The 2027 budget line

Budget season opens this week, and somewhere a 2027 planning sheet already has a row for pipeline generation. That row usually gets written one of two ways: last year's number plus ten percent, or a headcount guess multiplied by a salary. Both skip the actual question, which is what a qualified meeting will cost next year and how many of them the revenue plan quietly requires.

Start from the unit, not the headcount

Run the chain backward. The revenue target divided by average deal size gives deals needed. Deals needed divided by your close rate gives opportunities, and since roughly one held meeting in two advances, that doubles into held meetings needed for the year. Now the budget question has a real shape: a number of meetings, at a price per meeting, from the unit math we published in July. Computed honestly, in-house lands near $475 per held meeting, premium agencies at $630 or more, and a dedicated rep at $3,499 a month works out to roughly $292 to $437 across the typical range. Then check capacity against the industry benchmark band of 8 to 15 held meetings per rep per month, a band to plan within, never a promise, and you know how many seats the target implies.

The lines the first draft always misses

• The full seat. An in-house SDR costs roughly $10,000 a month fully loaded, not the $60K the salary line suggests. The complete stack is in the three-year seat post, and it belongs in the sheet at full weight.
• Tooling. Data, dialer, sequencer, enrichment: $10K to $15K per seat per year, itemized in the tooling post, and usually scattered across other budget lines where nobody totals it.
• Ramp. Four to six months to full productivity, paid at full cost. A seat funded from January 1 produces spring meetings, so a plan that needs Q1 pipeline needed a fall decision. Budget the slope, not the switch.
• Turnover. SDR turnover runs 34 to 40 percent a year, and modeled over three years, replacement adds $52,000 to $99,000 per seat per year. It is the line that never appears in the plan and always appears in the actuals.

The comparison, priced in daylight

Put the options side by side at unit cost and the sheet gets clarifying. Three dedicated CommandVA reps run $10,497 a month, about the price of one fully loaded in-house hire, with ramp and turnover risk carried by us and the price published instead of quoted. That is not automatically the answer: a team with a proven motion and real management bandwidth should budget to build, and the sheet will show it. The point is narrower. Every option should enter the 2027 plan priced the same way, per held meeting, fully loaded, with its ramp and its churn attached. The full model with every input visible is on our math page.

If the 2027 sheet is open on your screen this month, book a strategy call and bring the revenue target. We will run the backward math live, and if in-house pencils out for you, we will say that too.