Outsourced SDR or your own hire: run the numbers first

Most comparisons between hiring an SDR and outsourcing are written by one side or the other, and both of them quote the salary and stop. The salary is the smallest interesting number. Here is the whole thing, for Finland, with the arithmetic shown so you can argue with it.

What an SDR actually costs in Finland

Start with gross monthly base. Then add the employer side costs, which in 2026 come to roughly 20 percent of gross for a normal office role:

• TyEL pension contribution, 17.55 percent
• Health insurance contribution, 1.91 percent
• Unemployment insurance contribution, 0.31 percent
• Accident insurance, about 0.54 percent at a typical office rate, though it varies by risk and insurer
• Typical total, about 20.3 percent

Then there is holiday. Accrued holiday pay plus holiday bonus adds roughly half a month to a year's salary cost in most arrangements, and side costs apply to that too.

On top of the person: a seat in a prospecting tool, a dialler, a data provider, a LinkedIn Sales Navigator licence. Budget this honestly, because an SDR without data is an SDR reading a website.

And then the part that is a cost even though it never appears on an invoice. A new SDR is not productive in month one. Three months to reasonable output is normal if they have done the job before and someone is coaching them. Six is normal if neither is true. During that time they are paid in full.

A worked example

Take a Helsinki SDR on 3,400 euro gross a month, 600 euro of on-target commission, 250 euro a month of tooling and data, three months to full productivity, and eight qualified attended meetings a month once ramped. Replace every one of those numbers with your own.

• Fully loaded cost, per month: about 5,230 euro
• Year one total: about 62,800 euro
• Meetings produced in year one, counting the ramp at 40 percent output: about 82
• Cost per qualified meeting: about 766 euro

The same eight meetings a month on Salenza's Founder Pipeline plan is 1,299 euro base plus 149 euro per attended meeting, so 2,491 euro a month, about 30,600 euro across year one including the setup fee, for roughly 92 meetings. That is about 333 euro per meeting.

Run it at any volume inside the published plans and the outsourced number stays lower, because the ramp is not being paid for and the fee only lands when a meeting is attended. That is a real finding and it is also not the whole decision, which is the next section.

What the comparison does not count, on either side: recruitment fees, management time, a laptop and a desk, and everything an employee does that is not a meeting. So treat the in-house figure as a floor.

Where the outsourced side is genuinely better

• It starts producing in weeks, not quarters. There is no recruitment loop and no ramp paid at full salary.
• The cost moves with output. A monthly base plus a fee per attended meeting means a bad month costs you less than a bad month with an employee, where the salary is fixed and the output is not.
• You can stop. Ending an engagement is a notice period in a commercial contract, not a redundancy process with a person's livelihood attached.
• You find out whether outbound works for you before committing a headcount to the answer. For a company that has never run outbound properly, this is the real value, and it is worth more than the cost difference.

Where hiring wins, and it is not a short list

I sell the outsourced version, so take the obvious discount on my opinion and then read this part anyway, because getting it wrong wastes a year.

• You are past the experiment. Once outbound is demonstrably working and you need five SDRs rather than one, in-house is cheaper per meeting and always will be. An outsourced partner is how you get to that point, not where you stay.
• The product needs deep expertise to even open the conversation. Some technical and regulated sales cannot be opened by anyone who has not lived in the domain for a year.
• You want the career path. Your best future Account Executive is usually an SDR you hired two years ago. Nobody's outsourced SDR becomes your AE.
• You need the whole role, not the meetings. A good SDR also keeps the CRM honest, reports what the market is saying back to product, builds internal knowledge, and sits in the room. That is real value and no cost-per-meeting model counts it.
• Your motion is product-led. If customers mostly arrive by signing up, outbound is not your bottleneck and neither option fixes anything.

The decision in one paragraph

If you have one or two closers, no SDR, a contract value above roughly 15,000 euro a year, and you are not yet certain outbound works for your market, outsourcing is the cheaper way to find out. If outbound already works and you are scaling it, hire, and hire properly. If your deals are worth 4,000 euro a year, neither of these is your answer and you should be looking at how customers find you instead.

Employer contribution percentages are 2026 Finnish rates for a standard office role, taken from published payroll guidance. Accident insurance varies, so confirm your own rate with your insurer. The salary figures are illustrative, not a benchmark. There is an interactive version of this calculation where you can put your own numbers in. Ask me for it: hello@salenza.fi.