Sales Development Representative (SDR)

The pipeline machine. A Sales Development Representative — SDR — is a quota-carrying rep whose job is to book qualified meetings for Account Executives, not to close deals themselves. The role splits into two flavors: outbound SDRs who prospect cold accounts, and inbound SDRs (sometimes called Business Development Representatives, or BDRs, though the titles overlap inconsistently) who qualify and route inbound leads from marketing. Both report to a Sales Development Manager and feed AEs.

How SDR Performance Is Measured

SDRs don't carry a revenue quota. They carry a meetings quota, usually 12-20 qualified meetings per month for outbound and 25-40 for inbound. A qualified meeting is one that converts to a sales-accepted lead — the AE took the meeting and agreed it was worth their time. Meetings booked but rejected by the AE don't count, which is the single biggest source of SDR-AE friction in every org that exists.

Secondary metrics include opportunities created (meetings that became real SQLs), pipeline generation attributed to their sourced meetings, and activity volume — typically 60-120 cold calls and 80-150 personalized emails per day. Top-decile SDRs hit pipeline targets with 40% of the activity of bottom-quartile reps. The cold-call-volume target persists anyway because it's easy to measure.

A Worked SDR Compensation Example

Sara is an outbound SDR at a Series B SaaS company. Her base salary is $55,000. Her on-target earnings (OTE) are $85,000 — $30,000 in variable, paid quarterly. Her quota is 15 qualified meetings per month, or 45 per quarter.

She books 52 meetings in Q2. 47 are accepted by AEs as qualified. Her quota was 45.

Attainment = 47 ÷ 45 = 104%

She earns $7,500 base variable for hitting quota, plus a 2% accelerator on the 2 meetings over plan — roughly $300. Her Q2 commission is $7,800. Annualized, she's tracking toward $86,200 — slightly above OTE.

What the comp plan doesn't show: of those 47 qualified meetings, only 11 became opportunities in CRM, and only 3 are still in pipe 90 days later. Sara hit her number. Her AE didn't. This tension defines the role.

When Sales Teams Use SDRs

SDR teams exist in every B2B SaaS company above roughly $5M ARR. Below that, AEs prospect their own pipeline and the math doesn't work for a dedicated role. VP of Sales cares about SDR-to-AE ratios — the standard is 1 SDR per 2-3 AEs, though high-velocity transactional businesses run 1:1 and enterprise orgs sometimes run 1:5. RevOps tracks SDR efficiency by cost-per-meeting and cost-per-opportunity, which usually lands between $300 and $900 per meeting depending on segment.

Recruiters know the SDR seat is the dominant entry path into B2B sales careers. Roughly 40-60% of AEs at SaaS companies started as SDRs at the same company or a peer. Ramp time for SDRs is 30-90 days; promotion to AE typically happens at the 18-24 month mark for the top quartile and never for the bottom half.

Common SDR Anti-Patterns

The role is structurally set up to be gamed because the metric is meetings, not money.

The deeper misconception: SDR performance is not predictive of AE performance. Roughly half of the SDRs promoted to AE wash out within 18 months because the skills overlap less than the org chart suggests. Cold prospecting rewards volume and resilience. Closing rewards diagnosis and patience. Conflating the two is how companies promote their best SDR into their worst AE — and then wonder why the pipeline coverage ratio collapses two quarters later.