The cheapest alternative to hiring a salesperson is software that does the repeatable half of the job: finding buyers, emailing them, following up and booking meetings. It costs tens of dollars a month rather than thousands, but it only covers part of the work. Whether it's enough depends on which part of selling is actually missing in your business.

Below are the four ways to get sales help (a hire, an agency, a part-time rep, software), what each costs when you do the math with your own numbers, and a simple way to decide. I won't quote salary figures, because they depend on your city and industry. Use your own.

What a salesperson costs once you add it all up

Start with base pay and keep adding. A worked example with placeholder figures, which you should replace:

  • Base pay: $50,000 a year.
  • Employer payroll taxes and benefits: your accountant can give the real percentage. Use 10 percent as a stand-in, or $5,000.
  • Tools: phone, laptop, email, a CRM seat. Say $1,200 a year.
  • Commission or bonus if you offer one. Say $0 in the first months.
  • Ramp time: if the person takes three months to produce anything, that's a quarter of the year's pay with no revenue. $12,500 of the base falls into it.

Excluding ramp, that's $56,200 a year, or about $4,683 a month. The ramp doesn't add to the bill; it just means the first quarter buys you very little. And then there's your own time: hiring, training, reviewing, correcting. An hour a day of a founder's attention is a cost, even though it never shows on an invoice.

A hire makes sense when there's enough demand to keep the person busy and enough margin to pay them. It's a bad bet when the main thing missing is a process nobody has written down. The alternative to hiring an SDR goes through the full math for that one role.

What an agency costs

Outsourced sales and appointment-setting agencies usually quote a monthly retainer, sometimes with a fee per meeting booked on top, and often with a minimum term of several months. I can't tell you the price, since it varies by agency and scope, so get at least three written quotes and ask the same questions of each.

Those questions: what's the monthly fee and the minimum term, what counts as a "meeting," who writes the emails, who answers the replies, whose email account do the messages go out from, and who owns the contact list when you leave. Multiply the monthly fee by the minimum term. That's the real commitment, not the monthly figure.

What a part-time rep costs

A part-time or freelance rep, paid hourly or on commission, sits between the two. Say you pay $30 an hour for 15 hours a week: $450 a week, about $1,950 a month. You get a human who can make calls and talk to customers, without the full payroll burden. The trade-offs are that the person knows your business less well, is split between clients, and leaves with what they learned.

Commission-only reps look cheap, but they tend to chase easy deals and skip hard ones, and you give up control of how your name is used. Whatever the structure, write down what a good week looks like before they start.

What software costs

Software prices are published, so you can check them. Rocketship, which is one product that finds buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, answers replies and books meetings, costs:

  • Launch: $24.99 a month ($20.83 a month billed yearly). One AI worker, 50 leads a month, 30 voice minutes. Answers the number you already have through call forwarding; a dedicated line is $5 a month more.
  • Frontier: $79 a month ($65 billed yearly). Two workers, 200 leads, 80 voice minutes, one automated follow-up campaign.
  • Mission Control: $149 a month ($124 billed yearly). Three workers, 500 leads, 150 voice minutes, a dedicated number included, three campaigns.

Even Mission Control is about 3 percent of the example hire above ($149 against $4,683). The comparison isn't one-to-one, since software doesn't do everything a person does, but it shows why the question is worth testing before you recruit. If you assemble the same work from separate tools instead, what a sales stack costs assembled shows where the total ends up.

Compare cost per meeting, not cost per month

Monthly price is the wrong yardstick, because the options produce different amounts. Divide each option's monthly cost by the meetings it books, using your own numbers. A placeholder example: an agency at a retainer of $3,000 a month that books 6 qualified meetings costs $500 a meeting. A part-time rep at $1,950 a month who books 4 costs about $488. A software plan at $79 a month that books 3 meetings of your own buyers costs about $26. The hire at $4,683 who books 10 costs about $468.

Those figures are invented to show the method. Yours will differ, and the interesting part is the second column: how many of those meetings turn into customers. A cheap meeting with the wrong person is worth less than an expensive one with the right buyer. Track meetings and closed customers for each option you try, and divide again.

The parts software cannot do

Be clear-eyed about what's left for a person:

  • Running a discovery call and reading the customer's real problem.
  • Pricing a complex or custom job.
  • Handling a negotiation, an objection that comes with emotion, or a long relationship with a large account.
  • Deciding that a customer isn't worth taking.

If your business sells large, complex deals, software gets you the meetings and a person closes them. If it sells simple services at a set price, software may handle most of the path to a booked job. Where you fall decides how much of a hire you actually need.

A simple way to decide

Answer these in order:

  1. Are you missing conversations (not enough people talking to you), or missing closes (plenty of conversations, too few yes)? If conversations, software and a list fix that cheaply. If closes, a salesperson or your own improvement fixes that, and software won't.
  2. How many hours a week do you spend on finding, writing, following up and scheduling? If it's more than about eight, that work is worth handing off.
  3. Can you write down your process on one page? If yes, anyone or anything can follow it. If no, don't hire yet.

Then run software for 30 days as the cheap experiment. You can check the answer to the first question in a month: if the calendar fills with conversations and you close few of them, you've learned a closer is what you need, at a cost of $24.99 to $149. If meetings never appear, the offer or the buyer is the problem, and a hire wouldn't have fixed it either. Do I need an SDR or can AI do outbound frames the same choice.

When a hire is right

Hire when the process works but you can't keep up: you have more good meetings than hours, your close rate is steady, and the extra revenue from one more person clearly exceeds the full cost you worked out above. At that point, a salesperson and the software work together, since the software keeps filling their calendar. If you want the plan for a handoff, see founder-led sales for small business owners. For other low-cost routes that cover the phone, see answering service alternatives for small business.

Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and every monthly plan starts with a 7-day free trial, card required. Answering your existing number is included; a dedicated line is $5 a month.