An SDR Pay Plan: Meetings Versus Inroads

What paying per meeting buys

It buys meetings, reliably, and that is the problem. A rep paid per meeting is paid most for whoever says yes fastest: the curious junior, the bored browser, the consultant gathering quotes. On a broad market with a cheap product that is fine. On a list of named accounts it is a quiet catastrophe: the measure fills while Tier 1 sleeps, and every soft meeting burns a seller's hour and a prospect's patience. The fix teams often reach for, a tighter qualified meeting definition, helps, and it still pays for a moment rather than progress: one meeting, one person, once.

What an inroad is, precisely enough to pay on

An inroad is an account genuinely opened, not an account touched. To pay on it, the definition must be checkable from the tracker:

An account counts as an inroad when ALL of these are true:
1. It is on the approved named list (no freelancing into easy accounts)
2. Two or more mapped committee members are in real conversation
3. A second meeting has happened, or a dated next step agreed by the
   buyer exists
4. The tracker row is current: people, status, next step, date

One meeting with one person fails lines 2 and 3 on purpose; the definition is the strategy, priced. The term itself is in the glossary under inroad.

The worked mix

Numbers in brackets are placeholders to fit your market; the structure is the point. All figures in the example are invented to show the arithmetic, not benchmarks.

Base                 The majority of pay. Research-heavy work collapses
                     under a starvation base; [70/30] is a common shape
                     for named-account SDR roles.

Variable, split three ways:
  Inroads [55-60%]   Paid per account meeting the definition above,
                     counted once per account per [quarter].
  Qualified meetings Paid per meeting that meets the written definition,
  [25-35%]           at a lower rate than inroads.
  Quality gate       Paid on tracker integrity and review scores, the
  [10-15%]           boring multiplier that keeps the other two honest.

Guardrails:
- An account can earn inroad pay once per quarter, however many
  meetings it produces.
- Meetings that later no-show or fail the definition claw back.
- The list is fixed monthly; reps cannot swap hard accounts out
  mid-month.

So a rep who books six soft meetings earns less than a rep who opens two real accounts and books three meetings inside them, and both can see why from the plan itself.

Why not pure meetings, and why not pure salary

Pure per-meeting pay turns the SDR into a bookings vendor inside your own payroll, with all the definition disputes that model buys externally. Pure salary with no variable removes the dispute and sometimes the urgency with it; a small variable pointed at inroads keeps the urgency aimed correctly. The deciding question is the same one that picks the sales motion: does your revenue come from volume, or from a short list of companies that must be opened properly?