Is Your First BDR Hire Going to Be Profitable? Here’s How to Know
Hiring your first BDR (Business Development Representative) is a big move—and for many founders, it's a milestone that signals they're ready to start building a repeatable sales engine.
But before you hand out logins and assign lead lists, there’s one critical question you need to answer:
Will this hire actually generate ROI—or just add overhead?
At Foundations, we help founders make this decision with clarity—not gut feel. In this blog, we’ll walk you through the key steps to take before hiring a BDR, the metrics that matter most, and how to use our BDR Profitability Calculator (linked at the bottom) to get a real-time snapshot of whether this hire makes financial sense for your business.
Step 1: Do the Work Yourself (Yes, You)
Before bringing anyone else into your outbound motion, you as the founder need to prove that your sales process works at a foundational level.
That means:
Identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Crafting your initial outbound messaging
Testing and validating what works (and what doesn’t)
Booking meetings consistently—even if it’s scrappy
This phase is critical because founder-led sales performance ≠ team-led sales performance. Your charisma, deep product knowledge, and founder energy will skew results. But it still gives you the building blocks for a repeatable playbook.
Step 2: Test Your Playbook with an Agency Partner
Once you’ve got your ICP and messaging dialed in, the next smart move is to bring in a reputable outbound agency to pressure test your process at scale.
Here’s why:
They simulate what a BDR might experience without the full-time risk.
You get objective data on outreach volume, response rates, and meeting conversion.
It helps establish realistic benchmarks for your own future hire.
Think of this as your “MVP for outbound.” You're putting your process in someone else’s hands to validate it before committing headcount and payroll to it.
Step 3: Run the Numbers Before You Hire
If your process is validated and you’re ready to hire, don’t skip the math. Here's how to determine if a BDR will be profitable.
There are three essential metrics to calculate:
1. Cost of the BDR
Expect:
Base salary: $50,000 to $70,000 (CAD or USD, depending on market)
Commission: $20,000 to $30,000 on average
👉 This gives you a total annual cost baseline between $70K and $100K per rep.
2. Meetings Booked per Month
Pull this from your agency trial, your founder-led data, or industry benchmarks. Most early-stage BDRs will fall somewhere between 15–25 meetings per month, depending on support and infrastructure.
3. Conversion Rate & Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
This is where profitability comes into play. Ask yourself:
What percentage of those booked meetings turn into closed revenue? (e.g., 5–10%)
What’s the LTV of a new customer? (i.e., total contract value across their lifecycle)
Once you know these two metrics, you can determine the value of each meeting booked and the revenue generated per month by your BDR.
The Goal: ROI Even at 50% of Plan
You don’t want your first hire to only be profitable if everything goes perfectly. You want to ensure that even if they’re performing at half of target, the numbers still make sense.
At Foundations, we coach founders to hire when:
✅ The rep can pay for themselves with margin
✅ There’s clear line-of-sight into conversion and CAC
✅ You’re confident in the playbook, tools, and support you’re providing
Otherwise, you risk tying up budget in underperforming headcount instead of optimizing where it counts.
Try the BDR Profitability Calculator
If you want to know whether now is the right time to hire a BDR—or if you just want to get smarter about your numbers—use our BDR Profitability Calculator below.
🔢 Plug in your own metrics:
Salary + commission
Expected meetings/month
Conversion rate
Customer LTV
And instantly see whether your BDR will generate a positive ROI at plan—or even at half plan.