per 100. The same kind of message to strangers got about 1 reply per 100. Our cold email averaged 1.09 per 100 on the first email across 195,635 emails, and LinkedIn messages to strangers got 0.8 per 100. That difference is why the network comes first. We don't promise you a number of leads or calls. You see the real numbers on a scoreboard every week. This is for companies that sell to other businesses, when their buyers are on LinkedIn. It takes weeks to build, and it needs 10 minutes of your voice a week.

Who should pick which

What it costs, side by side

Glassdoor puts the average SDR base at $94,647 a year, with the middle half between $76,122 and $120,399. That's base pay. On top of it you pay benefits, tools, management time and ramp, and you carry the risk if the hire doesn't work out. A salary is also harder to reverse than a monthly fee.

ExpertGen is one flat plan. The first block is 90 days, paid up front, because a network takes weeks to warm. We give you the price on the first call. That plan covers the buyer list, the connection requests, the 12 posts a month, the messages to buyers who accept or react, the profile rewrite and the weekly scoreboard. Plenty of companies should do both. Your SDR works the phone while we work LinkedIn, so some of the people they call will have seen your name already.