Odyn vs. an outsourced SDR: what you actually buy in each case

What an outsourced SDR does well

They pick up the phone. That is the clearest advantage: a full-time SDR averages 60 to 100 outbound calls a day (Leadriver, September 2026). They can reach a plant manager at 8 a.m., answer an objection on the spot, rephrase, and get a meeting where an email would sit unanswered. They can also work a list of accounts you hand over, without waiting for a posting to appear.

Published prices vary by model. A monthly retainer typically runs $3,000 to $15,000 (Salespipe, July 2026), from $2,500 to $5,000 for a startup-scale program to $12,000 and up for enterprise. Pay-per-meeting pricing is $150 to $600 per appointment for mainstream B2B targets. A hybrid is a $3,000 to $8,000 base plus $100 to $300 per qualified appointment. Setup and onboarding fees of $3,000 to $10,000 are common, minimum terms of three to six months are standard, and an early exit can cost two to three months of fees. Those figures come from agency and vendor blogs, which sell what they price, and each engagement is quoted separately.

Hiring instead of outsourcing changes the scale. Salespipe puts an in-house SDR at a median base of about $55,000, $83,000 to $85,000 on target earnings, and $9,800 to $14,200 a month fully loaded per productive rep. The average ramp is about 3.1 months (Bridge Group, as cited), and annual turnover averages 34%.

The question recruiting firms ask: can they sell my trade?

The price list does not answer it. At a prospecting agency, a "qualified" meeting is defined by a client's brief. For a recruiting firm, it has to be with someone who has an open role, a budget, and a reason not to fill it alone. A rep who is learning words like "contingency", "retained", "exclusive" or "replacement guarantee" on the job may stall at a director's third question, and the meeting, if it happens, comes back to you with a half-convinced hiring manager. Look for someone who knows recruiting, or plan to train them.

Ramp time is paid time. With the usual three to six month minimum at $3,000 to $8,000 a month, you commit between $9,000 and $48,000 before you know whether the pitch holds, setup fees excluded. Ask one question before signing: from which address and which account do the messages leave? And accept one answer in advance: you will be the one holding the meeting once it is booked, because the intake call and the fee agreement are your trade.

What Odyn does differently

Odyn does not replace a phone, it replaces the groundwork. From published job postings it finds the companies hiring in your target, finds the decision-maker for each opening, writes a message built on the posting and on your specialty, sends it from your email address and LinkedIn account, follows up until someone replies, then stops. It starts after a 15-minute demo: you describe your target, you review the messages for the first three business days, and it takes over. There are no calls. When a decision-maker accepts the LinkedIn invitation, Odyn suggests that you call, and you make the call.

Two channels is a choice. In our data, email and LinkedIn invitations got about the same number of decision-makers to answer, but LinkedIn produced about twice as many interested replies; email replies are mostly refusals. Those measurements come from mostly French postings, between June and October 2026. The detail is in the guide to LinkedIn automation for recruiters.

The subscription is €290 a month per consultant, excluding VAT, with no long-term commitment, for 450 decision-makers contacted a month, or €2,900 a year. A month at the low end of an agency retainer costs roughly what a year of Odyn costs. Odyn does not sell meetings: it contacts people, and the replies are theirs. See pricing and the AI prospecting agent. One caveat for US and UK firms: Odyn was built in France and most of its history is on French postings, so bring up your market in the demo.

Outsourced SDR and Odyn side by side

When an outsourced SDR is the better choice

If your best channel is the phone, or if your target is a list of named accounts that may not have a posting online, a person who calls does what Odyn does not. The same goes if you have a budget of several thousand dollars a month, a recruiter free to take the meetings, and a need to get conversations with executives quickly. Pay-per-meeting suits firms that want to pay for a result rather than for time spent, provided they define what a qualified meeting is before signing. At contingency fees of 20 to 25% of first-year salary (Eden Capital, 2026), one placement is worth several months of retainer, so the question is whether the meetings turn into job orders.

When Odyn fits better

Odyn fits better if the budget is tight, if you want neither a multi-month contract nor a ramp-up period, and if you would rather have prospecting running in the background than a service to manage. A freelance recruiter or a small firm often has neither $3,000 a month to commit nor the time to brief someone every week. The same question arises for prospecting you do yourself; see Odyn compared with manual prospecting. The guide to business development for a recruitment firm compares the possible setups more broadly, and the comparison index gathers the other options.

Frequently asked questions