Cold email agency or hiring an SDR: which should you pick?

If you need meetings in the next month and nobody on your team has time to manage a sales hire, a cold email agency like True Delta is the faster way to start. If you already have a sales manager, a pitch that works and a year to build a team, hiring an SDR gives you someone you own and can grow.

What an SDR costs

The Bridge Group surveyed 351 B2B companies for its 2025 SDR report (published 6 February 2025, checked 13 November 2026). The median SDR earns $80,000 a year on target, made up of $55,000 base and $25,000 commission. That's before payroll costs, benefits, their tools and the time a manager spends coaching them.

The same report puts the average ramp at 3 months and the average tenure at 1.9 years, and 40% of SDRs leave each year. 60% of SDRs hit their quota.

What we do

We find the companies you want to work with, write the emails, send them from mailboxes built for cold email, and handle every reply until there's a meeting in your calendar.

Here's what that has looked like:

• A marketing agency had 15 sales calls booked in 4 days, one for every 320 people we emailed.
• A commercial HVAC contractor had 4 in-person site visits in their first week, and one of them signed a service agreement the next day.
• Our own outreach has booked 50+ sales calls in 2 months and brings in 50+ positive replies a week.

Why choose an agency

Meetings start in days. Our clients have had sales calls in their calendar in their first week, and a new SDR takes around three months to get up to speed.

You skip the hiring. There's no recruiting, no manager's time spent coaching, and no starting again when someone leaves, which 40% of SDRs do every year.

The work is already done by people who do it every day. Finding the right companies, keeping the mailboxes healthy, writing emails people answer and replying fast enough to book the meeting all take practice, and we've been doing it across clients for months.

You find out whether your market answers before you commit to a salary. If cold email works for your buyers, you have meetings coming in, and if you later hire an SDR they start with a pitch and a list that are already proven.

Where each one falls short

An SDR takes about three months to get going, needs someone to manage them, and when they leave their pipeline goes with them. What you get back is a person who learns your product properly, can pick up the phone and stays with your company.

An agency doesn't know your product as well as an employee would, and you don't keep the person when you stop. We only do email, and some markets just don't answer cold email.

When an SDR makes more sense

• You already have a sales manager who can coach them.
• Your deal size pays for $80,000 a year per rep with room to spare, and your buyers expect a phone call before they'll meet.