What Is an SDR? Role, Day, Pay and When to Hire One

What is an SDR, in plain words?

An SDR, or sales development representative, is the person who finds potential B2B buyers, starts a conversation with them and books a meeting for the colleague who closes. Along the way the SDR also qualifies each prospect, checking whether they fit. The closer is usually an account executive (AE), who runs the sales call, the proposal and the negotiation.

The SDR owns the front of the pipeline and stops at the meeting. In most B2B teams the job comes in two versions:

• Inbound SDR: works people who already raised a hand, such as a demo request or a filled-in form, and qualifies them before they go cold.
• Outbound SDR: opens the conversation with people who never asked, using a targeted list, a sequence of messages and follow-ups.

Getting a meeting and winning a contract take different skills and a different tempo, and usually different people. When founders ask me where the line sits, I give them one sentence: "Booking sales calls and closing sales are two different things."

Most SDR job ads assume a phone headset, the job described in what a cold caller is. The same function can run through email and LinkedIn instead, and that changes how the seat works.

What does an SDR actually do day to day?

An SDR's day is made of counts: contacts researched, first messages sent, follow-ups due, replies answered, meetings booked.

The best-known benchmark comes from The Bridge Group's 2016 study of 355 companies. The average SDR in it made 46 dials and had 5.8 quality conversations per day, with 8.2 attempts per prospect (For Entrepreneurs, summarizing the Bridge Group report).

These are phone counts from an outside source, and they are ten years old. They are still useful for one thing: they show that dozens of attempts buy a handful of real conversations. SDR metrics worth tracking defines each one in full.

The Bridge Group now runs the 10th edition of that research, with 351 B2B companies and data collected in 2025. It treats ADR, BDR and SDR teams as one sales development group (The Bridge Group, sales development metrics).

For an outbound SDR, a working day usually runs in this order:

1. Check the day's new contacts for fit and a verified address.
2. Send first touches to the new names.
3. Send every follow-up that falls due today.
4. Answer replies, the most valuable hour of the day.
5. Write handoff notes for each booked meeting so the closer walks in prepared.
6. Log everything in the CRM.

A busy day proves nothing. Look at what the seat left in the pipeline at the end of the month.

Below is a real 30-day campaign my team ran on 5 LinkedIn profiles plus email.

Each step down is a filter, and every filter is normal. Most replies are a no, a "later" or a question. A conversation turns into a meeting only when there is a reason to meet. A few booked people do not show.

That shape is why I care about the order more than the dial count. No conversation, no call. No call, no client.

It also decides how I set targets. I set the goal for an SDR seat as conversations started, 50+ a month, before any target for calls booked. A rep chasing calls pitches too early. A rep chasing conversations asks, listens and books the meeting when it is relevant.

How is an SDR different from a BDR, an AE and an inside sales rep?

The titles overlap, so compare them by what each person owns.

SDR vs BDR. Companies use these two titles differently. Some companies put SDRs on inbound leads and BDRs on outbound prospecting, others do the opposite, and many treat the titles as interchangeable. Do not hire on the title. Read the job description and look at what the person is measured on.

Inside sales in official data. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics describes inside sales reps as working mostly in offices and often finding new clients by cold-calling. It defines cold-calling as calling potential customers who are not expecting to be contacted (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook).

O*NET, the Labor Department's occupation database, lists "Inside Salesperson" as a title within an occupation whose reps contact customers and solicit orders (O*NET 41-4012.00). Soliciting orders is selling, so the official inside sales role is a closing role. The SDR title does not appear in either source.

The practical rule: if the person signs the deal, they are not an SDR.

What do SDRs get paid?

The cleanest SDR-specific pay data I can point to comes from RepVue. It aggregates verified, anonymous salary reports submitted over the past 12 months in the US and does not state the sample size for this role (RepVue, SDR salaries).

OTE means on-target earnings: what the rep takes home if they hit quota. The $28,000 gap between median base and median OTE is the part of the pay that depends on results.

BLS says its OEWS wage estimates cover wages and salaries only and leave out nonproduction bonuses, and it does not collect starting salaries at all (BLS OOH FAQ). For a commission-heavy job, that understates real pay, and it tells you nothing about entry level. Use the official figures as context and RepVue as the SDR number.

For a founder, salary is only part of the bill. The real cost of the seat adds data, tools, sending infrastructure, a manager's time and the months before the rep produces anything. Budget for the whole seat. What an SDR costs in each country breaks the pay out.

Why is the SDR job considered so hard?

RepVue reports that about 57% of SDRs reach or exceed their annual quota. Roughly 4 in 10 miss it, in a job where a big part of pay depends on hitting it.

Then there is the rejection load. In the 30-day campaign above, about 99 of every 100 people contacted never became a conversation, and that was a campaign that worked.

An SDR lives inside that ratio every day. Most of their messages get silence, and most replies are some version of "no". It is also why a seat fed only 50 to 100 "perfect-fit" names a month stalls: busy, not ready and not interested use up the whole list.

The part that breaks people is persistence. I plan at least 5 to 6 touch points per prospect, across more than one channel when we can. The fifth message to someone who ignored the first four feels pointless to a new rep. Sending it anyway, written as well as the first, is the job. Teams that let reps stop at message two get a short, quiet pipeline.

Ramp time and turnover make it harder still; how long SDRs take to ramp and why they leave covers both.

Can the SDR function run on email and LinkedIn instead of cold calls?

Yes, and that is how I run it. My team works through cold email and LinkedIn. We never do pure cold calling and have no dialing floor; when a client needs it, we add warm calls to warm lists, meaning people who already replied, engaged or opted in. Every result number on this page from my own campaigns is an email or LinkedIn result.

The phone is still the default in the job market. In the O*NET occupation that includes inside salespeople, 100% of respondents reported telephone conversations every day and 80% reported email every day. Expect many candidates for an "SDR" job to arrive ready for the phone, not the inbox.

Run on email and LinkedIn, the seat changes in four ways.

The first message asks for a meeting. My team sells the meeting in the first message and saves the service for the call. A stranger can say yes to 15 minutes. They cannot say yes to a contract.

The prospect checks you out before they reply. By the time someone joins a meeting, most of their decision has already been made online, from what they found when they looked up the sender. The SDR's profile and your website are part of the pitch. A ghost profile sinks even a perfect message. A strong profile carries a weaker one.

Replies get a person. I put an inbox manager on replies so no interested answer sits unread for days. A two-word reply can mean curious, annoyed or "ask me next month", and software reads that badly.

The meeting goes to your closer. The SDR books the meetings, and your own team runs them and closes. The SDR's work ends at a prepared handoff. Check the closer before you add a seat. If your closing ratio is weak today, more meetings will make it weaker, not hide it.

Set expectations with real ranges. For an SDR seat my team runs on cold email, I expect roughly 1 reply per 100 people. Push to thousands of sends a day and that drops toward 0.5%; the more you send, the lower every average gets. A tightly targeted, heavily personalized campaign can reach 15% to 17%.

Of the replies, usually 10% to 50% turn into a booked meeting. These are ranges, never a promise. The 30-day funnel above mixed LinkedIn and email, so its reply count is not comparable to a pure cold email average.

Here is a made-up first message from an SDR at a software development firm to a head of engineering, written to sell the meeting:

Subject: mobile backlog

Hi Petra, I noticed your team is hiring three senior mobile developers at the same time. That usually means the roadmap is moving faster than hiring. We run dedicated mobile teams for software companies in that spot. Would a 15-minute call next Thursday be worth it to compare how other teams covered the gap?

It names one trigger and asks for one small step. If you have a real result from a similar client, add it in one line.

Should you hire an SDR, outsource, stay founder-led or use an AI SDR?

One condition comes before every row. Companies that cannot make time for sales calls get nothing from the system, whoever runs it. If nobody on your side can take the meetings this month, fix that first.

What each route costs. An in-house SDR starts at the RepVue figures above ($60,000 median base, $88,000 median OTE, at the time of writing), plus tools, data and management time. My team's retainer runs from USD 3,000 a month (about EUR 2,500) and climbs with scope; tools, domains and data are paid separately. Founder-led costs your own time. I have no independent price to cite for AI SDR tools.

On outsourcing. Some SDR offers charge a monthly fee upfront and run playbooks that stopped working years ago, and outsourced SDR programs usually fade rather than blow up. The weakest are faceless agencies: a brand name with nobody visible behind it, where the writing goes to interns, junior reps or offshore teams messaging your buyers in their second language. The quick test is the one in the table.

Outsourcing is what my agency sells, so weigh my view on this row with that in mind.

One tech client started with no qualified calls. By day 90 they had more than 40 a month. Sending begins roughly 15 days after the contract is signed, and you can see replies and booked meetings within the first 30 days of launch.

On staying founder-led. It is the cheapest way to learn what your market answers to, and you keep that knowledge when you hire later.

On AI SDRs. An AI tool can research and send at volume. It cannot decide who belongs on the list or tell a curious reply from an annoyed one, so a person still owns the list and reads every reply. What AI SDRs, human SDRs and agencies cost compares the three.

Whichever row you pick, judge it the same way: how many conversations it started, then how many calls it held. Pull last month's numbers this week and count only conversations.

If you are weighing an SDR hire against other routes and want a straight view, book a call and tell me your offer, your closer's capacity and your budget.