Also called: SDR, Sales Development Rep
TL;DR
A sales rep responsible for outbound prospecting and inbound qualification, handing qualified opportunities to Account Executives.
SDRs sit at the top of the sales funnel. They prospect target accounts, run cold outreach, qualify inbound leads, book discovery calls, and feed pipeline to AEs. The role is metrics-heavy: activities per day, meetings booked, and qualified opportunities created.
SDR org design (volume vs account-based, dialing vs writing, paired vs pooled) is a strategic choice driven by ICP and ACV. High-ACV enterprise teams favor account-based; SMB-heavy motions favor volume.
A 4-person SDR team books 240 qualified meetings in Q3 (60 each, ~1 per business day) at $42k base + $18k OTE per rep. Pipeline created: $4.8M; cost per qualified meeting ~$1,000, within healthy SaaS benchmarks.
Sales-led decks reference SDR-to-AE ratios when explaining the GTM cost structure.
An outbound-focused sales rep who creates pipeline by prospecting target accounts, often used interchangeably with SDR.
The sales rep who owns the deal cycle from qualified opportunity to signed contract, carrying revenue quota.
The set of qualified opportunities currently moving through the sales cycle, segmented by stage and weighted by probability.
The percentage of qualified sales opportunities that result in closed-won deals over a given period.
A composite measure of how quickly a sales team converts pipeline into closed revenue, derived from deals × win rate × ACV ÷ cycle length.
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