How Brex picked its SDRs’ accounts from closed deals and paid them on revenue
Outbound teardowns by
October 2026
- Company
- Brex sells corporate cards, banking and spend management software to businesses. Part of Capital One since April 2026.1 Visit Brex ↗
- Sales team
- Six AEs before the first SDR in 2018; about 15 SDRs at the change
TL;DR
Brex’s SDRs were producing more opportunities but less sourced revenue per rep than its AEs. Brex took account choice away from them and paid them on the revenue their opportunities closed. By Sam Blond’s own account, revenue per SDR roughly tripled, in a sale that closed in two to three weeks.
The lesson
Judge a prospect by what it turned into, then point the account rules and the pay at that same result. Paying on revenue worked for Brex because its deals closed in weeks.
For your team
Compare opportunities by source and segment before changing anything.
What Brex did
The starting point
Brex’s first salespeople found their own customers.
When Sam Blond joined Brex to lead sales in May 2018, “brex.com read ‘coming soon’.” It launched on June 19, 2018, with billboards across San Francisco reading “The First Corporate Card For Startups,” and, in Blond’s words, “We were everywhere for people at startups and nowhere for anyone else.”2
The first creative, on boards across San Francisco from launch day.
June 19, 2018Blond joined with two AEs, or account executives, who work a deal to a signed contract, and hired four more. All six prospected for their own deals before Brex had an SDR, or sales development rep, whose job is to book the first meeting. Blond has said the first outreach went to founders and finance leads in the team’s own networks and to introductions through investors such as Y Combinator.4,5
The first SDR hire was a leader, Ashley Kelly, who had worked for Blond at Zenefits and brought in three experienced SDRs from her previous company, Lever. Her team was paid on sales-qualified opportunities, credited, as Blond recalls, when a director or above at a company of more than 50 employees in a target industry showed up for the demo.4,5,6
The problem
Brex’s AEs sourced more outbound revenue per rep than its SDRs did.
Outbound sourced 80% of Brex’s revenue, Blond wrote, and the AEs kept doing it alongside the SDRs, which gave Brex an internal benchmark: “Despite spending less time on outbound, the avg AE was generating more revenue through outbound than the avg SDR.” In February 2023, after leaving Brex, Blond told the story on X.7
3/ Digging a layer deeper, SDR’s were creating more opportunities, but those opportunities converted at a lower rate, and the ones that did convert generated far less revenue than opportunities sourced by AE’s. We had a quality problem.
5/ AE’s were incentivized 100% on closed revenue. SDR’s were incentivized 100% on opportunity creation. This incentive structure drove different types of behavior that ultimately resulted in the SDR quality problem described above -
6/ they were generating a high quantity of low quality opportunities. They didn’t care about revenue. And they shouldn’t have with the incentive structure in place.
7/ We decided to try incentivizing SDR’s 100% on revenue generated from the opportunities they sourced. The next month we saw an immediate impact - conversion rates went up and deal sizes increased.
The first warning came from AE managers. Blond has recalled passing on their complaints about the quality of Kelly’s team’s demos, and Kelly has said she took it personally. When finance and the founders asked why Brex didn’t just hire more AEs, Blond said no, because its best AEs had started as SDRs.4,5
Blond has said Brex probably shrank Kelly’s team of about 15 slightly and may have managed out a couple of the weakest performers.4
The decision
Undated, between 2018 and September 2022
Brex changed whom SDRs could target and what their variable pay rewarded, together.
Blond and Kelly first described it on a SaaStr panel in September 2022.
Blond’s diagnosis was the pay plan. SDRs were paid 100% on opportunity creation, so “they didn’t care about revenue. And they shouldn’t have with the incentive structure in place.” On the panel, Kelly called it a quality problem, meaning meetings that did not convert.6,7
The redesign
The account rules came from what AEs had already closed.
The rules came from the AEs, who in Blond’s account knew a strong opportunity because they worked deals long past the first meeting. In 2022 he explained that a 100-person law firm took about as much effort to win as a 100-person tech company, while card spend, and so revenue, differed hugely.6 SDRs could no longer add anyone they wanted to their named-account lists in Salesforce; Brex named the sub-verticals, personas and geographies to work, with CFOs ahead of controllers because they converted better. Kelly has said e-commerce was the strongest segment, and that a company’s Alexa ranking, a measure of its website traffic, signaled heavy card spend.4,5,8 Brex had launched a corporate card for online brands in February 2019.9
Brex’s SDR plan, two lines rewritten together
Variable payQuoted phrases: Blond, posts 5 and 7
SDR’s were incentivized 100% on Before: “opportunity creation.” After: “revenue generated from the opportunities they sourced.”
Which accountsas Blond and Kelly described it, 2024
Named accounts in Salesforce: Before: each SDR’s own pick After: set by rules from what AEs had closed: sub-vertical, persona, geography
What changed after
Revenue per SDR (up)
“the average productivity (revenue contribution) of each SDR increased by 3x”
Blond, written, Feb 2023Demos passed to AEs (down)
Fell, which strained the sales capacity model.
As Kelly described it, 2024The pay change was to variable pay. Kelly has said each SDR was also tightly aligned with an AE in a pod. Blond recalls announcing the change early in a month to take effect the next, and thinks SDRs were paid on the higher of qualified opportunities or revenue for that first month.4,6,7
The result
Blond reports that revenue contribution per SDR tripled.
The month after the pay change, Blond wrote, “conversion rates went up and deal sizes increased.”7 In 2022 each leader credited a different lever with about 3x. Kelly said outbound-referred revenue tripled within six months of the pay change, and Blond said the account rules roughly tripled average deal size and could have come sooner.5,6,10
- Sep 2022 · Kelly~3xoutbound-referred revenue within six months of the pay change
- Sep 2022 · Blond~3xaverage deal size, from the account rules
- Feb 2023 · Blond3xrevenue contribution per SDR
He wrote that SDRs then passed AEs in sourced revenue, and recalls that every SDR earned more and the team grew faster afterward. These are the leaders’ own figures, and they don’t separate out staffing or business growth.4,7
Kelly has said that once SDRs were paid on revenue, the demos they passed to AEs fell sharply, a problem for the sales capacity model. She tied the plan to Brex’s two-to-three-week sales cycle and revenue from card spend, and cautioned against it for longer cycles.10
What it took
Blond has called the targeting a function of strategy and ops that let Brex hire fewer reps and get more from each, and in 2026 named early revenue operations as one of three things behind Brex’s results. Kelly recalls building the account scoring very closely with sales ops, and Blond has said the rules lived in Salesforce as named-account lists.4,5,6,11
What to borrow
- Benchmark opportunity quality by source. Compare conversion and deal size by source and segment. Brex had AE outbound to compare against; a historical cohort or a pilot can do the same job.
- Point the account rules and the pay plan at the same number. At Brex both changed together, and both pointed SDRs at revenue from the opportunities they sourced.
- If your sales close in under 30 days, pay SDRs at least in part on closed revenue from the opportunities they source. Blond limited this to outbound-led teams whose opportunities vary widely in conversion rate and deal size. With longer cycles, keep opportunity credit.7
How to build a version of this in Unify
Build the targeting half in Unify
Everything above is what Brex did. This section is our suggestion for the targeting half in Unify.
Brex built its account rules in Salesforce with sales ops, and its data science team separately built account scoring for over a million prospects.12 Unify combines your CRM, warehouse and product usage data with enrichment from 40+ sources, with warehouse data, such as your own scores, synced in through a sync tool or the API. The list can come from Unify’s company data as well as accounts already in your CRM.
A first version needs one Audience and one Play. Build the Audience from the traits your won deals share, and add an AI Agent question for the fit your CRM can’t check. The Play assigns one owner, skips accounts that already have an owner or an open opportunity, prospects personas in order and starts a Sequence the rep approves.
One account, from signal to next step
- Account
- Fernhill Goods, an online retailer with 220 employeesIn an Audience from your won deals: e-commerce, 50 to 500 employees, US.
- Signal
- It sells physical goods online, and a new VP Finance started in AugustAn AI Agent question checks the website; new hires come from Signals.
- Why it matters
- A third warehouse opens in March, which means more spend to approveAI Research adds the warehouse news to Theo’s task.
- Next step
- Assigned by rule to Theo Ramos, who calls the CFO today, then the controller. Emails wait for his approval.From the Play: one owner, personas in order, Sequence started.
did thisOnce deals close, check which targeting rules produced valuable customers and adjust the next list.