SDR vs AE and How the Two Roles Split One Sales Process

An SDR (sales development representative) finds the right people, qualifies them and books the first meeting. An AE (account executive) takes that meeting and owns everything after it: discovery, the proposal, the negotiation and the signature.

In funnel terms, the SDR is judged on the rows from contacted to booked. The AE is judged on the rows from showed to closed. The stretch between booked and showed belongs to both of them.

That shared stretch is where deals get lost. One person earns the meeting and another earns the signature. Most teams lose money by hiring for the first job and grading it on the second.

What is the difference between an SDR and an AE?

The SDR creates the meeting. The AE turns the meeting into revenue.

Most rows are obvious. The last one is where teams argue.

When nobody decides who owns a record the morning after a meeting is booked, the SDR assumes the AE has it. The AE assumes the SDR is still confirming. The prospect hears from nobody and forgets why they said yes.

Use one rule: the SDR stays responsible until the prospect joins the call, and the AE owns the record from the first minute of the meeting. Write that rule down before you hire anyone.

What do government job data say about prospecting and closing?

US government job data do not recognize the split. Neither SDR nor AE appears as an occupation.

O*NET, the US Department of Labor's occupation database, lists prospecting and closing as tasks of one job. For services sales representatives, the task list includes "identify prospective customers" and "negotiate prices or terms of sales or service agreements" (O*NET 41-3091.00).

The same pairing appears for technical sales reps (O*NET 41-4011.00). For non-technical wholesale and manufacturing reps, one task covers finding prospects through directories and client leads, and another covers demonstrating products and soliciting orders. The titles reported there include "Inside Salesperson" and "Outside Sales Representative" (O*NET 41-4012.00).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics comes closest to an official SDR and AE parallel. Inside reps work mostly from offices and are often expected to win new clients by cold-calling. Outside reps spend most of their time on the road with existing clients and possible buyers (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook).

The same BLS page still describes one rep who makes the first contact, introduces the product and gets the final agreement. So the split is a design choice your company makes. Split the job only when two people bring in more money than one person doing both.

Where does the SDR hand off to the AE in a real campaign?

Below is one 30-day campaign run from one LinkedIn account, with each row marked by the role that owns it.

Read it as two jobs stacked on top of each other. The SDR side turned a list into meetings, roughly one booked meeting for every 75 people contacted. The AE side turned the people who showed up into signed deals.

In between, a quarter of the booked meetings never happened. That gap is the handoff zone. The SDR controls how the meeting was sold and confirmed. The AE controls how well the call is prepared. Both can lose the meeting, so measure both on it.

Every number in that table came from LinkedIn messages and the meetings they booked. Nobody cold called anyone.

What should happen on the day a meeting is booked?

1. Write the CRM record before the call. I tell every client to use a CRM, so no lead gets dropped, and I do not care which one.
2. Note why the prospect agreed. Paste the line they replied to and the message number that got the reply.
3. Record the prospect's own next step. Write down what they said they need before they can decide.
4. List who else signs. If the prospect mentioned a finance director or a board, the AE needs that before the meeting.
5. Confirm the time in the same thread. A reply that says "yes, Tuesday works" beats a calendar invite nobody opened.
6. Have someone own the replies. My rule is one named inbox manager on every reply, so nothing gets missed.
7. Agree who rebooks a no-show. In most teams it should be the SDR, because the SDR holds the conversation.

Here is a made-up example of the note an AE should read before the call:

If the AE can open the call by repeating the prospect's own reason back to them, the handoff worked.

Why can't more booked calls fix a weak close rate?

Closing is the AE's row, and the SDR cannot move it.

In the table above, 3 of the 12 people who showed up signed, or 25%. That is the AE's number, from one 30-day campaign and a small sample, so read it as an illustration. In a second campaign, a financial services client booked 26 calls in its first 7 days and signed 4 contracts.

That is about 15% of calls closed, in a very short window. The two ratios use different bases: the first counts only people who showed, the second counts every call. More of these windows are compared in meeting-to-close rates from real campaign windows.

Expect your close rate to fall once more calls arrive. One likely reason: your current meetings come from the warmest prospects, and new volume brings colder ones who are comparing you with other suppliers.

So booking a hundred more calls to escape a sales problem is the fastest way I know to burn a quarter. For the numbers that show which row is leaking, see the SDR metrics worth tracking.

A founder counts the contracts signed. I count the prospects who sat through a call and still walked away. To shrink that second number, the AE has to learn the pitfalls of the call, how this buyer decides, and where selling ends and closing starts.

Selling is making the case: the problem is real and your offer fits it. Closing is getting a decision: the terms, the date, the people who sign. A call can go well and still end with "send me something" instead of a dated next step on the calendar.

On my team's campaigns that split is written into the work: we fill the calendars, and the client's own people run the meetings and close them.

Decision rule: if your AE closes a smaller share of meetings this quarter than last, stop adding meetings. Listen to the last ten call recordings and fix what happens after "thanks for joining" first.

How much do SDRs and AEs earn?

The SDR figure is published. The AE figure is not, at least in official data.

The SDR line comes from ZipRecruiter's SDR salary page, which builds its numbers from postings by employers plus outside data sources. It does not say how much of that figure is variable pay.

The BLS medians cover the whole occupation, prospecting and closing together. BLS also notes that most employers pay salary plus commission or salary plus bonus, which is the same base-plus-variable shape both SDR and AE plans use.

Do not use the $104,920 technical median as "AE pay". It covers every rep selling technical products, including the ones who do their own prospecting. Any AE salary you read online, like the ZipRecruiter SDR figure above, is a private benchmark with its own sample and its own definition of the job.

Salary is only part of what an SDR seat costs. The months before a new hire books at full speed matter as much, and the SDR ramp time and tenure data shows what to plan for.

Decision rule: price an SDR seat against your AE's close rate as well as the SDR's salary. A cheap SDR feeding an AE who closes few meetings is the expensive option.

Are hunters and closers really different people?

Partly. The preference is real, but it moves with pay and expectations.

DeCarlo and Lam published research in 2016 (Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, vol. 44) on B2B salespeople who hunt for new customers versus farm existing ones (Springer). Reps with a promotion focus, driven by gains, leaned toward hunting. Reps with a prevention focus, driven by avoiding losses, leaned toward farming.

Two more findings matter for team design. Reps strong at both hunting and farming earned higher profits when they were also customer oriented. And the extent to which a pay plan rewards customer acquisition, together with how much success a rep expects from hunting, could change the direction of the link between personality and orientation.

A University of Alabama at Birmingham release on the work describes a final sample of 357 salespeople at one large B2B firm (ScienceDaily). Reps high in both orientations showed about a 3% improvement in sales profitability. The author's own caveat: one company, one industry.

Keep two limits in mind. Hunting versus farming means new customers versus existing ones, so it maps only loosely onto SDR versus AE. An AE hunts inside every new deal too. And the data is about a decade old.

What it does support is the pay question. The pay plan itself can shift which way a rep leans. That points toward paying SDRs on booked and shown meetings, the acquisition work they control, rather than on deals the AE closes. The studies did not test SDR pay plans, so treat it as a lead, not proof. If a good booker suddenly stops booking, check the pay plan first.

Should you run SDRs and AEs or one full-cycle rep?

Choose by who can close the meetings you book today.

Full disclosure: the third row describes the kind of work my team does, so weigh my view accordingly. On price: my team's fee starts at USD 3,000 a month (roughly EUR 2,500) and rises past USD 10,000 when a client needs more channels or markets. Tools, sending domains and data are bought separately.

Then check these rules:

1. Split only when someone already closes reliably. If nobody does, an SDR produces meetings that die in the bottom half of the funnel table.
2. Protect the closer's time. If the closer has no time to take the calls, booking more meetings will not help. They pile up, get rescheduled and go cold.
3. Divide territory before the second rep starts. Give every account one owner, so that no two people ever contact the same leads. With SDRs and AEs, map each SDR's accounts to exactly one AE.
4. Weigh deal size honestly. If your deals run $10,000 and up, often six or seven figures, one extra close a quarter pays for a lot of handoff discipline. Set your own line from your own deal size.
5. Stay full-cycle while you are still learning who buys. A split team runs a known process faster, but it cannot discover that process for you.

Deciding between an SDR, an AE or one person doing both? Book a call and tell me your deal size and who closes today. I will say which split I would try.