A Sales Development Representative (SDR) is a sales professional focused on generating and qualifying new leads for a business through prospecting and outreach. As the first point of contact, they identify and educate potential customers, creating a pipeline of qualified opportunities before handing them off to an account executive or another closing role.
SDRs are the engine of the sales pipeline, responsible for identifying and nurturing potential customers. They act as the initial bridge between the company and its future clients, ensuring the sales team engages only with well-vetted, high-potential leads.
To excel as an SDR, a unique blend of hard and soft skills is essential. These professionals must be adept researchers and compelling communicators to consistently generate high-quality leads. Success hinges on their ability to connect with prospects while navigating the technical aspects of sales.
While the titles are often used interchangeably, SDRs and BDRs can have distinct roles focused on different parts of the lead generation process.
The SDR role is a common entry point into a sales career. Successful SDRs often advance to become Account Executives, where they close deals. Other growth paths include moving into sales management, customer success, or even marketing, making it a versatile foundation for professional development.
SDRs leverage a robust tech stack to streamline prospecting and engage potential customers effectively.
How is an SDR's performance typically measured?
Performance is primarily measured by the number of qualified opportunities or meetings booked for account executives. Key metrics often include call volume, email response rates, and conversion rates from lead to opportunity, ensuring a focus on quality over quantity.
Is the SDR role just about cold calling?
No, it's much more. While cold calling is a component, modern SDRs use a multi-channel approach, including personalized emails and social media engagement, to connect with prospects and build relationships before the first call.
What is a typical compensation structure for an SDR?
SDR compensation is usually a mix of a base salary and a variable component like a commission or bonus. This variable pay is tied to achieving specific targets, such as the number of qualified meetings set or opportunities generated.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost a business spends to gain a new customer. It includes all sales and marketing expenses.
Intent leads are prospects who show buying signals through their online actions, indicating they're actively looking to make a purchase.
Sales development is the process of identifying and qualifying potential customers to create a pipeline of sales-ready leads for closers.
Rollback procedures are a set of steps to restore a system to a previous, stable version after a failed update, ensuring minimal disruption.
A messaging strategy defines what your brand says, how it says it, and where it says it to connect effectively with your target audience.
Predictive lead generation uses data and AI to find prospects most likely to buy, helping teams focus their efforts on high-value leads.
A marketing attribution model is a framework for assigning credit to the marketing touchpoints that lead a customer to convert.
Feature flags let you remotely control features in your app without new code. This enables safe testing, gradual rollouts, and quick rollbacks.
Account-Based Selling is a B2B strategy where sales and marketing treat high-value accounts as markets of one, using personalized outreach.
Pipeline coverage is a key sales metric. It's the ratio of your total open pipeline value to your sales quota for a specific period.
Content Rights Management involves controlling the use and distribution of copyrighted digital media to protect intellectual property.
Cold emailing is sending unsolicited emails to potential customers you haven't contacted before, aiming to start a business conversation.
Learn about bounce rate, including understanding bounce rate implications, key factors affecting bounce rate, & reducing your bounce rate effectively.
A System of Record (SoR) is the authoritative data source for a specific type of data. It acts as the single source of truth for an organization.
Learn about behavioral analytics, including implementing behavioral analytics successfully, & key metrics in behavioral analytics.
A sales coach is a mentor who trains and guides sales reps to enhance their skills, boost performance, and ultimately close more deals effectively.
CRM integration connects your CRM software with other tools, creating a unified system for all your customer data and business processes.
A Salesforce Administrator is a certified professional who manages and customizes the Salesforce platform to meet a company's specific business needs.
Website visitor tracking collects and analyzes data on user behavior to understand their journey and improve the overall user experience.
Learn about B2B intent data providers, including evaluating intent data quality, leveraging intent data for growth, & B2B intent data: key providers comparison.
Customer relationship marketing is a strategy for building lasting connections with customers to foster long-term loyalty and engagement.
Learn about brag book, including crafting your outstanding brag book, essential components of a brag book, & brag book vs. resume: unveiling the differences.
Firmographics are descriptive attributes of organizations, used to segment companies by characteristics like industry, size, and location.
Data appending is the process of adding new data fields to your existing database records to enrich and complete your information.
A User Interface (UI) is the point where humans and computers interact. It encompasses all visual elements like screens, icons, and buttons.
End of Day (EOD) refers to the close of business hours. It's a common deadline for tasks and reports to be completed before the workday ends.
Logo retention is a key B2B metric that measures a company's ability to retain its customers, or 'logos,' over a specific period.
A product champion is an internal evangelist who drives a product's adoption and success by ensuring it solves real problems for their team.
Programmatic display campaigns use automation to buy and sell digital ad space in real-time, targeting specific audiences across the web.
An Operational CRM is a system that automates and improves customer-facing business processes like sales, marketing, and customer service.
Learn about bottom of the funnel, including maximizing conversions at the funnel's end, & strategies for nurturing bottom-funnel leads.
Voice broadcasting is an automated system that delivers a pre-recorded voice message to a large list of phone numbers simultaneously.
The FAB technique is a sales framework connecting product features to advantages and then to the specific benefits for the customer.
Sales automation uses software to streamline and automate repetitive, manual sales tasks, freeing up reps to focus on selling.
Chatbots are AI-powered programs that simulate human conversation. They interact with users via text or voice, typically for customer support.
The marketing mix is the set of marketing tools a company uses to sell products, defined by the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
Customer retention refers to the strategies and activities a company uses to prevent customer churn and encourage them to continue buying.
Event marketing is a strategy where brands engage directly with target audiences through live events like trade shows, conferences, or webinars.
Lead generation software helps businesses automate finding and capturing potential customers' contact information to build sales pipelines.
An enterprise is a large-scale organization, often a corporation, defined by its complex structure and substantial number of employees.
HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform with tools for marketing, sales, and service, all aimed at helping businesses grow.
A marketing play is a repeatable tactic used to achieve a specific marketing goal, like generating leads or driving engagement.
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a software application that manages your entire hiring and recruitment process from a single dashboard.
Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a business strategy where the product itself drives user acquisition, conversion, and expansion.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a focused B2B strategy where marketing and sales collaborate to target and convert high-value accounts.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is the percentage of recurring revenue kept from existing customers, including upsells, downgrades, and churn.
Video selling uses personalized video messages to engage prospects, build rapport, and guide them through the sales funnel to close more deals.
Intent-based leads are potential customers whose online actions—like searches or content engagement—signal a clear interest in buying a solution.
Sales operations analytics is the practice of analyzing sales data to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire sales process.
SFDC stands for Salesforce Dot Com, a popular cloud-based CRM platform that helps companies manage their customer interactions and data.
A Letter of Intent (LOI) is a document declaring the preliminary commitment of one party to do business with another, outlining the chief terms.
Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) is the portion of the market your business can realistically serve with its current products and sales channels.
Net new business is revenue from customers who have never purchased from your company before. It’s a crucial indicator of sustainable growth.
Closed Lost is a sales term for a deal that didn't go through. The prospect decided not to buy, or the sales team disqualified them.
A sandbox is an isolated testing environment where new or untrusted code can be run safely without affecting the host device or network.
Event tracking is the method of collecting data on specific user actions, or 'events,' on a website or app, such as clicks or downloads.
A cold email is an initial outreach sent to a potential customer with whom you've had no prior contact, aiming to introduce your business.
Ramp-up time is the period a new hire takes to get fully up to speed and become a productive member of your go-to-market team.
Objection handling in sales is the process of responding to a prospect's concerns about a product or service to move the deal forward.
Microservices is an architecture where apps are built as a collection of small, independent services that communicate with each other over APIs.
AI data enrichment uses artificial intelligence to automatically enhance and update raw data, making it more complete, accurate, and valuable.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a tool that centralizes customer data to help manage interactions and nurture relationships.
Lead enrichment adds third-party data to your raw lead lists, creating fuller prospect profiles for more effective and personalized outreach.
Buyer’s remorse is the sense of regret or anxiety that can arise after making a purchase, often questioning if it was the right decision.
Outbound sales is when reps proactively contact potential customers through cold calls or emails to generate leads and build a sales pipeline.
Hadoop is an open-source framework designed for the distributed storage and processing of extremely large data sets across clusters of computers.
The Dark Funnel describes customer buying activities that are untrackable by companies, such as private chats and word-of-mouth referrals.
Expansion revenue is the extra money a business makes from its current customers via upgrades, new products, or additional services.
Sales metrics are quantifiable data points that track and measure a sales team's performance against specific goals and objectives.
Technographics is data that outlines a company’s technology stack, helping B2B teams identify prospects based on the software and hardware they use.
Buying criteria are the specific requirements and standards a customer uses to evaluate products or services before making a decision.
An Account Executive (AE) is a sales professional responsible for closing new business deals and managing existing client relationships to drive revenue.
A sales lead is a potential customer—an individual or organization that has shown interest in your company's products or services.
Cross-selling is a sales tactic of encouraging customers to purchase products or services that are related to what they're already buying.
A lead generation funnel is a systematic process that guides potential customers from initial awareness of your brand to becoming qualified leads.
Learn about B2B marketing attribution, including challenges in B2B marketing attribution, & key metrics for effective attribution.
Sales Engineers blend deep technical knowledge with sales acumen, demonstrating a product's value and solving customer problems to drive revenue.
Accounts Payable (AP) is the money a company owes its suppliers for goods or services bought on credit. It's listed as a current liability.
A RESTful API is a web service interface that uses HTTP requests to access and use data, adhering to the constraints of REST architecture.
Trigger marketing uses customer actions or events to automatically send highly relevant, personalized messages at the perfect moment.
Load testing is a type of performance testing that determines how a system behaves under both normal and anticipated peak load conditions.
Lead generation is the process of identifying and cultivating potential customers for a business's products or services.
Mid-market companies are businesses larger than small businesses but smaller than large enterprises, often defined by revenue or employee size.
“No Spam” is a commitment to sending only relevant, solicited messages. It means avoiding bulk, unwanted emails to respect the recipient's inbox.
Learn about buyer intent data, including sourcing and interpreting buyer intent data, & key metrics in buyer intent analysis.
A Target Account List (TAL) is a focused list of high-value companies that a business specifically aims to convert into customers.
Revenue forecasting is the process of estimating a company's future revenue, using historical data and market trends to guide strategic planning.
An email cadence is a scheduled sequence of emails sent to prospects over a specific period to nurture leads and drive engagement.
An elevator pitch is a short, memorable summary of what you do, designed to be delivered in the time it takes to ride an elevator.
CRM enrichment is the process of adding third-party data to your existing customer profiles to make them more complete and accurate.
Learn about B2B, including what is it, its key elements, the benefits of B2B partnerships, the differences between B2B and B2C, and strategies for effective marketing.
Customer buying signals are the actions, behaviors, or statements a prospect makes that indicate they are moving towards a purchase decision.
A sales dashboard is a visual tool that centralizes and displays key sales data, metrics, and KPIs to help teams track performance and goals.
A lead list is a curated database of potential customers (leads) with contact information and other key data for sales and marketing outreach.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) software helps teams coordinate personalized marketing and sales efforts to land high-value customer accounts.
A consumer is an individual or entity that buys products or services for personal use, not for resale. They are the final user in a supply chain.
"Smile and dial" is a high-volume sales tactic where reps make numerous cold calls from a list, often with little to no prior research.
Contact data is the set of details, like names, emails, and phone numbers, used to get in touch with a person or business for outreach.
Lookalike audiences are groups of potential customers who share similar characteristics and behaviors with your existing, high-value customers.
User interaction is any action a user takes within a digital interface, like clicking a button, scrolling a page, or filling out a form.