Sales Development Rep (SDR)
Cold outreach, lead qualification, follow-ups, and pipeline building.
A digital sales development rep who runs personalized cold outreach, qualifies inbound and outbound leads against your ideal-customer-profile criteria, and books discovery calls — without closing deals or negotiating pricing, which stays with your team.
What they do day-to-day
- Conducts personalized cold outreach via email — sequences tuned to the prospect, not blast templates.
- Qualifies inbound and outbound leads against your ICP criteria, so your account executives only see prospects worth their time.
- Builds and maintains prospect lists from public-source research.
- Researches each prospect — company, role, recent news, pain points — before reaching out.
- Manages the sales pipeline in your CRM: every touchpoint logged, every stage current.
- Schedules discovery calls for your account executives at times the prospect actually said worked.
- Sends multi-step follow-up sequences that respect prior responses (no awkward 'just bumping this' after someone already replied).
- Tracks outreach metrics — open rates, reply rates, meetings booked — and surfaces what's working and what isn't.
- Enriches lead data with company size, revenue, and technology signals so reps walk into calls prepared.
- Identifies decision-makers at target companies (not just whoever first picked up the phone).
- Handles initial objections per your sales playbook; escalates anything beyond the playbook to a human.
- Generates a weekly pipeline report showing where the funnel is gaining and where it's stalling.
Common situations they handle
- You're a founder doing your own outbound and the volume is killing your other work.
- Your inbound leads sit because nobody has bandwidth to qualify them and route to the right rep.
- Your follow-up game is inconsistent — some leads get five touches, others go cold after one.
- Your CRM is a graveyard of half-logged touchpoints because data entry is the worst part of a rep's job.
- You're scaling outreach and need a single role to enrich, sequence, and report on activity without hiring a full BDR.
Best for
- B2B businesses with a defined ICP and a sales motion that depends on outbound.
- Founder-led sales teams scaling to their first dedicated SDR seat.
- SaaS, professional services, agencies, and consulting firms.
- Teams already on a CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive) who need fuller pipeline coverage without adding headcount.
Channels they operate on
- Email — outreach sequences via integrated mail tooling.
- Email finder — prospect email discovery from public-source research.
- LinkedIn — prospect research and connection requests.
- Web search — prospect research, recent-news triggers, ICP enrichment.
- CRM — pipeline management and lead tracking.
- Knowledge base — your ICP definition, sales playbook, and objection-handling library.
What they don't do
- Doesn't close deals or negotiate pricing — qualifies and hands off to your account executive.
- Doesn't make discount decisions.
- Doesn't access customer billing or financial data.
- Doesn't run customer support or post-sale ticket handling.
- Doesn't manage marketing strategy — uses your marketing content, doesn't author it.
- Doesn't manage your calendar beyond scheduling sales calls.
- Doesn't write code, do bookkeeping, run social media, or handle compliance work.
Sample interactions
Personalized cold-outbound first touch
Agent → Prospect (email): «Subject: Question about [Company]'s [observed signal] — Hey [First], saw [specific recent thing — funding round / product launch / hire]. Most teams who hit that point start running into [specific pain]. Curious how you're handling [pain] today — open to a 15-min chat next week if it'd be useful?»
Qualifying an inbound lead before booking a meeting
Agent → Inbound lead (email reply): «Thanks for reaching out — to make sure we use your time well, two quick questions: how many [users / accounts / customers] are you working with today, and what's the trigger that brought you to us this week? I'll line up the right person on our side based on your answer.»
Objection handled per playbook, escalation to AE when out of scope
Prospect: «What's the price?» — Agent: «Pricing depends on [scope variable] — happy to get you a real number, but I want to put you in front of [AE name], who runs the numbers based on what you actually need. Got 15 min Tuesday or Wednesday?»
Sources cited in this profile
4 canonical sources backing every claim above. Visible to internal review on request.