What's a fair monthly rate to pay for outsourced BDR execution versus running it myself?

The real cost of hiring your own BDR

A domestic Sales Development Representative shows up on Glassdoor with an average base salary in the $50,000-$60,000 range. That number is the floor, not the answer. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data puts benefits and payroll taxes at roughly 30% on top of wages for private industry workers, which pushes a $55,000 base to somewhere near $71,500 in true cash cost before you've bought a dialer, a data subscription, or spent a single hour managing them.

Add management time (someone has to run call reviews and hold the rep accountable), a 60-90 day ramp where output is near zero, and the churn that hits entry-level sales roles hard — most SDRs turn over in 12-18 months — and a realistic fully-loaded monthly cost lands between $6,500 and $8,000. That's before you've generated a single qualified meeting.

What outsourced execution actually costs

Outsourced BDR execution comes in three flavors, and they price very differently.

Offshore BDR seats are the cheapest lever: $19.65 an hour, which works out to roughly $3,400 a month for a full-time seat. You get labor at a fraction of domestic cost, but you're still responsible for the script, the target list, the CRM, and the coaching — the seat executes, it doesn't strategize.

Outsourced agency retainers, the kind most companies mean when they say "outsourced BDR," typically run $3,500-$8,000 per rep per month depending on target market, call volume expectations, and whether the agency owns the messaging or just the dialing. The wide range reflects a real quality gap: cheap retainers often mean shared reps split across five clients.

Led offshore execution — a sales leader running offshore seats on your playbook — prices as two lines: a monthly leadership fee plus the seat hours. It costs more than a raw seat because it replaces the management layer, not just the labor.

Comparison table

What you're actually paying for at each price point

The cheapest option — a raw offshore seat — only pays off if you already have a working playbook, a clean prospect list, and someone internally checking call quality weekly. Without that scaffolding, a $3,400/month seat produces activity, not pipeline, and you've just moved the cost of a bad process offshore.

The most expensive option, a domestic hire, buys you full control and someone who can eventually grow into an AE. It rarely buys speed — most founders wait four to six months to see if the hire was right, and by then a full sales cycle has been lost.

The honest middle ground pairs offshore execution labor with a built playbook and management oversight: roughly $5,900 a month for one full-time seat plus the leadership running it, which replaces both the SDR's salary and the sales manager's time reviewing their calls — and still lands under one fully-loaded domestic hire.

Where SalesARC fits

SalesARC Perform Basic is the led-execution model above: our sales leadership runs SalesARC offshore BDRs on your playbook for $2,499 a month, with the BDR hours billed on top at $19.65/hr every two weeks — so one full-time seat plus the leadership lands near $5,900, under one fully-loaded domestic SDR, and covers the oversight a raw offshore seat doesn't. Standard ($4,999) and Enterprise ($7,499) are for leading your own reps and the whole motion; BDR seats are optional and hourly on those too. It's not the cheapest option on this page; it's built for companies that already tried the cheap option and got activity without pipeline. See /product/perform.