The Actual Cost Baseline
Most revenue leaders undercount SDR spend. When you stack base salary, benefits, manager overhead, tech stack, training, and a 40% six-month attrition rate, a 10-rep outbound team lands at roughly $180K per rep annually — $1.8M all-in before a single qualified meeting is booked. That number tends to land hard in CFO conversations because it reframes the question. You're not evaluating whether to replace productive output. You're evaluating whether the ramp-and-churn cycle is worth carrying at all.
This isn't a headcount-reduction argument dressed up as strategy. It's a pure math decision, and the math has gotten harder to ignore now that 2026 deployment results exist.
What the Deployment Numbers Actually Show
The Clay + n8n + AI SDR platform stack is the most commonly cited configuration for mid-market B2B operators running live outbound agents right now. Reported outcomes from 2026 deployments: 7x conversion rate increase, 500+ positive replies per month, 88% cost reduction versus the human team baseline.
Treat those numbers as directional, not guaranteed — every deployment varies by ICP quality, data hygiene, and sequence logic. But even if your results come in at half those figures, the unit economics still flip. The question stops being