Stop Paying SDRs For Effort and Start Paying Them For Conversations That Convert

Most sales development compensation plans pick a side and live with the consequences. Pay reps on meetings booked and you get meetings, some of which an account executive will quietly resent sitting through. Pay them on closed revenue and you've tied their income to a deal cycle they stopped controlling the moment they made the introduction. The usual compromise adds a small revenue kicker to a meeting-heavy plan and calls it balanced. That structure makes meetings the primary output while revenue remains a downstream result the rep has limited ability to influence.

One sales development leader built hers around the opposite premise, where meetings and revenue are each capable of carrying the entire number. Adia Toll started as an inbound SDR, earned four promotions at go2, then left for an early-stage startup because she'd gotten attached to building from nothing. Most recently she ran sales development at AskElephant, and she's been vocal about a position that drew real pushback when she first started making it: daily dial quotas work against the thing SDRs are hired to do.

"We optimize what we measure," she says. "If every day what you're being measured on and what you're talking about with your manager and what you're talking about with your team is an activity or an amount of effort being put in, you're going to begin optimizing for as much effort as possible."

Effort is a terrible proxy

The trouble with effort as a KPI is that it can be maximized in ways that damage the outcome it was meant to predict. An SDR carrying a three hundred dial target has a rational incentive to keep every call short, and a live human on the line becomes an obstacle to the number. "If I'm focused on 'I need to make 300 calls today', when someone picks up and actually has a conversation with me, that slows me down," Adia says. "That makes me less likely to want to have a conversation with them because I need to hit the dial count."

The same pressure distorts who gets called, since the fastest way to log conversations is to dial whoever answers. "Just because another SDR is more likely to pick up the phone than a sales leader does not mean I want to talk to SDRs," she says.

Effort still belongs on her scorecard, demoted to one measure among several. Her fix moved the metric one step closer to the outcome, swapping dials for conversations with the right people. By her own tracking, which isn't independently audited, teams she's implemented this with went from roughly two or three ICP conversations a day to somewhere between ten and fifteen.

Two ways to hit the same number

Adia's SDRs are paid half on qualified meetings generated and half on closed-won revenue, and a rep can reach full quota through either side alone. Working from a quota of ten, twenty qualified meetings takes a rep to plan on the meetings side, while two closed deals do the same on the revenue side, with no further pipeline required.

"You can create this sliding variable that makes it to where the number of deals they need is based on their individual close rate and the quality of their deals," she says. The plan doesn't need a separate philosophy for a new SDR and an experienced one. The same quota changes meaning as the rep gets better. A new hire has almost no influence over close rates and considerable influence over volume, so volume carries her number, as it's more available to her. As judgment sharpens and her meetings start converting, the same ten becomes reachable with less pipeline, and the accelerators sit on the revenue side.

Most teams handle that ramp with a temporary quota reduction, which everyone understands as a concession and which eventually has to be taken away. Adia's version makes it so nobody renegotiates anything. The rep simply discovers, somewhere a few months in, that the faster path to plan has changed. The behavioral shift follows on its own, since reps start filtering their own pipeline once filtering is worth money to them. "They're actually thinking about what deals can I put through that will actually close," Adia says, which she credits with setting reps up to move into closing roles considerably sooner.

Clearing the desk first

This compensation plan works because the role has been redesigned. Paying for conversations is only effective if the job is structured to support them. "One of the easiest ways to do it is to remove your SDRs from the qualification process, the pre-qualification process of accounts and leads," Adia says. "Most of that can be done via some level of AI scoring at this point." Accounts get scored on ICP fit and on publicly visible buying signals, and the combined score sets how much human attention the account earns. The bottom tier runs without a rep touching it, the middle tier gets a call or two across a couple of contacts, and the top tier gets gifts, in-person visits, and creative outbound across multiple people.

"Everything that is moving the leads around, choosing and prioritizing the leads, deciding which sequences the leads should go into can be done by AI," she says. "But the conversational part needs to be completely human." Adia hired a dedicated GTM engineer to own the scored tiers, which leaves her SDRs with zero administration. Sellers spend 21% of their time navigating systems, and every one of those hours is an hour a rep isn't having the conversation the comp plan is built to reward.

With that clearing, the hiring profile changes. "In the past you would hire someone who's really good at systems for SDRing, because they'll be able to move the leads effectively and know what to target effectively," she says. "Now that's no longer their job." So she started hiring for the skill she thought mattered most once the systems work was gone. "I've been hiring ex-actors. I've been hiring ex-comedians. People who are very entertaining and very personable, because they are so good on the phones."

What's actually scarce first

Automated outreach is now cheap and abundant. Buyers have adjusted to it, which makes a live conversation with the right person a scarce experience in the SDR motion. At the same time, CRMs are filling with AI-generated inquiries that reps have to sort through before they reach anyone real.

"There is so much resistance towards talking to AI or responding to an AI email in this space that I really think it stands out whenever they get something they know is human," she says. "And I would imagine that it's the same in other industries. Even though they're less likely to talk to a salesperson, they're still getting a ton of AI-generated outreach. So having a conversation with a person makes you feel important." She's watched the conversation around that position change. A year ago, saying her team carried no daily dial KPI reliably provoked argument. Now it mostly provokes questions, as buying committees get harder to reach and teams still running on activity volume find the returns thinning.

The sequence matters. Comp changes land badly when reps still owe four hours a day to list building, since paying someone on closed-won while they're stuck in a CRM is just a harder quota. The upstream work has to move first, whether that means a GTM engineering hire, better scoring, or a partner running the scored tiers. Then the compensation plan can do what Adia built hers to do, which is make the economics of good SDR behavior impossible to misunderstand.