SDR KPIs for DevTool GTM Motions

The role of an SDR in a DevTool company isn’t one-size-fits-all. Depending on your go-to-market (GTM) motion - whether it’s top-down, hybrid, or open source-led - the way SDRs work, the signals they act on, and the outreach they execute can vary significantly.

But the core responsibilities and outcomes stay consistent:

→ Spot accounts with real opportunity
→ Reach out and drive qualified meetings
→ Generate real sales opportunities

Common KPIs for SDRs across Different GTM Motions

First Order KPIs

Number of Qualified Outreaches

Most companies still track the number of outreaches , i.e., the total number of outreaches made by an SDR - across all channels (email, calls, social DMs).

But this is a misleading metric.

Instead, the focus should be on Qualified Outreaches.

A "qualified outreach" is one that meets three key conditions:

✅ ICP Fit – The company fits your Ideal Customer Profile based on factors like:

Tech stack (technographics)
Company size or funding stage
Engineering or DevOps team size

✅ Intent Fit – There’s a reason to believe they’re in-market, based on:

Searching for solutions online
Reading technical docs, help guides, or blog posts
Engaging on developer forums (e.g. Stack Overflow, Reddit)
Hiring engineers with skills related to your product category

✅ Persona Fit – The outreach is sent to someone who can influence or participate in the buying process (e.g., an engineering manager, DevOps lead, or architect)

Tracking Qualified Outreaches over raw volume shifts focus from "spray-and-pray" to smart, signal-driven prospecting - which is essential in DevTool sales

Formula:

Qualified Outreaches = Count of outbound outreaches (emails, calls, DMs) that meet all three criteria - ICP Fit, Intent Fit, and Persona Fit

Response Rate

Response rate tells you how well your outreach is landing. It’s the percentage of outbound emails, calls, or DMs that get a neutral or positive reply - a yes, a "maybe later," or a request to learn more.

If you’re getting a good response rate, that’s a strong sign your message worked. It means you understood what the buyer might be struggling with, and spoke to their problem in a way that felt timely and relevant.

Cold outreach response rates vary... It can be as low as 0.1% and as high as 25%

Cold outreach response rates vary. They can be as low as 0.1% or as high as 25%. In the age of AI-led outbound, your prospect’s inbox is flooded with generic messages. You get a split second of attention - and the right kind of prospecting can make all the difference.

You can blast 500 emails a day with a 0.2% response rate and a 2% unsubscribe rate. Or you can write 50 thoughtful, tailored emails a day and get a 20% response rate with 0% unsubscribes. Your call.

If you deliver value [i.e. highly targeted personalised outbound that attacks the problem your prospect is facing] and ask for less [conversation instead of sales] then you get better response rates.

Anything above 5% is a good response rate. On the flip side, anything below 2% is a red flag - it usually means you’ve either misunderstood the buyer’s problem, or you’re targeting the wrong accounts entirely.

To write messaging that gets responses, you need to understand the buyer’s pain point.

What problem are they facing?
How can your product solve that problem?
Why should they believe you, that your product can solve their problem?
What's your Call to Action? What should they do next once they are done reading your email? Is that going to be too much of an effort for them?

Intent Signals can help you uncover a lot of information:

Are they reading specific blogs or documentation? That can reveal what problem they’re actively researching.
Are they hiring for engineers with specific skills? That may indicate the kind of projects or bottlenecks they're trying to solve.
Are they posting or engaging on developer forums like Stack Overflow or Reddit? That can expose what challenges they're discussing publicly.

In a Hybrid motion - these intent signals could be developer activity within the product - things like multiple users from the same org signing up, connecting a key integration, or hitting usage limits.

Using those signals, you can craft messaging that’s timely, helpful, and grounded in what they actually care about. Tech buyers don’t respond to sales-y emails. They only reply when the message is relevant, specific, and speaks to a real problem they’re facing.

That’s why the goal of your first outreach isn’t to sell - it’s to start a conversation

You don’t need to pitch the product on day one. The best first messages are low-pressure, value-driven, and written to spark curiosity or open a dialogue. Once the prospect engages, you’ll have more room to explore the problem - and that’s what eventually turns into a real opportunity.

For example: If you're an SDR at Confluent and you see a Company hiring developers with Kafka experience, that might signal the Company is investing more in their Kafka team. Can they benefit from buying into Confluent Cloud and reducing the team dependency? Any resource that helps them evaluate this, would be extremely helpful. If that content lands well, the conversation starts - and sales can follow.

Formula:

Response Rate = (Positive + Neutral Replies received ÷ Total outbound messages sent) × 100

Conversation-to-Opportunity Conversion

Once you've started conversations, the next thing to track is how many of those actually convert into opportunities. This KPI reflects how well you're qualifying during early conversations and how accurately you're reading the buyer's timing.

If a conversation turns into an opportunity, it’s a strong sign that you not only understood their problem - but also caught them at the right moment.

Here again intent signals have a big role to play. Timing is everything. If you see someone reading migration guides, asking about performance tuning, or hiring engineers for a specific skill set - those can be clues that they’re actively evaluating or building.

But a good conversation doesn’t always turn into an opportunity on day one. The best SDRs know how to keep the conversation alive without being pushy. They focus on staying relevant and helpful through the entire evaluation cycle. That might include:

Sharing best practices or case studies tied to the buyer’s specific use case
Offering a call with a Solutions Engineer to help unblock a technical discussion
Troubleshooting blockers or sending best-practice guides that actually help the prospect make progress
Sending a Build vs. Buy breakdown, with a clear Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comparison
Following up with a helpful framework, like how similar teams approached scale, security, or integration

The key is to make yourself useful - not just to sell, but to move the buyer forward in their process.

It's not just about finding the right accounts - it's about staying valuable until they’re ready to buy.

Formula:

Conversation-to-Opportunity Rate = (Opportunities created ÷ Conversations started) × 100

If an SDR reaches out to the right people, with the right message, at the right time - and is able to generate real sales opportunities - their core job is done.

But it’s also helpful to track second-order KPIs like Pipeline Generated and Average Contract Value (ACV) to keep a check on the quality and impact of the opportunities being created.

Second Order KPIs

Pipeline Generated

Pipeline is the big picture. It’s the total dollar value of all the opportunities you’ve helped create. While you don’t control how much a deal closes for, you do influence how big those opportunities can be - and how many of them you’re surfacing in the first place.

If your pipeline numbers are strong, it means you're targeting accounts where the problem is real, the stakes are high, and there's a budget to solve it. But if pipeline is consistently low, ask yourself:

Are you booking enough qualified meetings?
And are you going after accounts where the value is actually worth pursuing?

This is the metric that connects your day-to-day work directly to revenue.

This is a great checkpoint KPI - not just for SDRs, but for managers to assess the strategic focus of outbound.

Formula:

Pipeline Generated = Total dollar value of opportunities created by the SDR

Average Contract Value

ACV stands for Average Contract Value - and it gives you a read on deal quality. While pipeline shows your total impact, ACV looks at the average size of the opportunities you’re creating. It helps answer: are you consistently bringing in the kinds of accounts your company wants to close?

If your ACV is high, it’s usually a sign you’re targeting the right types of accounts - ones with complex needs, broader use cases, and real budgets.

If ACV is low, it could mean you’re mostly landing with smaller teams or narrow problems. But that’s not always a red flag - in many cases, ACV is shaped by the product itself. If your company sells something designed for small teams or self-serve adoption, lower ACVs may be totally expected.

What matters is that the opportunities you’re creating are aligned with your company’s sales motion and revenue model.

Formula:

Average Contract Value = Total pipeline value ÷ Number of opportunities created

KPI for SDRs unique to Hybrid GTM Motion

Speed to Lead

In a hybrid motion, you’re not reaching out cold - you're stepping in when a developer or team has already started using the product. They’ve signed up, explored a key feature, or spent time in the docs. That’s your window.

Take HashiCorp, for example. When a team was actively using Terraform and started exploring Vault docs, that signaled they might be running into secrets management challenges - and could be ready to adopt another product from the suite. That’s a perfect moment for the SDR to step in with something useful, like a guide on securing infrastructure at scale.

This KPI is about how quickly you respond when a high intent activity happens - maybe a signup, demo request, or usage milestone.

Formula: