Turnover is contagious

An SDR resigns on a Tuesday. By Friday her accounts are "temporarily" split across the two reps who stayed. By the following week those two reps are running 150 percent of a normal book, hitting their numbers less often, and fielding sympathetic messages from recruiters who noticed the departure announcement. Within a quarter, one resignation has a decent chance of becoming two. SDR turnover already runs 34 to 40 percent a year, roughly three times the all-role average, but the annual rate hides the more dangerous fact: exits cluster. The second departure is rarely independent of the first.

Why one becomes two

The workload shifts. The departed rep's accounts do not pause, so they land on the survivors. Overloaded reps connect less per account, miss more, and start associating the job with drowning. The "temporary" redistribution that never ends is the single most reliable way to manufacture a second resignation.

The question gets asked. Every remaining rep privately runs the same audit: she left for what, exactly. More money, a better title, a saner territory. Whatever the answer, the survivors now have a comparison point they did not have last month, and the market is one message away.

The recruiters arrive. A departure is a public signal that a team is movable. Recruiters work signals for a living, and a fresh exit puts every remaining rep on somebody's call list within days. Your team will be prospected with more discipline than most teams prospect their own market.

The manager disappears into backfill. Hiring eats the manager's coaching hours precisely when the remaining reps need attention most. Neglected reps in an overloaded quarter are the recruiters' easiest conversations.

The containment playbook

First 48 hours. Redistribute the departed book explicitly and temporarily, with a stated end date, and cut the redistributed list to its best accounts rather than passing the whole load. Say the honest version of why the person left in front of the team, because the vacuum will otherwise be filled by a worse story.

First two weeks. Have the comp and career conversation with each remaining rep before a recruiter has it for you. Not a panicked raise, a real conversation about what the next year looks like. One in five SDR hires is gone within 90 days, so if the departed rep was recent, also re-examine the intake that hired them.

The first month. Decide the seat's future honestly instead of reflexively backfilling. Each departure costs $78K or more once you count the search, the empty months, and the ramp, the arithmetic we laid out in the three-year cost of an SDR seat. Sometimes the right answer is a rebuilt in-house seat. Sometimes it is a structure where turnover is somebody else's problem to absorb.

Contagion is a structural argument

A two-rep team that loses one rep has lost half its capacity and exposed the other half, which is the concentration risk we described in the one-rep continuity plan. This is the part of in-house SDR math that never appears in the offer letter: the roughly $10,000 a month a seat costs assumes the seat stays filled, and the turnover statistics say it will not. CommandVA absorbs that risk on our side of the contract. When a rep moves on, we run the bench, the transition file, and the overlap, and your program does not learn about contagion firsthand. The full cost model, turnover included, lives on our math page. If you are one resignation into what might become two, book a strategy call this week rather than next quarter. The window for containment is short.