The State of Sales Development 2026 survey closes this Saturday, 19 September. 550 SDR leaders across NAMER, EMEA and APAC have already given us their numbers.

That is already bigger than last year's whole EMEA sample. But the regional cuts are the point of going global this year, and at 550 some of those cuts are thin. At 750 they hold up. That is 200 more leaders, and this email goes to over 4,000 of you.

If you have had the tab open since launch, this is the nudge. Nine minutes. Anonymous. You get your own numbers benchmarked against the full dataset and the report before it goes public in October.

Fill it in here

Already done it? Send it to one other SDR leader you rate. That is the difference between a good report and a definitive one.

Three separate threads on intent data landed in our Slack channel within six days. The first asked who had used ZoomInfo Intent. The second asked which ABM platform to buy and whether Clay could do it. The third mattered:

The first reply was… to the point:

The thread went back and forth on what the difference is, and it landed here:

That is the whole debate in three quotes. Half of you are paying for intent scores. The leaders who have run them for a while are split on whether they moved a single meeting.

Here is where I land on this argument and I will show my working.

An intent score is a vendor's model of a third party's browsing, rolled into a number and sold as readiness to buy. You cannot see inside it. You cannot tell a rep why the account is an 87 and not a 62. And when the rep calls and the account has never heard of the category, the score was still right by its own definition, because it never promised a meeting.

A signal is a fact. The company hired a VP of Sales last month. They posted three SDR roles. Their CEO said "pipeline" four times on the earnings call. Their tech stack changed. Someone in that domain opened your email twice, then went to your pricing page. A rep can read a signal, say it out loud on a call, and build a first line around it. Nobody has ever opened with "I noticed your intent score went up."

The leaders in the thread who said intent was working for them had one thing in common. It was not sitting in the SDR account list. One uses it for paid marketing targeting and saw inbound quality improve. Another uses it for outbound account prioritisation and saw the account-to-meeting set rate move. Both were using it to decide who to put in front of a rep, not to tell the rep what to say.

The ones who said it was a black box were the ones who had handed the score to reps as a reason to call.

So the question is not whether intent works. It is where in the funnel it sits. Above the rep, as one input to a prioritisation model, it earns its keep. In the rep's hands, as a substitute for a real reason to reach out, it is expensive noise.

Most teams paying for intent have never checked whether it changed anything. It takes an afternoon.

Pull every meeting your team booked last quarter. For each one, mark whether the account carried an intent flag before the first touch. Then split your total accounts worked the same way.

You now have two set rates: flagged accounts and unflagged accounts. If the flagged set rate is not meaningfully higher, the score is not doing what you are paying for. If it is higher, look at whether those accounts were also the ones a rep would have picked anyway on firmographics alone. That is the part that usually hurts.

Then do the same split on one first-party signal you already have. Email opens plus a website visit. New hire in the last 60 days. Whichever is easiest to pull.

In my experience, the first-party signal wins or draws, and it costs you nothing. I would rather you proved me wrong with your own numbers than took my word for it.

Big news

We partnered with Apollo this year – and one of the perks we negotiated for our community is complimentary access to ApolloNext 2026. This isn't available to the public.

GO TO THIS LINK to register for free.

September 30. SFJAZZ Center. San Francisco. One day with the GTM leaders actually moving the number:

This is the room. You should be in it.

Claim your spot

When: September 30, 2026
Where: SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco

Our chapters are running across the US and EMEA through September and October. Check www.sdrleaders.global for the full agenda of upcoming events.

Dave