Sales Development Representative

When one person does all the selling, the first thing to disappear is new outreach. Cold-calling unfamiliar companies in the morning, arguing over contract terms in the afternoon and listening to an existing customer's complaints in the evening are all sales, so one person looks sufficient while a company is small. The trouble is that urgent and important aren't the same thing. Given a deal with a signature due next week and a first conversation that becomes revenue six months out, people pick the first one every time.

Stack those choices up and the quarter takes on a recognizable shape. Three weeks poured into open deals at the end of the quarter produces four signed contracts — and not one new company contacted during those three weeks. So the first month of the next quarter has an empty calendar. Dialing furiously against that empty calendar doesn't fix it, because first contact to contract takes two months, and that quarter is already lost. Companies that follow a good quarter with a bad one usually wobble right here.

A sales development representative (SDR) is that disappearing work carved out as somebody's only job. The mechanism that makes it work is the absence of contract responsibility. Put quota on the role and it gets pulled back toward the urgent end, so the target attached to this seat isn't an amount of money — it's the number of qualified meetings handed onward. The role owns the entrance and passes everything after it to someone else.

The day fills up with outreach and record-keeping. Five things make it up.

1. Building the list. Prospecting is the name for this stage — selecting companies worth approaching and opening first contact, which means choosing only places that actually have the problem the product solves. For a shared-documents product, 100 companies above thirty employees beats a list of 1,000 sole traders.
2. Sending email. Not one message per person but roughly four spread across two weeks. The first opens with a single observation about that company; the later ones each come at it from a different angle. A rep handles about 60 messages a day.
3. Calling. Around 40 dials a day, fewer than five of which turn into a live conversation. The goal on those calls isn't to sell but to book one fifteen-minute follow-up.
4. Sorting the replies. Qualification is this work — determining whether someone who showed interest can actually buy, by confirming there's budget, who makes the decision, and by when it has to be solved. A company that's enthusiastic but has budget only next year doesn't become a meeting this quarter.
5. Handing off and writing it down. Once a meeting is booked, the account gets promoted to an opportunity — a deal where budget and intent are confirmed enough to manage — and passed to the next owner, along with three or so lines of what was actually said on the call.

Read as arithmetic, it's roughly 100 contacts a day producing one meeting. Three percent reply rates are normal, which is why the difficulty of the seat isn't skill so much as holding the same rhythm while absorbing rejection every day.

The closest counterpart is the account executive (AE), the rep who takes the meeting and owns it through signature. The handoff standard between them has to be written down as sentences. Without something like "thirty or more employees, budget confirmed, decision within three months," the SDR gets measured on meetings booked and the AE gets measured on the quality of meetings received, and the two start pulling in opposite directions.

Marketing is a weekly conversation too. Inquiries arriving from ads and content get sorted by the SDR, which makes the SDR the only person who knows which channels turn into real meetings. At Pagedeck, Ravi splits the inquiries by source, and a source that turns out to be a consistent mismatch on the phone gets less budget the following month.

Sales operations supplies the tooling and the data — the role that runs the systems and reporting a sales team depends on, including the record of who has already contacted which company, which is what keeps two reps from calling the same account. With a team lead, the work is listening to call recordings. The first 30 seconds decide the outcome, so that stretch gets replayed and reworked on its own.

"We booked twelve SDR meetings this month, and eight of them meet the bar."

Reporting meetings created and usable meetings as two separate numbers.

"I already contacted that company last month. Don't add it back to the list."

Preventing a duplicate approach to the same account.

"We hit the meeting count but the AEs rejected half of them. The handoff bar needs another look."

Naming the problem a count-only target creates.

Pagedeck has two SDRs. With Sofia carrying the enterprise deals, first contact belongs to these two. The first two hours of the morning are dialing only; afternoons go to replies and to building the next day's list. Friday afternoon, three call recordings get picked and listened to together.

The handoff bar is written out and posted on the wall: thirty or more employees, already using some document collaboration tool, and a conversation with the person who decides. Only meetings with all three go to Sofia; miss one and the SDR keeps holding it. When the bar changes, Sofia and the SDRs change it together.

The most common mistake is reading it as a simple dialing job, the entry rung of a sales career. The work repeats and appears to run on a script, so the impression is easy to form. But the gap between a good SDR and a poor one is unusually wide. Hand two people the same list and the same email template and reply rates come in at 1 percent and 5 percent. The difference lives in the judgment about which companies go on the list and in the rewriting of the first sentence for each account. Treat the seat as simple and you hand over a script without teaching either of those, and the person leaves inside six months.

The other mistake is expecting volume alone to produce results. At a 3 percent reply rate, tripling the sends looks like it should triple the meetings. But sending into an indiscriminate list drops the reply rate itself, and the sending domain starts getting classified as spam. Once that happens, even well-written email lands in the junk folder. Recovery takes months, so the decision to raise volume comes after the list quality has been verified, not before.