Employing a New Business Manager (or SDR) in London will need base salary of £40,000 and a bonus of c. £10,000 according to Glassdoor. This results in a total gross salary of £50,000. In addition to National Insurance Contributions (NICs), employers are required to make pension contributions under the UK’s auto-enrolment scheme.
Pension Contributions:
- Employer’s Minimum Contribution: 3% of the employee’s qualifying earnings.
- Qualifying Earnings: For the 2025/26 tax year, these are earnings between £6,240 and £50,270.
Calculation:
- Qualifying Earnings: £50,000 (total gross salary) – £6,240 = £43,760.
- Employer’s Contribution: 3% of £43,760 = £1,312.80.
Total Employer Cost:
- Gross Salary: £50,000.
- Employer’s NICs: £6,750.
- Employer’s Pension Contribution: £1,312.80.
- Total Cost: £58,062.80.
On top of this there are the other costs to weigh up, such as …
- Data (you’ll need something like ALF or WinMo, don’t kid yourself; you WILL): £10,000
- Email & Mobile Number Plugin: £1,200
- Call Charges: £600
- Other: £200
- Total Cost: £12,000
So the cost of employing a BDM with twelve month’s experience will be c. £70,000. The average tenure of a BDM in the UK is just twelve months (!) so you’ll need to factor in recruitments costs as well which range from 15% to 30% so let’s settle on 20%.
This brings the total cost up to a whopping £84,000 per year.
From speaking with BDMs who are looking to switch jobs, we have been able to ascertain that, on average, they spend two hours per day actively prospecting, with the remainder of their time spent researching, in meetings, training, reading, posting on LinkedIn and a myriad of other activities they either prefer to do or they get dragged into doing “to help out”.
There are 260 working days in a year, minus bank holidays (eight) and annual leave (let’s say 23), that leaves 229. Now let’s look at sickness. Your average BDM with one years experience is likely to be Gen Z and they, on average, just over 14 days sick per year. Let’s add another two days off for company meetings and away days. This leaves 213 days.
213 days at 2 hours per day is 426 hours per year or 35 hours per month.
For £84,000 – that works out at £7,000 per month for 35 hours prospecting.
At Manifest we have various standard packages that you can see. For this you don’t get a BDM is one year’s experience. You get a Business Development Lead with an average of ten year’s experience at Manifest prior to which they have served an average of five years in an agency. You also get access to our senior management team who between them have more than fifty years experience.
