Last Saturday morning, an SDR leader in our USA Slack channel posted three questions in our community Slack within 90 seconds.

The third one was the most honest thing I've read from a sales leader in months:

They run a team of 14. They are a strong leader. Last quarter, only one of their reps missed quota. The quarter before, only two.

And they just admitted, in front of their peers, that they’ve been flying without instruments.

They’re not the only ones.

Four senior leaders. One metric. A 30-point spread.

This specific question was about meeting-booked to qualified opportunity conversion. They have built their team's quota assuming an 85% conversion rate. They wanted to know if that was reasonable.

Here's what came back from the community over the next 24 hours:

• Kol Souers: 80%+ is the vertical SaaS benchmark, focused on qualification but not so strict you miss real ICP.

• Collin Chlarson: 75–80%. Anything higher and your SDRs are over-qualifying out of real opportunities.

• Max Kouris: Across his clients' SDR teams, the 3-month average right now ranges from 70% to mid-90%, depending on industry and segment.

• Rob B. Anderson: The number he sees most often in the market is around 50%.

Read that last one again.

Rob isn't disagreeing on the margins. He's 30 points off Kol. Half off the SDR Leaders standard. And Rob is a senior leader with broad market exposure. He's not guessing.

These aren't junior people winging it. These are four experienced operators, looking at the same metric, in the same week, in the same community, giving answers that span half the spectrum.

That should bother all of us.

This is bigger than one metric

A few weeks earlier, another community leader asked something that should have been easy.

Tristan Rogers was scaling outbound from North America into ANZ and the UK. His conversion metrics were behaving differently from what he was used to, even when ICP fit was strong. What should he expect? What's normal in those regions?

Nobody answered.

Not because the community is unhelpful. This is a Slack community of 5,000+ leaders that answers almost everything, and answers it fast. They didn't answer because nobody actually has the data.

And here's the uncomfortable truth underneath all of this: most published SDR benchmarks come from vendor reports. Written by vendors. Drawn from their own customer base. With little segmentation by motion, ICP, region, or company stage.

We've been building quota plans, hiring models, and team-performance reviews on top of data that was never built for us.

The most useful version of the answer right now

The same week, Kol Souers stitched together the most rigorous attempt I've seen to summarise what good looks like across the funnel. He pulled from Gong, Outreach, Salesforce, Pavilion, Bridge Group, 30MPC, Gartner, and Winning by Design.

He was the first to caveat it heavily. These are directional, they vary significantly by industry and motion, and the spread is wide. But it's the most honest version of the answer I've seen this year.

Worth screenshotting:

• CR1 (prospects → meetings set): 5–8% outbound. Inbound MQL: ~30–50%.

• CR2 (meetings set → meetings held / show rate): 80%+ in vertical SaaS. Varies heavily by ICP and TAM.

• CR3 (meetings held → pipeline / quality): 80%+, with a working range of 80–95% depending on qualification rigour.

• CR4 (pipeline → closed won): 20–30% overall. Outbound ~20–25%. Inbound ~40–50%. Events ~10% with high variance.

Use these as directional. Context matters enormously by industry, ICP, and motion. And as Kol himself flagged: in some segments he's worked, CR2 averaged 70% with a 75% ceiling, well below the “typical” 80%+. Your industry might be one of them. You wouldn't know from any vendor report.

One question for you

I want to ask you one specific thing, and I'll read every reply.

What's the one SDR benchmark you've never been able to find a trustworthy answer for?

The one you've made up a number for. Or guessed at. Or borrowed from a vendor report you didn't fully trust. Or set based on what your last company used.

Just hit reply. One line is fine.

I'm collecting these because we're quietly building something to fix it. The questions you can't answer today are the ones we want to make sure get answered.

Looking forward to reading what you send back.

Dave