How do I hire SDRs in India and keep them past four months?
The India SDR pool is deep and trained on US outbound tooling, and it costs roughly a fifth to an eighth of a US hire, but attrition is the tax you pay for that. Two things reduce it. First, hire in pairs or small cohorts and onboard them as a class, because a lone SDR on a night shift with no peer group leaves. Second, publish the path: what makes them an AE, on what timeline, and what the number has to look like. Screen with a live mock call and a written cold email, not the resume, and do not hire an SDR until a full cycle AE has already proven the close, or the meetings just bounce back to you.
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5 resources, 3 India-specific, 5 link-checked.
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Actual rupee bands for junior, mid and senior SDRs in India, the cost comparison against a US hire, and a hiring process built on live mock calls. The most concrete India SDR numbers we could find in one place.
365 B2B companies surveyed on ramp, tenure, attrition, activity and comp. When you want to know whether your ramp is slow or your attrition is normal, this is the reference everyone quotes.
77 percent of Indian SaaS leaders name ramping critical talent as their biggest challenge, and the piece quantifies how much the GTM talent pool has to grow. Useful context for why your hiring feels harder than the US blogs suggest.
A concrete onboarding curriculum you can copy: cohorts, drilling, peer sparring and shadowing, with the argument that practice matters more than the live calls. Exactly what a first ramp plan should contain.
Debdutta Saha has spent his career as an SDR based in India selling into the US, and he writes openly about hiring SDRs here. This masterclass covers what the job actually demands day to day, which is what you screen and coach for if you want them to stay past month four.
