What is a Sales Development Representative? Roles and Responsibilities

An Overview of the Sales Development Representative (SDR)

In smaller companies, a single sales rep may be responsible for overseeing every aspect of sales pipeline management, from digging up email leads to educating prospects about the company’s offerings, to getting them to ink contracts. As the sales team expands, though, it becomes clear that different skills are needed at each stage of the sales cycle – it just makes sense to divide these among different roles.

By way of example, let’s look at what tasks SDRs might undertake in different industries:

• Financial and investment services: Entry-level employees are often responsible for first engaging prospects to understand their needs.
• Healthcare: Knowledgable SDRs reach out to potential clients to introduce the company’s solutions such as IT infrastructure, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals for use in hospitals.
• Digital marketing: Professionals generate new business leads through various outreach methods for others to act on – regardless of what products they may be selling.

Did you know that you can effectively outsource the sales development representative role? BookYourData identifies potential business opportunities through market analysis and has assembled a constantly refined database of over 500 million prospects. These can be filtered according to various user-supplied criteria, allowing you to develop and maintain a robust pipeline of prospects at very little cost.

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What are the Roles and Responsibilities of SDR

The culmination of a sales development representative’s day-to-day tasks is often when they qualify inbound and outbound leads for sales opportunities. At this point, they may hand off these qualified leads to senior sales representatives, but the actual business of turning prospects into customers doesn’t lie in their bailiwick.

Instead, SDRs connect with leads via phone, email, and social media and manage the early stages of the sales pipeline. Much of their time is typically taken up with identifying potential customers in their industry through painstaking research. The net result of all this effort is that other employees can apply their sales training more effectively rather than spending half their workday on tasks like cold calling and CRM (Customer Relations Management software) data entry.

Let’s unpack a SDR’s tasks in more detail:

Connecting with Prospects

Sales prospecting is usually an SDR’s primary responsibility. Their bosses may supply them with lists of leads to contact, or let them loose on the marketing to find leads by:

• Utilizing social media platforms like X/Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to scan for and contact leads.
• Drafting marketing emails that will (hopefully) resonate with different kinds of prospects and get them to respond positively.
• Networking, both online and at industry events, with a view to initiating contact with potential customers and those who may refer you to them.
• Fielding inbound leads and responding to inquiries from potential clients.

Though an SDR’s immediate objective isn’t to make a sale, this doesn’t mean they can get by without any sales skills. A lot of the future shape of customer relationships depends on presenting an approachable, professional image during early interactions. Sales development representatives need to possess some market and product knowledge and be able to carry a conversation.

Qualifying Prospects

Aside from introducing their company to potential customers, it’s part of an SDR’s job to separate warm leads from those who are unlikely to buy in the near future. This can be done by:

1. Defining an ideal customer profile: what characteristics do your most profitable accounts share?
2. Developing a set of lead scoring criteria and refining this into questions that help determine their level of suitability.
3. Apply a formalized grading system to rank prospects according to their progress down the sales pipeline, interest expressed, and demographic criteria.
4. Follow up. Discovering prospects’ needs and concerns also serves to nurture leads to keep them interested over time.

The main idea here is that, as marketing resources are always limited, it’s important to spend more time on developing the most promising opportunities. Strategic, personalized, results-oriented sales strategies generate the highest ROI (Return On Investment) by not offering a solution to a company that doesn’t have the associated problem.

Communicating with Sales Team Members

The most effective lead generation in the world doesn’t help much if prospects don’t see any follow-up! In order to kick-start the sales process, an SDR’s colleagues need to know information like:

• Prospect contact details
• Their roles within their companies
• Data on the target company: size, number of employees, market niche, etc.
• Other information that facilitates personalization, including demographic data.
• Level of qualification and likelihood of conversion.

Regular, open conversations between sales development representatives, salespersons, and management ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction. If the sales force is experiencing problems with outreach, or is seeing exceptional success using new sales techniques, SDRs need to know about this. In addition, marketing departments don’t operate in a vacuum and have to be aware of overall business goals.

Establishing Contact with Leads

Depending on the company’s policies and strategy, it may also fall on SDRs to contact decision-makers within target organizations, introduce their services, and invite them to take the next step down the sales funnel. While it’s not a sales development representative’s job to nurture prospects to conversion or haggle over contract details, it doesn’t do any harm for them to initiate contact and perhaps educate prospective customers about their value offering.

Depending on the market, any of several different tools can be used for this:

• Phone them up: Even a brief conversation can yield tons of information about a prospect’s pain points and level of interest.
• Send bulk emails: Though spamming people at random is frowned upon, it is possible to reach appropriate customers with persuasive, customized messages.
• Social media: Engaging, customer-centric posts can gradually build a following and cause prospects to reach out to you.

While charm and empathy are still valuable skills for anyone in marketing, the best sales development representatives are also tech-savvy. Cold emailing software, for example, can be used to automate campaigns and reduce their manpower requirements. Be warned, though: misusing these tools will badly affect your conversion performance.

Providing General Sales Support

By the nature of their work, SDRs typically have their fingers on the pulse of their industry and can offer valuable insights into marketing strategy. In many cases, their professional goals may include transitioning to a sales-focused role; even if they don’t want the experience, their ordinary duties may not occupy their whole workday.

Sales development representatives therefore play a number of supporting roles within sales teams, for example:

• Sharing tips on making more sales with other reps. If their research indicates that buyers of their product value well-organized customer support, salespersons can emphasize that selling point.
• Scheduling meetings between qualified leads and account executives. Setting appointments at the same time as ensuring the sales team has all necessary information makes the actual sales pitch go much more smoothly.
• Tracking lead interactions and updating CRM systems with new information. Though this may seem like busywork, keeping this body of knowledge up to date has huge tactical and strategic advantages.

Important Sales Development Representative (SDR) Skills

In the modern workplace, there really isn’t any such thing as “the perfect employee”. Depending on the team and environment, a wide range of personality traits can make an SDR successful. One who’s very detail-oriented, for example, might collaborate with a more goal-focused supervisor and become more than the sum of their parts.

In general, though, this career isn’t for you unless you possess the following skills and are willing to keep refining them through training, listening to constructive feedback, and keeping up with new trends, tools, and best practices.

Time Management

Unlike sales executives, who may only have to worry about a few dozen accounts, sales development representatives are typically juggling hundreds or thousands of leads at any given moment. Also, though they don’t always work on commission, this can be a high-pressure role, as each team member’s performance is tracked constantly. 

The good news is that you can learn to manage your time better and avoid losing sight of the forest for the trees. Very often, failing to meet expectations isn’t the result of refusing to work hard, but simply ignoring the following time management principles:

• “Eat the frog”: Do the most unpleasant tasks first; this accomplishment will keep you motivated for the rest of the day.
• Block out your time: Assign specific periods for each activity so that one task doesn’t end up crowding out the others.
• Learn to prioritize: Obviously, high-impact, time-critical assignments should be given more attention than unimportant, low-pressure chores. It’s easy to confuse these two categories, though.
• Understand the Pareto principle: Efficiency beats sheer effort every time, meaning you’ll get more done by spending 20% of your time planning and 80% executing.

Communication

The stereotypical salesperson is a smooth talker and an active listener. In face-to-face or telephonic conversations, this is certainly an advantage. However, the same communication skills don’t necessarily translate to an ability to customize an email sales template effectively. Ideally, an SDR will be able to do both.

Whether we’re talking about interpreting a new company policy accurately, following up with leads to maintain engagement, or educating peers on new approaches to marketing, a sales development representative needs to be skilled at:

• Verbal communication: Speaking clearly, concisely and understandably in the various contexts business requires.
• Written communication: Being able to produce engaging and persuasive text, from sales emails to product descriptions.
• Listening: Perceiving the meaning, intent, as well as the emotional subtext of what other people say.

Organizational Capabilities

This is a skill related to time management, but its field of applicability is much broader. Keeping track of various tasks, deliverables, and deadlines frequently makes the difference between finding and exploiting a valuable lead and simply allowing it to fall through the cracks due to neglect. “Being organized” isn’t simply a personality trait some people have and others can never learn; try to improve your organizational skills by embracing:

• Prioritization: Understand which tasks are essential and important, and which can be delayed or ignored (or, more accurately, which ones your boss wants prioritized).
• Scheduling: Plan your days, weeks, and months so that important actions aren’t overlooked. Know when to adapt your schedule due to extraordinary circumstances, but also develop the discipline to stick to it most of the time.
• Collaboration: While you don’t want to abuse any work relationship, building a team also means being able to delegate and share the load effectively.
• Technological tools: From Microsoft Outlook and spreadsheets to specialized CRM packages, effective SDRs understand how to streamline their workflows and work smarter, not harder.

Diverse Experience with Tools

Speaking of technology, this can be an amazing force multiplier for the tech-savvy sales development representative. You don’t have to be a programmer to understand how to use these, but reading a few how-to guides and watching a YouTube tutorial will give you an idea of what this kind of software is capable of.

New tools are released all the time – keeping up with new developments is part and parcel of the SDR game – so it’s hard to recommend any as being objectively better in any given use case. Still, the following are worth looking at for starters:

• Mailchimp: Mass mailing platform that makes it easy to track email marketing conversion rates.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: A tool that allows you to mine this professional social media platform for B2B leads.
• Hunter: This is an easy-to-use application you can use to find prospects’ email addresses and, especially, check that messages can be delivered to them instead of bouncing back.
• BookYourData: A leading lead generation service. Not only is prospects’ contact information guaranteed to be 97% accurate, addresses are validated in real time, avoiding the need for an additional verification step.

Product Knowledge

While sales development reps aren’t expected to be engineers or tech support personnel, they do need to be able to quickly explain exactly how their companies’ products can add value to potential customers. This also helps them identify the USP (Unique Selling Point) or angle sales reps should emphasize during follow-up conversations.

Some ways to become an expert on your company’s products include:

• Read all the sales literature (brochures, case studies, white papers, etc.) from cover to cover.
• Meet up with your fellow sales staff to discuss each product line’s pros and cons.
• Check customer reviews to see which problems your products solve, and how they’re used in the real world.

Sales Development Rep Job Description

If you’re a new entrant to the job market and what you’ve read above attracted your interest, you may be wondering what exactly companies are looking for when hiring SDRs. Alternatively, it could be that you want to add this role to your existing sales staff and need a template to advertise it. 

In either case, the following example will give you an idea of the high notes these kinds of job descriptions generally hit:

“We are looking for a driven, proactive SDR with the analytical mindset needed to utilize modern software tools. Our company culture values resourcefulness and adaptability in a collaborative environment, so please apply if you believe you are a good fit. The role’s responsibilities include:

• Research market opportunities and generate fresh sales leads.
• Qualify prospects in terms of account value and willingness to buy.
• Coordinate with sales staff to schedule calls and appointments.
• Help to track and analyze sales performance according to standard industry metrics and benchmarks.

SDRs vs Sales Executives

To some extent, all titles in the world of sales are arbitrary. There’s always some overlap between roles and most employees are happy to pitch in when and where they’re needed. In general, though:

• SDRs focus on generating leads, sales executives on converting them into customers.
• SDRs are mainly involved in the early stages of the customer acquisition process, handing the most promising prospects off to sales executives.
• SDRs are (usually) salaried, entry-level positions. Sales executives tend to have more experience and earn commissions on sales they close.
• Sales executives are noted for great interpersonal skills, while organizational ability and attention to detail are more important to SDRs.

Note, however, that these two roles aren’t exactly chalk and cheese. It’s perfectly feasible to use a sales development rep job as a stepping stone to becoming a sales executive. The most important determinant of such a person’s suitability for promotion is a willingness to learn.

How to Build a Great Sales Development Representative Team

When you have either too few leads coming in or too many to qualify and handle effectively, your first instinct may be to hire more sales reps. However, these will still be spending time on prospecting rather than closing, which isn’t an ideal situation. As SDRS are often junior team members, hiring a few also presents an opportunity to increase diversity, fleshing out your sales department with new skill sets and perspectives.

Assembling a high-performing SDR team may be a more efficient use of your budget than adding more salespeople. In order to do so:

• First of all, identify KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for the new team: number of leads generated, increase in revenue, and so on.
• As you’ll have to onboard new hires anyway and train them on your company’s products and policies, consider hiring based on talent and cultural alignment rather than academic qualifications or prior sales experience.
• Define how each new role will integrate with existing sales processes.
• Identify the tools they’ll use for maximum impact; hire people with proven experience with these platforms.

One of these tools is called BookYourData. There are several others, but is one becomes especially attractive if you’re still figuring out how to implement lead generation successfully. Their main selling point for companies in this position is that you can order as many or as few leads as you like using a unique pay-as-you-go pricing model, unlike with competitors who insist on bulk lead purchases or monthly subscriptions,.

SDRs in a Nutshell

1. Sales development reps support other sales staff, especially by generating and qualifying new leads.
2. Though these are often low-paying positions, employees require a number of skills and personal traits to succeed at this job.
3. Just like SDRs funnel new prospects into your sales pipeline, the sales development team is often a source of promising talent marketing managers can use to fill more responsible roles.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Important is Teamwork in an SDR Role?

A smoothly functioning sales team is characterized by both internal competition and a high degree of cooperation. Good communication and teamwork allow sales executives to tell SDRs what kinds of leads they’re looking for and let sales development representatives provide salespersons with the most relevant information on each prospect.

What is the Average Salary for an SDR?

Salaries (excluding benefits and incentives) for sales development reps in the U.S.A. vary widely, from under $30,000 to over $80,000 per year, with the average being around $50,000. You need to look beyond these headline figures, though, as performance bonuses can boost your earnings. Those working in IT, consulting, healthcare, and media services earn the most.

How Do SDRs Contribute to the Overall Success of a Company?

While sales reps can do everything sales development reps do, SDRs make the sales process much more efficient by focusing their attention on the upper part of the sales funnel. In this way, they make a tangible impact on marketing ROI, company revenue, and therefore the bottom line.

What Training is Required for an SDR?

Strictly speaking, a newly-fledged sales development representative doesn’t require any qualifications in marketing or sales, though this is naturally an advantage. On-the-job training, however, is crucial. It’s the employer’s responsibility to give SDRs access to resources on product knowledge, sales techniques, use of technological tools, and improving skills such as time management.

What are the Typical Performance Metrics for an SDR?

Most companies use KPIs that are automatically tracked by software when evaluating how well each sales development rep is doing their job, statistics like total dials and emails, number of appointments set, lead conversion rate, and average deal size are all useful. However, it’s best to look beyond simple numbers and include “soft” metrics like teamwork and effectiveness as a brand ambassador.

What Industries Employ SDRs?

Though sales development representatives are found in all sectors of the economy, they play the largest role in companies where relatively few but high-value sales make up the bulk of revenue – i.e. those that prioritize outbound lead generation. Healthcare, financial services, IT, and consulting all employ large numbers of SDRs.

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