This morning, I ran a LinkedIn search for open SDR, AE, and Customer Success jobs in greater Boston. I found 1,506 active job posts—with 600+ posted within the last week alone. With every social post, in every recruiter InMail, and on every career page, companies are screaming for sales talent.

There are two problems though. One, the unemployment rate (for the typical candidate profile) is nearing a natural floor.

Two, the era of sloppy growth is coming to an end (see here, here, and here). When times are fat, companies can ignore slack in their hiring process. Heads for headsets, paying signing bonuses, and “hire-fast + fire-fast” mentalities will put butts in seats when growth trumps profitability.

As the pendulum swings toward efficient growth, hiring momentum becomes what matters. And for high-growth companies, it becomes a strategic competitive advantage.

What is hiring momentum?

According to my good friend Google, momentum is the quantity of motion of a moving body, measured as a product of its mass and velocity. In sales, you can increase hiring momentum in three ways:

Three weeks ago, the Department of Labor published its final rule updating the overtime regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Whether to classify inside sales reps as exempt or non-exempt remains a very messy issue. For those unfamiliar, non-exempt employees are:

Subject to overtime pay
Entitled to rest and meal breaks
Required to keep time records

By a stroke of luck brilliant strategic planning, I happened to be running research on how companies classify their SDRs and AEs for the purposes of overtime pay.

One hundred fifty-nine companies were kind enough to participate. Let’s first turn to what the new rule means.

What’s in the final rule

What has changed: The salary and compensation levels needed for the Executive, Administrative and Professional exemption will be raised to $47,476 on December 1^st, 2016.  The total annual compensation requirement for highly compensated employees (HCE) will be raised to $134,004.

It’s safe to say that the sales development function is here to stay. Companies, conferences, and careers are being built around the SDR movement. If your average sales price is $100K+, sales development is a no brainer. At $50K, it’s most definitely a yes. But what about $16K? Or $8K? $4K?

There are dozens of threads on Quora about sales development, but none directly answer the question:

What is the minimum ASP where “doing sales development” makes sense?

Even in our Inside Sales AE research and SDR research, we’ve never tackled this specific question. But by combining the two data sets, I think I’ve come up with a pretty good answer. You can follow my math below or skip to the end number here. (Note: I’m not commenting on growth versus profitability. See Mark Suster, David Skok, and Danielle Morrill for that.) I’m trying to answer a more straightforward question. If I spend $250K on sales development, by how much should revenues increase?

To get there, we need to step through four questions.

Sales development as a function, role, and profession has seen serious change lately. In recent years, we’ve had a significant rise in stature, a host of new SDR-focused technologies, and even a conference all its own.

One constant is a thirst for the metrics behind the sales development function.  To make sense of the changes and trends, we researched and collected insights from 355 B2B companies. Our 2016 Sales Development Metrics and Compensation report is available today, and we have a ton to share with you.

What’s inside the report

This is our sixth round of sales development research since 2007 covering:

• Reporting structure
• Models, territories, and SDR to AE ratios
• Experience, ramp, and tenure
• Compensation, quota, and career path