Most SDR functions are still built for 2015.

The stack that creates pipeline has re-formed four times since sequences became standard. The org chart, the metrics and the way managers run the team mostly have not. I build and scale SDR functions for how pipeline actually gets created now.

Roland Varga. 25 years in sales, 8 of them running SDR and inside sales teams in enterprise software.

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25

Years in sales

4

SDR teams built or scaled

$737M

SDR-sourced pipeline

191 + 33

SDRs and managers coached

The question is not whether to use AI.

Every leader carrying a pipeline number has been asked some version of the same question this year. Do we still need twelve SDRs, or six and a proper stack? And how would we tell the difference?

Look at who is answering it. The AI SDR vendors say the role is finished and their product replaces it. The outsourced SDR agencies say stop trying and hand the function to them. In both cases the answer happens to be the thing they sell, and neither one is answering the question you actually asked, which is what your own team should look like and who should be on it.

There is a simpler problem with the vendor answer. A brilliant AI stack in the hands of an untrained SDR team is a fast car with a junior driver. They will crash it, and then they will blame the engine.

I do not sell software and I do not sell you a team. I have built and scaled this function four times in enterprise software. What I do is work out what shape yours should be, and then build it with the people you already have.

You already know something is wrong. This is usually what it is.

Pipeline is short, and nobody can give you a straight answer as to why.

The team is busy. Activity looks fine on a dashboard. Very little of it lands.

AEs say the leads are poor. SDRs say the follow-up is poor. There is usually a written definition of a qualified opportunity somewhere, and it was usually written in a silo. RevOps drafted it without sales and SDRs in the room, so it asks an SDR to produce qualification nobody could get on a first conversation, and sales never really signed up to it. So it is either unusable or unenforced, and both sides carry on being right.

Every SDR manager runs their territory their own way, so anything you fix in one place does not stay fixed anywhere else.

The function costs real money and you cannot explain the return to the board in a way that survives a follow-up question.

And the part nobody says out loud: it works because one specific person is holding it up. When that person leaves, it degrades.

The stack re-forms every couple of years. The function almost never does.

Every one of those changed what a rep should be doing with their day. Not one of them changed how the team is structured, what it is measured on, or how a manager runs the week. That design is still: more people, more activity, more meetings.

Look at the last fifteen years.

Around 2015, sales engagement tools like Outreach and Salesloft let one rep put the same email in front of five hundred people on a schedule. Output scaled with headcount. Hire more SDRs, send more, book more. That is when the model most SDR teams still run was designed: a pod, a manager, a dial target, a meetings quota.

By the end of that decade, conversation intelligence and data enrichment arrived. Every call recorded and scored, every account pre-researched, so a rep stopped guessing who was worth calling.

Then intent data, in the early 2020s, and you could see which companies were in market before they ever contacted you.

Then orchestration, where the tools finally got wired together so a buying signal could trigger the work automatically. A job title appeared that had not existed before, the GTM engineer, purely to do the wiring.

And in the last two years, agentic. The software now researches the account, drafts the outreach and does a first pass at qualification itself, rather than just routing work to a person.

What building for now actually looks like

The systems in the stack talking to each other, rather than six tools nobody integrated.

Account research automated properly, so a rep reads a brief instead of assembling one.

Administrative work taken out of the rep's day rather than tolerated in it.

Practice run against AI rather than booked into somebody's calendar and cancelled.

Call coaching built off recordings and analysis, so managers coach from evidence instead of impressions.

Tiering that means something. Tier one gets human effort. Tier three gets automated outreach that does not embarrass you.

That is the standard I build to. It is a design position, not a product, and it is why a function built this way needs fewer people doing more valuable work rather than more people doing the same work faster.

Four pillars, and the controls underneath them.

Four pillars, built across four enterprise SDR builds. Underneath each one, a set of controls that make it real.

Every time I have run this function, the same class of thing gets left behind.

A written definition of a qualified opportunity, and a qualification scorecard that applies that definition the same way every time, whoever is judging the call.

A call coaching standard that managers actually run, built from recordings.

KPIs and a service level agreement between SDRs and AEs that both sides agreed to.

A procedure for what happens when territory changes hands.

A fixed manager cadence with an agenda that does not drift.

A team charter that says what the function is for this year and how it connects to the company's corporate and strategic objectives.

None of that is exotic. It is the difference between a function that keeps working when nobody is watching it, and one that quietly stops the week you stop asking.

What that means concretely

Repeatability

The team's output stops depending on who is having a good month. Rhythm carries it: a coaching cadence, an enablement cadence, playbooks that actually get opened, and fixed moments like call-out days and summits that the team plans around.

Alignment

Everybody in the go-to-market org agrees who owns what before any of it goes live: the SDR KPIs, the opportunity criteria, how an opportunity passes from SDR to AE, and who is accountable when it stalls. Not just SDRs and AEs. Marketing, RevOps, Channel, and upward to the C-suite, so the team's goals align with the company's corporate and strategic objectives rather than running as a separate agenda alongside them.

All of it gets written down, as standard operating procedures and rules of engagement, so nobody has to remember what was agreed. And the GTM leaders who have to live with those rules see them before they go live, because a rule sales helped shape is a rule sales leadership enforces.

Data

The test is not how much reporting you have. It is whether you can get an answer fast enough to act on it. Plenty of SDR functions have forty-plus dashboards and three that anyone opens, none of them answering the question a leader asks on a Monday morning about where the funnel is actually leaking.

What matters is that the tools in the stack are connected to each other, the CRM, the sequencer, the dialler, conversation intelligence, enrichment, and the AI augmentation layer running across all of it, that every step of the funnel is visible, and that when the conversion between two of those steps moves you can say why while there is still time to do something about it. More instrumentation does not fix this, and neither does buying more tools to produce it. A process that is broken underneath stays broken however well you measure it.

People

Hiring, onboarding, ramp, coaching and performance management, plus a career path that exists in practice and not only on a slide. SDRs go on to become AEs, but also marketers, RevOps analysts, enablement leads and customer success managers.

Those moves do happen. They just usually happen badly. A top SDR earns a quota and gets one, and nobody asks whether they are ready for it. They have never seen an RFP, never worked with a systems integrator, never been through procurement, and the senior AE who was supposed to show them has a number of their own. So your strongest SDR becomes a struggling AE, and inside a year they are gone, along with the two people who watched it happen.

The other failure is quieter. The door never opens, because the leader on the other side has no idea what they are being offered. An SDR who learns customer success becomes a CSM who hunts, and cross-sell starts landing faster than it used to. But that only happens if the CS leader wants them and somebody built the enablement to get them there.

A path that works has coaching and enablement behind it in both directions, so people land somewhere they can succeed rather than somewhere they quietly fail.

None of it holds without three things that never appear on an org chart: a healthy performance culture, the leadership quality of your frontline managers, and coaching and enablement that run continuously rather than getting scheduled when the quarter goes wrong.

Diagnose, build, run.

Three levels of support. Most companies should start with the first and decide from there.

The system is fixed. How it lands is not. I bring a system and adapt it to your people, your culture and your stage, never the other way round.

Diagnose. The Pipeline Diagnostic.

Two weeks. A review of the SDR setup: tools, data, routing, sequences, call quality, CRM hygiene and the SDR to AE handoff. You get a written roadmap of what is broken and what to fix first, in priority order. The roadmap is yours either way, whether you build it with me or hand it to your own team.

Build. The Build Sprint.

Four to six weeks. Install the rules of engagement, the playbooks, the qualification standard, the coaching rhythm, the reporting cadence and the AE feedback loop. You get a system your managers can run.

Run. Fractional SDR Leadership.

Ongoing. I lead the weekly funnel inspection, the coaching, the call blitzes and the manager cadence, and keep SDRs, AEs, marketing and leadership pointed the same way. You get governed pipeline generation without hiring a full-time leader.

B2B technology companies where pipeline is the constraint on the number. I have led and scaled SDR organisations of up to 40 across EMEA and APJ, and I have worked with a lot smaller.

Two situations come up most. You have inherited something that is not working and you need it fixed. Or you are building one properly and you want it handed to a permanent hire in a state they can actually run.

Who I work with

Roland Varga

25 years in sales. The first 12 carrying a number myself, closing enterprise deals.

That matters more than it sounds. I know exactly what an AE needs before they will accept a meeting, trust the pipeline and stand behind the forecast. It is why the handoff is the first thing I look at.

Head of Inside Sales and SDR for EMEA at Dynatrace, 2012 to 2017. Senior Manager then Director at SailPoint, 2018 to 2020. Four years at Contentsquare in global enablement, coaching SDRs and frontline managers and rolling out sales methodology across EMEA and APJ. Director at Genesys, 2025 to 2026.

Four SDR functions built or scaled. 191 SDRs and 33 managers coached. $737M in SDR-sourced pipeline behind me.

MBA with Distinction. Based in the UK.

More about how I work

Let's find out what is actually wrong.

Thirty minutes on a call. Tell me how pipeline gets made in your business right now, who owns what, and where it stops. I will tell you what I think is going on and what I would look at first.

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