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

Like many of you, I’m finally recovering from the one-two punch of Dreamforce ’15 and the end of Q3.  

Now that my head is above water, I want to highlight one Dreamforce product launch you might have missed: SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud. I’ve been playing with the app for a few weeks and am totally blown away.

What it is

SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud is both a mobile email client (iOS and Android devices) and a Chrome browser extension.  The product marketing promises:  sell smarter right from inbox. They aren’t kidding. It is part email open tracker, part cloud calendar scheduler, part Salesforce integration, and part automated assistant.

How it works

I shot a quick video walk-thru to give you a feel for the app.