SDR Metrics With Formulas, Denominators and Real Funnels

SDR metrics are the numbers that show whether a sales development rep's outreach turns into qualified pipeline. For a team prospecting by email and LinkedIn, track them in funnel order, each one as a rate with a fixed denominator:

1. People contacted, per channel
2. Deliverability: spam complaints and bounces on email, connection acceptance on LinkedIn
3. Replies
4. Conversations
5. Booked meetings
6. Held and accepted meetings
7. Pipeline and signed contracts

That sequence is how I read every campaign: talk to people, then book the meeting, then sign the client. Email and LinkedIn need different early signals in steps 1 to 3. From step 4 onward, both channels feed the same funnel.

My team prospects through email and LinkedIn, with no dialing floors and no pure cold calls in the mix.

Phone only enters as an optional add-on, and only for people on a warm list who replied, engaged or opted in. So this funnel has no dial or connect-rate step, and every "call" in the cases below means a meeting booked through email or LinkedIn.

If your SDRs also dial, track dials beside this funnel, in their own view.

Judge the early steps weekly. Judge the late steps over months, because a meeting booked this week can become a contract long after the campaign that produced it.

What do SDR metrics mean for an email and LinkedIn team?

A list of counters (emails sent, opens, meetings) tells you a rep was busy. It does not tell you whether the work produced anything a seller can close.

A useful SDR metric has three parts: what you count, what you divide it by, and how old the number must be before you trust it. Drop the denominator and two reps with the same "20% reply rate" can be measuring different things: one divides by people contacted, the other by accepted connections.

The early steps behave differently by channel. On email, the first risk is that the message never reaches the inbox. On LinkedIn the platform delivers the message, and the first signal is whether people accept the connection and answer. Blend the two into one reply rate and a sick email domain can hide behind a good LinkedIn week.

From the conversation onward, the channel stops mattering. A meeting that happened counts the same whether it started in an inbox or a DM.

For an SDR, my monthly target is 50+ started conversations, with booked calls left to follow from them. A rep chasing a call count pitches too early, and the calendar fills with people who were never ready to talk. One "buy or die" message gives you a lottery ticket and no plan.

Which SDR metrics belong in the funnel?

Here are the seven steps, with the email and LinkedIn version of each.

Deliverability sits at step 2 because everything below depends on it. Google says all senders to Gmail must meet its sender requirements, keep spam rates in Postmaster Tools below 0.3% (its monitoring advice aims for under 0.10%), and set up SPF or DKIM, with DMARC required for bulk senders (Google Gmail Help).

Yahoo draws the same 0.3% spam line and tells senders to monitor hard and soft bounces and inactive recipients (Yahoo Sender Hub).

I do not let a domain send at volume until SPF, DKIM and DMARC are in place.

Open rates stay off the funnel. Google does not track open rates and says low opens are not necessarily an accurate sign of deliverability or spam problems (Google Workspace Admin Help). Do not coach reps on a number the inbox provider ignores.

Three rules stop double counting in the combined view:

1. A person reached on both channels counts once in "contacted".
2. A person who replies on both channels counts as one replier.
3. A meeting belongs to the channel where the conversation that booked it took place.

How do you calculate each SDR metric?

Write the numerator and the denominator next to every rate on the dashboard, so nobody can quietly swap them.

I verify every address before a send, and the bounce line in that table is the one my team holds.

Now run the formulas on a real campaign. For a business consulting and coaching company in the USA, we ran LinkedIn outbound from an optimized founder profile. Take the acceptance step: the campaign sent 98 connection requests.

• Connection requests accepted: 38 / 98 sent = 39%

That 39% sits above the 26% to 29% Expandi range in the formula table. It is one profile and 98 requests, so read it as a sign the profile works rather than a benchmark.

The second funnel starts from people contacted and separates booked from completed calls, which is the booked-versus-held split a dashboard needs. In 30 days, contacting 2,187 people across 5 LinkedIn profiles and email produced 309 replies, 26 conversations, 14 booked calls with 11 completed, and 2 contracts.

Booked calls here are 4.5% of repliers (14 / 309), below the 10% to 50% range in the formula table, so read that range as a typical spread across campaigns. The 14.1% per-person reply rate above is a blended LinkedIn and email figure, so it does not compare with the email-only 1% either.

For planning, this campaign needed about 156 people contacted per booked call, the number to use when someone asks how big next month's list needs to be. The step between a reply and a calendar invite has its own mechanics, covered in how replies turn into booked calls.

What are good SDR targets for email and LinkedIn?

Set targets per channel and per step. A single blended number cannot tell you which step to fix.

Email. The reply-rate range in the formula table comes from my team's campaigns, and it falls as volume rises. At the other end, a small and heavily personalized sequence can get 15% to 17% of people to answer, and roughly three in four of those answers show interest. Both are ranges that move with market and volume, and neither is a promise.

LinkedIn. Acceptance and replies depend heavily on the profile sending the request. Compare each profile to its own last four weeks before you compare it to a colleague. A plain message from a profile with real proof outperforms a polished message sent from an empty one.

Team pipeline. The Bridge Group's 2025 report, based on an online survey of 351 B2B companies, puts pipeline sourced per SDR at $3.78M and labels it "raw pipeline, not forecast or closed-won" (The Bridge Group 2025 SDR Models and Metrics report). Use it as a sense check for the pipeline step, and only once your team defines pipeline the same way.

Response time. The Lead Response Management Study used three years of data from six companies, more than 15,000 web-form leads and over 100,000 call attempts. It found the chance of reaching a lead drops sharply within the first hour (Lead Response Management Study).

Those were people who filled in a form, and nobody had sent them an outbound message. Still, a positive reply is the same kind of raised hand, which is why the target in the formula table is the first hour.

How do booked meetings, held meetings, and accepted opportunities differ?

A booked meeting has a date on the calendar. A held meeting happened with the person who was invited. An accepted meeting is one the account executive agrees is a real opportunity, by rules both teams wrote down before the quarter started.

Booking meetings and closing deals are separate jobs, and I measure them separately. When the close rate is already low, more meetings push it lower, because the extra volume brings colder and more skeptical prospects. The full argument is in why booked meetings still need a close to count.

Build the quality layer into three places.

Compensation. Pay the variable part on held meetings that pass acceptance. Paying on booked rewards meetings that never happen. Paying only on closed revenue punishes the SDR for a sales cycle they cannot control.

Forecasting. Forecast from accepted opportunities. Booked meetings belong in the forecast only as a ratio you have already measured.

Weekly review. Go through every no-show and every meeting the account executive rejected, one by one, with the rep in the room.

What happens after acceptance belongs to the sales team, and its own ratio is covered in meeting to close rate.

What should an SDR dashboard show every week?

Build three views: email, LinkedIn and combined. Each metric gets a review cadence and a lag warning, so nobody judges a number before it has matured.

A person contacted yesterday has had no chance to reply, so group every rate by the week a person was first contacted and read a cohort once its sequence has run.

Keep the infrastructure rows next to activity on the same tab. A strong daily send count can hide one domain whose complaints are climbing, and by the time replies drop, the damage is done. On my campaigns, a fresh inbox gets 10 to 14 days of warm-up at minimum before any prospect sees mail from it.

The dashboard works only if every lead lives in one system. I want a CRM behind every campaign so no lead sits forgotten in someone's inbox. Which brand you pick matters far less than the habit.

What goes to the founder at the end of the week is a separate question from the metric system itself. That format is in what a weekly outbound report should contain.

How do you diagnose a weak SDR funnel?

Start at the top of the funnel and fix the first step that is broken. A fix lower down is wasted while a higher step still leaks.

The order of checks is deliverability, then list, then message, then follow-up, then the close process. When replies are weak, I look at the list and the sender before I touch a word of copy, because copy cannot rescue poor targeting or a weak sender.

Volume comes last. A funnel that fails with small numbers will fail with big ones, so I fix the weak step first and scale second. On bigger campaigns I put a person on the reply inbox, so every answer gets read and handled by a human. If you would rather not staff the SDR seat yourself, SDR outsourcing is the other route.

Then separate lag from execution. Give outbound at least 3 months with a new client, and expect a program to take about 6 months to work fully.

An SDR can book meetings in month 1 whose deals sign 4 or more months later, inside sales cycles that commonly last 6, 9 or 12 months. I will not judge a campaign on its month-1 contracts, and you should not either.

A weak early step in month 1 is an execution problem: fix it now. A weak late step in month 1 is usually lag: wait.

How should managers read SDR metrics during ramp and turnover?

The Bridge Group's 2025 report puts average SDR ramp at 3.0 months and found only 60% of reps at quota, the lowest in the study's history (The Bridge Group). So a new rep's first quarter is a ramp period by default, and missing quota is common even after it.

A ramp-adjusted reading rule:

1. Months 1 to 3: compare the rep to their own previous month on steps 1 to 4. Hold them to team standards only on deliverability hygiene and reply response time.
2. From month 4: compare held and accepted rates with mature reps working the same segment.
3. After a full sales cycle: compare pipeline and contracts, once the rep's first cohorts have had time to close.

A new campaign ramps too, and it is easy to kill one by reading month 1 alone.

I watched exactly that slope with a UK social media marketing agency we worked for in 3 niches: 44 sales calls in the first month, then 57, then 68, on the way to 714 in a year. Each month beat the last, so month 1 alone said little about where the campaign would end up.

Turnover breaks cohorts in half. When a rep leaves, their threads are mid-sequence and their meetings are mid-cycle.

This happens more often than most founders plan for. The Bridge Group's 2025 SDR report, covering 351 B2B companies, puts median annual SDR attrition for 2024 at 40%, with a range of 21% to 57% from the 25th to the 75th percentile.

Divide territory per account and per rep so two people never work the same leads. On a handover, move the territory whole to one person and tag the inherited cohorts, so the new rep is not judged on someone else's half-finished work. More on that in how SDR ramp and turnover change the numbers.

This week, open your dashboard and write the denominator next to every rate on it. Any number you cannot write one for comes off the screen.

If your SDR dashboard shows booked meetings and little else, book a call and share what you track today. We can add the denominators that make it useful.