Outsourced SDR: what a seat costs per held meeting (October 2026)

What an outsourced SDR is, who sells seats and at what price as of October 2026, the cost per held meeting, and when it beats hiring or pay per meeting.

By Moe Alhosni, founder of ROI Maximizer. Published 14 October 2026.

Short answer: An outsourced SDR is a sales development rep on someone else's payroll, working your pipeline under your name. You pay for the seat by the month, whether it books meetings or not. As of October 2026, published per-seat prices run from $4,249 a month (one offshore CIENCE rep, with its team and platform) to about $12,950 a calendar month (one SalesRoads SDR). Martal Group's own figure is $138,000 a year per rep. At five to ten held meetings a month, that is roughly $550 to $2,600 per held meeting. A seat beats hiring when you need someone working in weeks, not months. It beats paying per meeting when your buyer needs a phone call, or the job is more than booking meetings.

I run ROI Maximizer, a pay-per-meeting agency. I do not sell seats, and I compete with every vendor below, so read this with that bias in mind. Every outside figure comes from a page I opened on 14 October 2026, linked where it appears. Martal's site blocked me today, so its figures are the ones recorded, with links, in our Martal Group pricing breakdown earlier the same day.

What an outsourced SDR is, and what it is not

An outsourced SDR, short for outsourced sales development representative, is a person. They work for a vendor, sit in your CRM and inbox, email and call under your brand, and the vendor manages them. SDR as a service is the same purchase with data, tools and a team lead bundled into the fee. Three other things get sold under the same words.

Read the last row twice. When you outsource sales development by the seat, you carry the bad month, because you are paying for activity. The agency that sells the meeting itself is covered in appointment setting services.

Who sells outsourced SDR services, and at what price

Two vendors this site already covers price by the seat. CIENCE prints its rate card. Martal Group does not.

CIENCE changed its page between 13 and 14 October. The older version, with a $5,000 setup and offshore seats from $1,500, is in CIENCE pricing. The order form is the price. Side by side: CIENCE vs Martal Group.

What an outsourced SDR costs per held meeting

Nobody above publishes meetings per seat, so I used three denominators. Ten held meetings a month is the median SDR quota in The Bridge Group's 2025 SDR report (351 companies, checked October 2026). Eight is a shade under its 9.0 quota for fully qualified meetings. Separately, the same report says 60% of SDRs hit quota. Five is close to the 5.6 meetings a month at the median of the case studies on Martal's homepage, though those are booked, not held.

CIENCE's bonus is "base x percent of target x 0.35" from 60% to 99% of target, and 0.7 from 100%. I read "base" as the seat price and assumed a target of ten. The page defines neither, so ask. Setup is left out of every row. SalesRoads' own case studies run faster than my denominators; see SalesRoads pricing.

CIENCE's bonus means a better month barely lowers the cost per meeting: eight to ten held moves the US seat from $1,032 to $1,015. And the seat is fixed while the denominator is not. The list is a big part of that denominator. In two of our 2026 campaigns, 46,201 emails into one list drew human replies on 0.78% of sends, and 38,254 into a colder list drew 0.32%. Those are replies of any sentiment, from different clients with different copy, so not a clean test. On a fixed seat, a colder list makes every meeting dearer.

An in-house SDR, priced the same way

The usual pitch for outsourced SDR services is that they cost less than a hire. Price the hire first. US figures, because that is where the public benchmarks are.

At eight held meetings a month for nine months, that is 72 meetings at about $1,790 each. At ten, about $1,430. The BLS line averages every sales job, retail included, so treat it as rough. The UK version is in in-house SDR vs pay-per-result agency cost.

On these assumptions, every outsourced row beats the year-one hire at the same meeting count, mostly because the hire pays for three months of ramp. The seat rows also lose time to campaign ramp (CIENCE goes live in 14 days, SalesRoads starts calling on business day 16) and leave setup out, so the real gap is narrower than the tables show. In year two, if the rep stays, the hire falls to about $1,345 a meeting at eight a month, below Martal and SalesRoads. Average SDR tenure is 1.9 years, so plenty do not stay.

Ramp time: the rep ramps, then the campaign ramps

A seat skips the recruiting and most of the person's ramp. CIENCE says "live in 14 days". SalesRoads starts calling on business day 16. An in-house hire ramps for 3.0 months on the Bridge Group average, after the weeks spent recruiting.

No vendor skips the campaign's ramp. New domains need warming, the list needs building and verifying, and the first replies tell you what to change. Our own timeline is 14 to 21 days to the first email, with first conversations in weeks three to four: how long until cold outreach books meetings. PR Noir had 10 meetings in its first 30 days with us. One client, not a promise.

The seats differ most on what you commit before you can judge. SalesRoads' 12 weeks is $35,850 for one SDR. Martal's three-month pilot is $34,500 at its own $11,500. CIENCE is one month plus setup.

Management overhead does not go away

In-house, one manager runs 6.4 SDRs on average. With one SDR, the manager is you. A seat moves most of that to the vendor: CIENCE's $2,000 team "reviews the SDRs' work", and SalesRoads includes a strategist and a performance coach.

What stays with you:

• Teaching the product. The rep does not know why your customers buy.
• Signing off the list, the message and the qualification definition before anything sends.
• Replies. Of 1,543 positive replies across our own and client campaigns, August 2025 to July 2026, 10.9% asked for a call outright and 7.4% asked the price first. Another 56.3% matched no keyword class, many of them a bare "sure" or "ok". Turning those into meetings is human work. Ask who does it, and how fast.
• The meeting itself. Closing is yours under every model.

AI takes the research and drafting, not the targeting or the judgement on an ambiguous reply. That line is drawn in AI SDR vs human SDR, and the tool-or-agency question in AI SDR software vs a pay-per-meeting agency.

When an outsourced SDR beats in-house and pay per meeting

I sell pay per meeting, and I would still point you to a seat in five cases.

1. Your buyers answer the phone. CIENCE, Martal and SalesRoads seats all call. We run cold email only.
2. The work is more than meetings. Inbound follow-up, event lists, closed-lost deals, account research for your closers. A seat does what you assign. A per-meeting agency is paid for meetings and will do little else.
3. Your market is a few hundred companies. Per-meeting pricing rewards volume. A seat is paid for time, so it can work 300 accounts slowly.
4. Your deal is $50,000 or more. At $1,000 to $2,500 per held meeting, with one in ten closing, a customer costs $10,000 to $25,000. A $50,000 deal carries that.
5. You want to test outbound before hiring. A month-to-month seat is a cheaper experiment than a hire with a 3.0-month ramp. Keep the scripts, list and reply history.

A seat loses to in-house once the motion is proven and you want the skill inside the company. It loses to pay per meeting when your buyers read email, your deal sits between roughly $5,000 and $50,000, and a dry month would hurt.

Our terms: a one-off setup of $1,000 to $3,000, then $200 to $500 per qualified meeting, billed in arrears, only for meetings that took place and that you approved against a written definition. Nothing for a no-show, no minimum, and you keep the domains and data at exit. The exact figure is confirmed on the call. Or $5,000 a month flat with no per-meeting fee, which carries a seat's zero-month risk. Full terms: pay per meeting lead generation pricing.

On those terms, PR Noir's first month would cost $3,000 to $8,000 with setup: 27 leads, 10 meetings, 37% lead-to-meeting, one $90K close (PR Noir's first 30 days). P1 Communications, a UK hospitality PR agency, reports 20+ qualified meetings, half moving to commercial discussions, 4 new deals and £12K a month of projected pipeline.

When not to hire us

• You have never closed a deal from outbound. No seat or agency fixes an offer nobody wants. Send fifty emails yourself first.
• Your annual contract value is under roughly $5,000. We turn that down.
• Your buyers only pick up the phone, or you want non-meeting work done. Buy a seat.

We have no Clutch or G2 reviews. Martal has 109 on Clutch. Hold that against us, and run how to tell if a lead generation agency is any good on every name, ours included. For a second opinion on an outsourced SDR quote, book 20 minutes or email moe@roimaxi.com.

Before you sign with anyone

Get four things in writing, from a seat vendor, from us, or from anyone else:

1. The qualification definition. Titles, company size, sector, budget authority, held versus booked. A seat's held-meeting target means nothing without it.
2. No-show terms. Replaced, credited or charged, and whether a no-show counts toward a bonus.
3. Who owns the domains and the data at exit. Warmed inboxes, the list, the reply history, the scripts.
4. What a zero-meeting month costs. On a seat it is the full fee. Make them say the number.

The full version of point one is what counts as a qualified meeting. Then put your deal size and close rate into the ROI calculator to find the most you should pay per held meeting, for a seat or for us.

Keep reading

• Pay Per Appointment vs Pay Per Lead: What Each Costs per Held Meeting — Pay per appointment vs pay per lead: what each bills, how two per-lead vendors define a lead, and the sum that turns cost per lead into cost per meeting.
• SalesRoads pricing: $11,950 per 4 weeks, and what a held meeting costs — SalesRoads pricing is $11,950 per 4 weeks for one SDR, not the $9,950 most pages quote. What that costs per held meeting, and the alternatives.
• Callbox pricing, October 2026: $16k–$32k a pod, and the cost per meeting — Callbox pricing as of October 2026: $16,000–$32,000 a month per pod, no per-lead fee, nothing tied to results. What a held meeting costs at its own numbers.

Or run the free GTM teardown on your own site for the ICP, cold email and numbers specific to your company.