Why Oper’s CEO Eliminated SDRs and What It Means for Enterprise SaaS

Why Oper’s CEO Eliminated SDRs and What It Means for Enterprise SaaS

The SDR-to-AE handoff is gospel in B2B SaaS. Build a team of junior reps to cold call prospects, qualify leads, and pass them to account executives who close deals. It’s in every sales playbook, every VC deck, every scaling guide.

Geert Van Kerckhoven read those playbooks and did the opposite. When building Oper, a mortgage tech platform that now serves over a dozen lenders across continental Europe, he eliminated SDRs entirely from the sales motion.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Geert Van Kerckhoven, CEO and Co-Founder of Oper, explained why this wasn’t just a budget decision—it was a strategic bet on what actually works when selling complex enterprise software to sophisticated buyers.

The Breaking Point

The decision came from observing what wasn’t working. “I felt that having really junior people just cold calling everybody every day really didn’t generate any meaningful relationships,” Geert says.

This wasn’t theory. It was pattern recognition from watching SDR teams at other banking software vendors. In mortgage tech sales, cold outreach from junior reps wasn’t just ineffective—it was damaging.

Consider the buyer’s perspective: You’re evaluating technology to digitize your entire mortgage process. An SDR with six months of experience cold calls you with a script. What are the odds that conversation generates trust?

“And also I think you can automate so much today that today I think full stack is just a much wiser choice, especially in the segment we are targeting and the ticket size that we have with clients,” Geert explains.

The Full-Stack Alternative

Instead of the traditional SDR-to-AE handoff, Oper built their sales motion around experienced full-stack account executives who “cover a certain region, build up the relationships and just work on accounts and make sure that when in that region, something’s cooking up that we can be there to support.”

The difference is profound. A full-stack AE owns the entire relationship from first contact to closed deal to expansion. They’re building relationships that span months or years, not optimizing for meetings booked this week.

This matters because timing is unpredictable in enterprise sales. When budget opens up next quarter, or when a current vendor fumbles an implementation, you want someone who already understands the business deeply. SDRs can’t do that—they’re measured on activity metrics and move on after handoff.

The Automation Factor

Geert’s point about automation deserves unpacking. The traditional argument for SDRs is that they handle high-volume work that would waste expensive AE time.

But in specialized markets like European mortgage technology, your total addressable market might be hundreds of customers, not tens of thousands. You don’t need volume—you need depth.

Automation tools now handle much of what junior SDRs used to do: initial outreach, basic qualification, meeting scheduling. What they can’t handle is the substantive first conversation that determines whether you’re seen as a credible partner or just another vendor.

That conversation needs someone who actually understands the business. You can’t script it. You can’t teach it in two weeks of onboarding.

When SDRs Make Sense (And When They Don’t)

Oper’s decision isn’t universally applicable. The SDR model works well for:

• High-volume, lower-touch sales motions
• Product-led growth companies needing to qualify inbound leads
• Markets where buyers expect and respond to cold outreach
• Early-stage companies where founder-led sales isn’t scaling fast enough

But it breaks down when:

• Deal sizes justify expensive, experienced talent from first contact
• Buyers are sophisticated and expect deep product knowledge immediately
• Your market is specialized and relationship-driven
• The sales cycle is long enough that continuity matters more than efficiency

Oper fits squarely in the second category. When you’re selling to banks that will conduct six-month evaluations involving legal reviews, technical assessments, and credit committee approvals, the SDR-to-AE handoff introduces a discontinuity that hurts more than it helps.

The Founder-Led Foundation

Eliminating SDRs only works if you’ve built a strong foundation first. For Oper, that foundation includes deep founder involvement in sales—something Geert discovered while researching successful enterprise companies in banking technology.

“When I started studying a lot of companies that are at the 5100 million ARR in our space, I always saw that founders were still heavily involved in sales,” Geert explains. Those founders “still knew all the big clients, was involved in all the big sales.”

This creates a virtuous cycle. Founders stay close to customers, understanding their problems deeply. That knowledge flows to full-stack AEs, who operate more like founder extensions than traditional sales reps. The entire motion prioritizes relationships and expertise over activity metrics.

The Content Multiplier

Without SDRs generating meeting volume, Oper needed another way to fill the pipeline. Their answer: content marketing that demonstrates genuine expertise.

“We write a lot of reports, we write a lot of content, we go to a lot of conferences, we engage, we bring together our clients and our prospects. So we build communities,” Geert explains. The approach generates “crazy download numbers” for their reports.

This isn’t blog posts optimized for “best mortgage software” keywords. It’s substantive analysis of how to digitize mortgage processes across European markets—the kind of content that decision-makers at banks actually read and share internally.

When a full-stack AE reaches out to a prospect who’s already downloaded three Oper reports and attended their conference sessions, that first conversation is fundamentally different. The prospect already believes Oper knows their stuff.

The Implication for Enterprise SaaS

Oper’s no-SDR model won’t work for everyone. But it reveals an important principle: sales structure should match your market, not follow a generic playbook.

If you’re selling complex software to sophisticated buyers in specialized markets, consider whether junior reps cold-calling is helping or hurting. If your deal sizes justify it, experienced full-stack AEs who build deep relationships might generate better returns than a high-volume SDR motion.

The uncomfortable truth is that eliminating SDRs means accepting lower pipeline volume in exchange for higher conversion rates and stronger customer relationships. Not every founder is willing to make that trade. But for Oper, selling mortgage technology to European banks, it’s been the right bet.