Vercel cut its inbound SDR team from 10 to 1.25
The company's COO says home-built agents now handle 90% of inbound sales development and 93% of support cases, on an infrastructure bill in the single-digit thousands a year.
Vercel reduced its inbound sales development team from 10 people to 1.25. The figure comes from Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, the company's chief operating officer, speaking on The Information's TITV.
On her account, 90% of inbound sales development is now automated, and a support agent the company built itself handles 93% of all support cases.
She puts the return on the sales development agent at 32 times, and says the total annual infrastructure bill for both agents sits in the single-digit thousands of dollars.
Those are company numbers, asserted by an executive on a broadcast interview rather than filed anywhere a reader can audit. They are worth taking seriously for the shape they describe more than the decimal places.
The shape is this. Inbound is the easiest part of sales to hand over, because the buyer has already raised a hand. The work is qualifying, routing and replying quickly, and all three are rule-bound.
The lesson for a small team is the order of operations. Vercel did not buy a bigger model; it wrote down what its team already did and handed the written version to software.
Grosser's framing is that the agents have become reliable performers most of the time, not that they have become clever. Reliability at volume is what lets headcount move.
Note the 1.25. The team did not go to zero. A quarter of a person still sits on top of the system, which is what the residual 10% of inbound and 7% of support cases require.
Note also the cost. Single-digit thousands a year is a rounding error against ten salaries, which is why the 32x figure survives whatever the model charges. If the model price triples, the arithmetic barely moves.
For a founder with a two-person go-to-market team, the copyable part is cheap to test. Take the inbound replies you send most often, write the decision rules that produce them, and measure what share of enquiries those rules already cover.
If the answer is 90%, the constraint was never the model. It was that nobody had written the process down.
What the public account does not include is the detail: how the workflow was codified, how long it took, what broke, or how the remaining cases are escalated. Grosser is scheduled to discuss the sales development function further at a Theory Office Hours session on 1 October.