Sales development representative (SDR): the job, the numbers and how to do it well

This guide is for people weighing an SDR job, new SDRs in their first quarter, and managers hiring or coaching them. It covers what the work looks like hour by hour, the numbers you'll be held to, how pay works and the habits that separate SDRs who hit quota from those who don't. Most benchmarks come from The Bridge Group's 2025 survey of 351 B2B companies, 83% of them software firms, so adjust if you sell something else.

What a sales development representative does

An SDR owns the top of the funnel: everything between "this company might need us" and "a buyer has agreed to a first meeting". The title varies (sales development rep, SDR, business development representative, BDR), but the work has four parts:

1. Research. Pick accounts that fit the ideal customer profile, find the people who own the problem, and find a reason to contact them now.
2. Outreach. Calls, emails, LinkedIn messages and sometimes texts, arranged in a sequence over two to four weeks.
3. Qualification. A short conversation that confirms a real problem, the right person and a reason to act, enough for an account executive (AE) to accept the meeting.
4. Handoff. Book the meeting, write up what you learned and make sure the AE walks in knowing it.

Some SDRs work inbound leads (people who asked for pricing or a demo), some work outbound (accounts that haven't raised their hand), and many do both. Companies that split the two often call the outbound role a BDR; the SDR vs BDR guide explains the titles. SDRs don't usually run demos, negotiate or close. That's the AE's job.

A day in the life of a tech SDR

Here's one way an SDR at a software company might plan a day: inbound first, research before outreach, protected call blocks and admin at the end.

The same survey found a median of 112 activities a day: 44 phone, 41 email, 19 LinkedIn and 8 text or other. Phone-led teams averaged 56 dials and 4.6 quality conversations a day; email-led teams averaged 28 dials and 3.4.

How SDRs are measured

Activity gets tracked, but SDRs are paid on outcomes. These are the measures you'll meet, with The Bridge Group's 2025 medians.

Quotas depend on how much qualifying the SDR does. The survey's median was 16 meetings a month where SDRs only make introductions, 10.4 where meetings are semi-qualified and 9.0 where they're fully qualified. If you're comparing two offers, ask which model each team uses before you compare quotas.

Watch the gap between held and converted: meetings that AEs reject create work, not pipeline, and most pay plans pay less, or nothing, for them.

How SDRs work with AEs, marketing and RevOps

• Account executives are the SDR's internal customers. The 2025 median was one SDR for every 2.4 AEs, and 82% of companies align SDRs to AE territories, up from 56% in 2018. Agree with your AEs what counts as an accepted meeting before you book one.
• Marketing supplies inbound leads, campaigns and content to reference. 60% of SDR teams report to sales, 26% to marketing and 10% to another executive.
• RevOps or sales operations owns the CRM, lead routing, sequences and the reports your pay is calculated from.
• Sales engineers and customer success supply technical answers and customer stories.

The handoff is where much of an SDR's work gets lost. A note like this one saves the AE from re-asking everything:

Account: [company, website]
Meeting: [date, time, attendees and their roles]
Why they took the meeting (their words): [quote]
Trigger: [the event or problem, with its source and date]
What they use today: [system or process, or "unknown"]
Who else is involved: [names or roles they mentioned]
What I promised: [e.g. "a 30-minute look at inventory reporting, no slides"]
Open questions for the AE:
1.
2.

SDR pay

There's no government pay figure for SDRs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) classifies jobs using the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC), and its 2018 list of direct-match job titles has no sales development or business development representative. Employers may report SDRs under a broader code such as 41-3091 (Sales Representatives of Services), whose May 2025 median annual wage was $69,990, but that figure mixes SDRs with reps who close deals, so it isn't SDR pay.

The best public benchmark is The Bridge Group's survey, run every two years since 2007:

On-target earnings (OTE) is what the plan pays at 100% of quota. With 60% of SDRs at quota, many earn less than OTE in a given year. The survey also found SDR OTE has grown by only 0.56% a year over the past decade, well below inflation.

For a specific job, read the posting. New York State, for example, requires employers with four or more employees to list a compensation range for advertised jobs and to say clearly when a job is commission-based.

Worked example: the math behind a meeting quota

Illustrative example. The company, rep and rates are invented to show the arithmetic.

Dana is an SDR at Ledgerline (ledgerline.example), a mid-market ERP vendor selling to manufacturers with 100 to 1,000 employees. Her quota is 10 meetings held a month.

• Show rate. About 80% of booked meetings happen, so she needs 10 ÷ 0.8 = 12.5, call it 13 bookings.
• Conversation to meeting. About 1 in 7 quality conversations books a meeting, so she needs 13 × 7 = 91 conversations a month.
• Per day. Over 21 working days, that's 91 ÷ 21 = 4.3 conversations a day, close to the 4.1 median.
• Dials. If 8% of dials reach the right person and half of those become a real conversation, each conversation costs 1 ÷ (0.08 × 0.5) = 25 dials. That's 4.3 × 25 = 108 dials a day, too many to do well alongside research and email.

So Dana changes the inputs rather than the effort. She narrows her list to manufacturers that announced a new plant or hired an IT or operations leader in the last six months, and opens every call with that fact. Her conversation-to-meeting rate rises to 1 in 5: 13 × 5 = 65 conversations, 3.1 a day, about 77 dials. Better targeting cut the dials her quota needs by almost 30%.

How to do the job well

1. Pick fewer, better accounts. Your conversion rate moves your number more than your dial count. Build the list from fit plus a recent trigger; the guide to building a prospect list shows how. At volume, the research is the slow part, and Bebop researches each account in a list and suggests who to contact and the angle to open with.
2. Lead with one checked fact. A dated, sourced reason for contacting them beats any template. These cold calling scripts build each opener around one.
3. Answer inbound first. Make new inbound leads the first job of every block.
4. Book for the AE, not the dashboard. One meeting an AE accepts is worth more than two they reject.
5. Use LinkedIn by hand. LinkedIn's User Agreement bans bots that add contacts or send messages, and software that scrapes profiles. Breaking it puts your account at risk.
6. Review three calls a week. Note where each one turned and change one thing at a time.

AI and the SDR role

AI tools now draft emails, summarize accounts and sometimes run whole sequences. "AI SDRs" first appeared in The Bridge Group's survey in 2025, at 1% of respondents. Quality is the open question: in GTM-Bench (Blackpearl Group, June 2026), several generalist AI agents scored net negative on prospecting tasks, returning more below-standard matches than good ones. Check any AI-built list before you contact it.

Career path

The 2025 survey found average SDR tenure of 1.9 years and median annual attrition of 40%: 16 points from promotions, 13 involuntary and 11 voluntary. The usual next step is account executive; others move into sales development management, customer success or RevOps. To be promotable, track how much of the pipeline you created closed.

Self-check for your first 90 days

• You can state your ideal customer profile and three triggers that make an account worth contacting now.
• You know exactly what makes a meeting "accepted" and how you're paid for one.
• Every account you contact has a reason, a source and a date in the CRM.
• You review your conversion rates (dial to conversation, conversation to meeting, meeting to accepted) every week.
• Your handoff notes let an AE run the meeting without re-asking the basics.

Next step: if you're comparing job postings, read SDR vs BDR to see what each title usually means and the questions to ask before you accept.