Also called: SDR
A sales development representative (SDR) is the rep who qualifies inbound or outbound leads and books the first meeting for an account executive, without usually owning the deal once it's past that handoff.
The SDR seat exists to protect an account executive's time: qualify a lead or a signal before it reaches someone who's supposed to be running a full sales cycle, not chasing dead ends. The job splits roughly into two halves, working inbound leads that already raised a hand, and running outbound against a target list, though plenty of companies collapse both into one seat rather than splitting them (see the BDR entry for where that split, when it exists, tends to fall).
A lot of what used to fill an SDR's day, building lists by hand, checking a prospect's tech stack one tab at a time, cross-referencing a spreadsheet to see who already got emailed, is exactly the manual research work an enrichment waterfall and a signal system are built to remove. When that layer is running, an SDR's queue shows up pre-qualified: an account that already fits the ICP, a contact whose email is already verified, a trigger already attached explaining why now. The job narrows toward the part software can't do, reading a reply, running a real qualifying conversation, deciding whether a lead is actually worth an AE's calendar.
That's a different SDR than the one measured purely on dial count or email volume. Judgment on what to pass along matters more than throughput once the manual research grunt work is handled elsewhere.
A good gut check for whether an SDR seat is running on an engineered motion or a manual one: does the rep spend most of a day finding people to contact, or talking to people already identified as worth contacting? The first is a research bottleneck with a person doing the work software should be doing. The second is what the role actually pays for.
SDR performance gets reduced to activity volume, calls dialed, emails sent, when the actual value of the seat is qualification judgment: knowing which lead is worth an AE's time and which one isn't. Confusing the role with an "AI SDR" tool is a separate mix-up. Those tools automate the surrounding research and drafting work; they don't replace the judgment call a human SDR makes on a live conversation.
Tell us how your motion runs today. We'll show you what we'd engineer.
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