SDR metrics worth tracking, and the denominators that ruin them

There is no shortage of SDR metrics you can track. The useful question is which ones change a decision. This is a framework, not a benchmark table — we are not publishing industry averages, because the ones circulating are mostly unsourced and a made-up number is worse than none.

The four that drive decisions

Held meetings per rep per period. The output metric. Note held, not booked — see below.

Show rate. Held divided by total booked. The honesty check on the first metric, and usually the most actionable number on the page.

Bookings per working hour, per rep per account. The planning metric. It is the only thing that lets you answer “can we take on this client in six weeks” with arithmetic instead of instinct.

Money per hour. Revenue produced divided by hours spent, per rep and per account. This is the number that decides whether a client relationship is worth keeping, and it is the one most operations never compute.

Everything else — dials, connects, conversation rate, email reply rate — is diagnostic. Useful for working out why the four moved, not for deciding anything on its own.

How each one gets gamed

Any metric that drives pay will be optimised, including in ways you did not intend. Worth knowing in advance:

Metric	The predictable distortion
Bookings	Low-quality meetings booked to hit a number
Dials	Short, pointless calls to inflate the count
Connects	Calling known-easy contacts repeatedly
Show rate	Reluctance to book anything marginal — real pipeline left on the table
Money per hour	Under-logging hours

Two guards help. First, pay on held rather than booked, which removes the main volume incentive. Second, make hours and outcomes come from the system rather than self-report — logged activity and recorded outcomes are much harder to shade than a timesheet.

The denominators that ruin everything

Most broken dashboards are not using wrong metrics. They are using right metrics with wrong denominators.

Weekdays instead of working days. The classic. Counting weekdays makes December look like March, so per-day productivity appears to collapse in holiday-heavy months and your team gets a performance conversation they did not earn. Working days are weekdays minus public holidays for the country the account operates in, then reduced by absences and part-time schedules.

Booking-month instead of meeting-month. If a meeting is booked on 29 March for 4 April, which month owns it? Booked-month flatters March and starves April; meeting-month is usually the honest choice for show rate but makes the booking rep’s output appear late. Pick one, apply it everywhere, and never mix them on the same chart.

Counting a reschedule as a new booking. This inflates both the numerator and denominator of show rate and makes the figure wander for no real reason. A rescheduled meeting is the same unit of work with a new date.

Averaging across accounts with different list quality. A rep on a clean, well-targeted list and a rep on a scraped one are not comparable, and a team average hides both. Rates belong at the (rep, account) grain; aggregate upward only when you know the mix.

Small samples treated as rates. A rep with three hours of history on a new account does not have a bookings-per-hour rate. Treating two bookings in three hours as 0.67/hour and planning against it is how forecasts embarrass people. Start from a prior and let the estimate move as evidence accumulates.

Leading vs lagging, honestly

Activity metrics are leading indicators, and they are weak ones. A rep can make the dials and produce nothing, and the dials will tell you they were busy. Their real value is diagnostic: when held meetings drop, activity tells you whether the cause is less work or worse conversion.

The genuinely useful leading indicator is usually list health — how much workable list remains, and what proportion of its numbers connect. A list running dry predicts next week’s output far better than this week’s dial count.

What to actually put on the dashboard

For a team lead, four rows and one chart:

1. Held meetings this period vs the same point last period
2. Show rate, with the booked count beside it
3. Remaining workable list per account, with a depletion warning
4. Money per hour per account, ranked

Then one chart: held meetings by week, per account, so you can see shape rather than a single number.

Everything else belongs one click down, available when you are diagnosing rather than deciding.

A note on benchmarks

Teams constantly ask what a good show rate or a good bookings-per-hour figure is. The honest answer is that your own trailing numbers, segmented by account, are a far better benchmark than any industry figure — because they already control for your market, your list quality, your pricing and your qualification bar. Measure yourself against last quarter, not against a blog post.