A sales role focused on pipeline generation rather than closing — typically responsible for prospecting, outbound outreach, and booking qualified meetings for account executives. The primary point of handoff between prospecting and the full sales cycle.
Also known as:
Sales Development Representative, BDR, Business Development Representative, outbound rep
An SDR (Sales Development Representative) is a sales role focused on pipeline generation rather than closing. The SDR's primary responsibilities are prospecting, outbound outreach, and qualifying inbound leads — with the goal of generating qualified meetings or opportunities for account executives to progress through the full sales cycle. The SDR function is the primary point of handoff between top-of-funnel activity and the revenue-generating sales motion.
In most B2B sales organisations above a certain size, the new business motion is split between two roles. The SDR generates and qualifies pipeline; the Account Executive (AE) runs the full sales cycle from qualified opportunity to close. This division exists because the skills, activities, and time horizons are different — prospecting and qualification require high volume, resilience, and precision; closing requires deep discovery, deal navigation, and relationship management. Not all teams split the function: in early-stage or smaller organisations, the AE (or founder) often carries both responsibilities.
The best SDRs combine discipline (consistently executing prospecting sequences, maintaining CRM hygiene, hitting activity targets) with genuine curiosity about prospects' businesses (which is what makes their outreach different from generic spam). The output metric is qualified meetings or opportunities generated, not just activity volume. SDRs who book meetings that AEs disqualify in the first call are not creating value — and a high meeting-to-opportunity conversion rate is a better indicator of SDR effectiveness than raw meeting count.
In many organisations, the SDR role is a development path into account executive positions. This creates an incentive alignment challenge: SDRs who are preparing to move into AE roles are motivated to book meetings that look good for promotion rather than meetings that are genuinely qualified. Revenue operations teams that track SDR-sourced pipeline quality over time — not just quantity — surface this problem before it compounds into a forecast reliability issue.
The SDR hire only creates value if there is a repeatable, scalable outbound motion to execute — defined ICP, clear messaging, an established sequence structure, and AEs with the capacity to run the meetings generated. Hiring SDRs before the outbound motion is defined and validated tends to produce expensive activity without proportional pipeline. The founder or first AE defining the motion themselves before handing it to an SDR is consistently a better sequence than hiring the SDR first.
When and how to hire an SDR is one of the most common questions we work through in Closing OS engagements. Our answer is consistent: hire the SDR only after the outbound motion has been defined and validated — by the founder or first AE — so there is a proven playbook to hand over. Founders who hire an SDR to figure out outbound on their behalf typically get expensive activity with no proven conversion pattern. The work required to build a scalable outbound motion (ICP definition, trigger signals, sequence design, call framework, qualification criteria) is the founder's or first revenue hire's work before it becomes the SDR's. In our sales capacity planning work, we model the SDR contribution net of ramp and pipeline-to-close cycle time — which usually means an SDR hired in Q1 is contributing meaningfully to AE pipeline by Q3, not Q1.
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