SDR (Sales Development Representative)

A Sales Development Representative (SDR) is the person responsible for the top of a B2B sales funnel. Their job is to find companies that look like a fit, start a conversation (usually through cold email, LinkedIn, and cold calls), qualify interest, and hand off booked meetings to an Account Executive. SDRs do not carry a closing quota. They carry a meetings quota, or a sourced-pipeline quota, depending on how the team is structured.

The role exists because closing deals and starting conversations require different skill sets and different attention spans. An AE on a six-figure deal cannot spend their morning sending 80 cold emails and re-sequencing 40 non-responders — the math does not work. An SDR, built around daily activity volume and a specialized outreach stack, can. Splitting the work into SDR then AE is one of the single biggest unlocks for an early-stage company moving from founder-led sales to a repeatable outbound motion.

Most SDR teams work from a defined ICP list, run multichannel sequences (email plus LinkedIn, often plus phone), and are measured on meetings booked, meetings held, and meetings that convert to opportunity. Good SDR teams also obsess over the quality of those meetings — a booked call with the wrong persona is worse than no call at all.

When the term matters

You will see “SDR” anywhere outbound is being built out as a function: B2B SaaS companies past the first $1M in ARR, agencies, consulting firms, and services businesses that need a predictable way to put qualified meetings on an AE’s calendar. If a team is hiring its first SDR, the infrastructure around them — the list, the domain setup, the sequences, the CRM — matters more than the individual. Without that, the role fails fast.

Related concepts

SDRs sit next to BDRs (often the same role, different name), feed meetings to the Account Executive, and run the cold outreach motion as their primary workflow.