Hire another SDR,or automate inbound?

Before deciding anything, look at a normal week for the people working inbound. Sort what they do into two columns:

If most of the week sits in the left column, another hire buys you more chasing, not more pipeline. The new person will hit the same wall: they are on a call when the next request lands, and the follow-up that should have gone out at 6pm waits until the morning.

If most of it sits in the right column and you are still turning good leads away, you need a person.

• Your SDRs already reply fast and follow up properly, and they are still too busy to talk to every qualified lead.
• Your sale needs discovery before a demo makes sense: several stakeholders, a technical evaluation, procurement.
• Leads regularly ask questions only someone who knows the product well can answer.
• You have the management time to recruit, ramp and coach someone. A hire nobody has time to train becomes a third person doing timing work.

• Requests wait for a reply because the team is on calls, in demos or offline.
• Follow-up stops after one or two messages because nobody owns it.
• Leads arrive in the evenings and at weekends, when nobody is working.
• Booked demos do not turn up and nobody reminds them.
• You want to grow the number of leads you handle without adding headcount.

Automate the timing work first, then look again. With replies, follow-up and reminders running on their own, you can see how much real conversation your team has to handle. Hire if that is more than they can do. Teams often find the hire they planned is no longer needed, or that they need a different person: a closer rather than a chaser.

Compare like with like. The salary is the number everyone knows, but it is not the cost. Write down your own figures for each line:

• Base salary and on-target earnings, plus employer costs.
• Recruiting: an agency fee or the hours your team spends hiring.
• Ramp time: the months before they work at full pace, and who covers in the meantime.
• Management: the hours someone senior spends training and coaching them.
• Cover: holidays, sick days, evenings and weekends, when nobody replies.
• Turnover: what happens to your leads the week they hand in notice, and the next hiring round.

Then cost the alternative over the same period and set the two side by side.

This is the moment leads get lost, because the knowledge of who was chasing whom leaves with the person. In the first week:

1. 01Export everything open. Every request in the last 30 days that has not booked, with where each one got to.
2. 02Put one person on new requests each day. A rota, so nothing sits in a shared inbox.
3. 03Turn on an instant reply with a booking link. For every new request, from a named person.
4. 04Set up a follow-up sequence for the open list. So those leads keep hearing from you while you decide.

Then decide whether to replace the person or the work. Use the two columns above: if the job was mostly timing work, replace the work.

They are good at different things, so the honest answer is usually “for which part of the job?”

An AI SDR for inbound should do a narrow job: reply, follow up, answer simple questions, qualify against your own rules and book. It should say it is an AI in its first sentence, contact only people who asked to be contacted, and hand any real conversation to a person. Be wary of anything sold as a full replacement for your sales team.

A scheduling tool on your form books the leads who are ready to pick a time there and then. It does nothing for the ones who close the tab. An AI caller reaches the people who asked for a demo and did not book, while the request is fresh, and finds them a time. They solve different halves of the same leak, so many teams need the first and add the second for everyone who did not book. If most of your requests already book through the calendar, start with the scheduling tool.

An in-house setter knows your product and sits in your team, but has the same limits as any one person: hours, holidays and a queue. An appointment-setting agency adds people, but you still pay for people, they know your product less well, and the quality varies with whoever picks up your account. A third option is a system that does the timing work, with your own team taking every conversation that needs judgement. Whichever you choose, your leads and their history should stay in your own CRM.

Usually, yes, if the leads asked to hear from you. Below about 50 a month, one organised person with a checklist and a follow-up sequence can keep up by hand. From 50 upwards the timing work starts to outgrow the time people have for it, especially when requests arrive in clusters or out of hours. Volume matters less than intent: 50 demo requests are worth more than 500 names on a list nobody asked to join.

Run both on real leads before you commit to either:

• Pick a measure that matters: requests that turn into held demos, not replies or calls made.
• Split by week or by lead source, not by picking which leads go where.
• Record every step for every lead (replied, followed up, booked, showed) so you can see where each one stopped.
• Show anything not yet measured as “not measured”, never as 0.

Two to four weeks on a few hundred requests is usually enough to see which side does the timing work better.