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What happens when you throw out the GTM playbook
That investor was wrong. Gamma is now worth $2B, with 50M users and more than half their growth driven by word of mouth.
They're one of 6 AI-native startups in HubSpot for Startups' free Bold Bets Playbook. Replit grew revenue 50x after half the team pushed back on the strategy. Ramp generated 100M+ views from a single stunt. Clay's co-founder wouldn't hang up a sales call until the prospect DMed him in Slack.
Each one took a GTM risk most founders would never greenlight. Each one paid off.
Three separate conversations broke out, and underneath them all was the same question: how should an SDR team actually be built?
Something happened in the community this week.
Three separate conversations broke out, and underneath them all was the same question: how should an SDR team actually be built?
Not the fun version. The real version. Who handles inbound? Who owns which accounts? Who does the team report to? The structural decisions that quietly decide whether your reps hit quota or burn out.
Here is what your peers are doing and what the sharpest ones said.
Inbound and outbound: blend or split?
It started with a simple question from Tj. How many of you are running inbound leads on top of outbound?
The answers split cleanly along one line: maturity.
Early teams blend by necessity. Bryston put it plainly. His Series A team handles both because a small team cannot afford to separate the two. Plenty of you are in exactly that boat.
Then the volume grows, and the blended model breaks. Leonard is mid-split right now, moving his senior BDR to run all inbound while two reps stay heads-down on outbound. Matt runs a mature commercial org with a dedicated demand gen engine and eight reps behind it. Colton has gone all the way, a full inbound team at seven to eight FTE with lean tooling underneath.
But here is the insight that cuts through all of it, and it came from Sam.
You do not split based on headcount. You split based on inbound volume. His question back to the group was the right one: how many MQLs are you getting per week? If the answer is not a consistent, predictable number, you cannot justify dedicating a person to it. Brian backed this up. Company maturity and target market set the ceiling. Inbound volume and outbound expectations set the floor.
The lesson: do not copy the org chart of a company three stages ahead of you. Build around your actual inbound volume, and revisit it every quarter.
The model nobody mentions: inbound as the on-ramp
Chaz shared the one structure most leaders overlook.
When his team was small, SDRs did both. As they scaled, inbound became the entry point. New SDRs start there, learn the product and the buyer, then earn their way into outbound.
That is not just coverage. That is a career path baked into your org design. It solves onboarding, it derisks outbound, and it gives reps a reason to level up. If you are scaling a team right now, this one is worth stealing.
Then AI walked into the room
Vic made the point that reframes the entire debate.
Routing inbound through agentic AI versus a human is now a strategic planning decision, not a someday-soon one. A lot of inbound does not need a rep at all. The tyre kickers, the no budget, no power, and no project leads can be handled by AI before they ever reach your team.
But do not let that data disappear. Vic's real point: everything the AI learns at the inbound layer should flow back into your outbound motion, your product marketing, and your demand gen. The inbound desk is not a cost centre. It is an intelligence source.
Territories or no territories?
The second conversation came from Mauricio, mid-reorg with ten reps, asking whether to drop geographic territories in favour of an account-based model.
Max came down hard on one side. He is always pro-no-territories, because it kills the unfairness of the lucky patch and lets you run plays across the whole team. You also get cleaner measurements: accounts touched, account-to-meeting ratio, proper account tiering, so reps spend their time on tier 1 and tier 2.
Vic flagged the one real risk. Conflict. When two reps have different personas inside the same account, you have a problem. His fix was less about structure and more about discipline. Get tight on intention before you change anything:
Why are you doing this?
What behaviour are you trying to create, or kill?
How does it affect the teams around you, especially your AEs?
How will you prove it worked when you report up?
Mauricio's own answer landed in the right place. One rep owns the full account and everything inside it. The goal is autonomy and the end of the lucky-territory lottery. The cost is that AEs now coordinate across more reps. A fair trade, handled well.
The question underneath all of it
We also asked the community this week who you report to. Sales or marketing.
It is not idle curiosity. That single line on the org chart decides how inbound and outbound get prioritised, how your team is measured, and whose number you are really carrying. Every structural choice above flows from it.
The takeaway
There is no universal SDR org chart. There is only the right one for your volume, your maturity, and your reporting line, this quarter.
Build for where you are. Measure it. Change it when the numbers change. And steal shamelessly from the leaders who are one step ahead, not five.
Join us
These conversations happen every day inside SDR Leaders Global. If you lead an SDR team and you are not in the room yet, come join us. Find your tribe here
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