The Solo SDR Playbook
For individual SDRs and AEs running their own outreach.
Whether you're a new SDR or a founder wearing the sales hat, LinkedIn is your highest-leverage channel — if you do it right. This playbook walks you from 'just starting' to 'consistent reply rates' in six guided reads.
Getting Started: Launch Your First Campaign
Step-by-step: sign up, connect, and start generating leads in 5 minutes.
Optimize Your Profile First
Your profile is your landing page — here's how to make it convert.
12 Connection Templates That Get Accepted
Pre-written templates with use cases and acceptance rates.
10 Outreach Tips That Actually Convert
The proven strategies that turn cold prospects into warm conversations.
Go Multi-Channel
Why LinkedIn alone isn't enough — and how to layer email, WhatsApp, SMS.
Safety: Don't Get Your Account Banned
Rate limits, detection signals, and recovery strategies — the essential guide.
Solo SDR playbook (deep dive)
The operating model for a single SDR running outbound on LinkedIn + email + WhatsApp in 2026 — daily routine, weekly review, monthly metric targets.
Daily routine
9:00am: Queue review (20 min). Approve AI-drafted first messages for the day's queue. Light edits. Reject wrong-fit prospects.
9:20am: Reply triage (15 min). Yesterday's replies. Positive: send Calendly. Question: respond personally. Negative: archive.
9:35am: Send sequence steps (auto, no SDR time). Infonet handles distribution across business hours.
1:00pm: Mid-day reply check (10 min). Catch positive replies that came in this morning. Send calendars.
4:30pm: End-of-day review (15 min). Manually engage with prospect content (likes, comments). Builds account warmth and gets your name in their notification feed.
Total active SDR time on LinkedIn outbound: 60 minutes/day. Plus calls, demos, and admin work in the rest of the day.
Weekly cadence
Monday morning: campaign review. Look at last week's metrics. What's working? What's not? One change per week.
Wednesday afternoon: ICP refinement. Review wrong-fit prospects from this week. Tighten the search to filter them out next week.
Friday end-of-day: queue prep. Approve next week's prospect queue. Check for ICP drift.
Monthly: voice library refresh. Add 2–3 examples of your best recent messages to the voice library. The AI improves over time.
Monthly targets
Per-rep typical metrics for solo SDR running this rhythm:
• Connection requests sent: 350–450/month
• Acceptances: 100–140
• Replies: 25–45 (positive + neutral)
• Meetings booked: 12–22
• Meetings → opportunities: 4–8
• Closed-won: 1–3
Variance is wide. ICP precision and message quality drive most of it.
Tooling stack
Sales Navigator Core ($99/mo): Sourcing.
Infonet ($39/mo): Outreach + multi-channel coordination.
HubSpot Sales Hub Starter ($45/mo): CRM.
Apollo Basic ($59/mo) or Hunter ($49/mo): Email enrichment.
Calendly Standard ($12/mo): Booking.
Total: ~$255/mo per SDR. Compared to $5-8k/mo loaded SDR cost, the tooling is 3-4% of the personnel cost.
When to hire a second SDR
Trigger: when you're consistently booking 20+ qualified meetings/month AND your acceptance + reply rates are stable. Hiring before that risks pouring more sand into a leaky funnel.
Compensation: base + per-meeting bonus. $4–6k/mo base + $200–400/qualified meeting works for most B2B SaaS.
Onboarding: hand over voice library, ICP definitions, suppression lists. New SDR shadows for week 1, runs solo from week 2.