Set an SDR quota by starting from the number of qualified opportunities your AEs need, then dividing backwards through your own conversion rates: meetings held, meetings booked, conversations, connects, dials. Done with real numbers, a quota of 15 held meetings a month is either obviously feasible or obviously not, before anyone signs it. Here is the method, seeded with benchmarks from our analysis of 1,000,000 B2B cold calls in France, plus the attainment analysis that tells you what your top reps do differently.

Why most SDR quotas are set wrong

Four mistakes cover most cases. The quota is set top-down from a revenue plan nobody translated into calls. It is uniform across reps with different territories and personas. It is copied from an American benchmark, where connect rates run higher than in France. And it is never revised when the tools change, so a team that moves to parallel dialing keeps a quota designed for a single line.

I spent five years as an AE at Google Cloud and watched my quota go from €1.5M to €10M. It was always derived from the territory plan, never from what a day of selling could produce. That works for an AE with a territory. For an SDR, whose job is activity converted at known rates, it is indefensible. The only honest way is bottom-up.

The reverse funnel in four steps

Step 1: start from what the AE needs

Ask the AE how many qualified opportunities a month they need to make their own number. Say eight. Then apply your two post-meeting ratios.

• Meeting-to-opportunity rate: in our experience, about 50% is healthy. Eight opportunities means 16 held meetings.
• Held rate: around 75% without a confirmation process, above 80% with one. 16 held means about 21 booked.

Twenty-one booked meetings a month is the quota. Now check whether it can exist.

Step 2: divide by the meeting rate per conversation

This is the step that decides everything, and the one most quota spreadsheets skip. In our data, pitch-first openers book 2-3% of conversations; trigger-based openers book 7-10%.

• At 2.5%, 21 meetings require 840 conversations a month, or 40 a day. Nobody does that.
• At 8.5%, 21 meetings require about 250 conversations a month, or 12 a day. Feasible.

So the quota depends on how the rep opens. If your team is in the 65% of reps who open by explaining what they sell, a 21-meeting quota is a resignation letter with a delay.

Step 3: divide by connect rate to get the day

Twelve conversations a day. The French average connect rate is 11.3%, and in our experience roughly six connects in ten become a real conversation with the target persona. That is about 175 dials a day on a single line. With a parallel dialer, reps get about 5x more conversations in the same hours, and 12 a day sits comfortably under our north-star of 20.

Slot matters as much as tool. Connect rate is 15.8% at 4pm and 9.8% at 8am. A rep who dials in the right windows needs 40% fewer dials for the same conversations. Put the calling blocks in the quota assumptions.

Step 4: adjust per rep, per persona, per quarter

Uniform quotas are fair on paper and wrong in practice. Three adjustments are worth making.

• Ramp. A new SDR is not at full rate for the first quarter. Set a ramped quota (a third, two thirds, full) rather than an exception you negotiate later.
• Persona. Sales and leadership pick up above 15% in our data; some personas sit at 11%. Two reps on different personas need different dial assumptions for the same meeting number.
• Signal coverage. A rep working a list with CRM signals (website visits, job changes, closed-lost notes) will book more per conversation. 50% of our own pipeline comes from signals that were already in the CRM. Give the list a number too.

And revise the quota when the tooling changes. A quota that survives a switch to parallel dialing unchanged is a gift, not a target.

Tracking attainment: compare ratios, not percentages

Quota attainment as a percentage tells you who hit and who missed. It does not tell you why. For that, lay each rep's funnel side by side: dials, connect rate by slot, conversation rate, meeting rate per conversation, held rate.

In our experience the top reps differ in three places and only three. They call in the right slots (10am and 4pm, not 8am). They open on a trigger rather than a pitch. And they make the second and third attempt: in our experience most connects happen within the first three attempts, and average reps stop at one.

None of those is talent. All three can be copied in a week. That is what attainment data is for.

How Sonik approaches SDR quotas

Our own SDR quota is expressed in held meetings, with a daily pacing number in conversations, because that is the number a rep can act on at 2pm. The Sonik dashboard shows conversations per day per rep against that pace, and splits connect rate by slot and persona so the assumptions behind the quota are visible, not buried in a spreadsheet.

When a rep is behind, we look at the ratios in the order above: slot first, then opener, then attempts. The quota itself changes only when the funnel data says the assumption was wrong, not because a month was hard.

Conclusion

A quota is a chain of ratios with a tool and an opener inside it. Build it from the AE's need backwards, check it against your connect and meeting rates, and adjust for ramp, persona and list. This week, take one rep's quota and divide it by their actual meeting rate per conversation. If the daily number that comes out is above 20 conversations, the quota is wrong, not the rep.