Breaking Down the Sales Development Representative (SDR) Role

The sales industry has drastically changed since the 2020 pandemic. Today, Sales Development Representative (SDR) team members are not tied to an office desk to hit the calls and close deals. 

Frankly, the more flexible you can be in sales, the better. Your prospects are all over the world, and they’re increasingly working from outside the office, which means to be a good SDR you need access to platforms that will get you in front of them (albeit virtually). And you need greater access to cell phones, emails, and social media to reach them when they’re not at their office desk. 

In addition to greater flexibility, SDRs need smarter workflows, the right sales lead intelligence tools, and collaborative work with marketing to succeed in their role and hit their goals. 

At Seamless.AI, we are at the forefront of sales ingenuity and transforming what the sales development representative (SDR) role looks like every day. Our innovation is paying off because our SDR team is crushing it. Want to learn our SDR secrets?

Our team has researched over a million leads and held over 30 million appointments to date!

Instead of keeping our SDR advice and training strategy secrets well…secret. We want to spread the wealth and share the tips with you. 

Keep on reading if you’re looking for expert advice about what it takes to be a good SDR, getting into the role, top skills to have, and many other insights from top-performing SDRs, recruiters, and SDR team leads. 

We’ve got interview quotes from real SDRs, stats, and product recommendations for anyone looking to start a career as a sales development representative, improve your training program, or grow your team. 

What is a Sales Development Representative?

A sales development representative (SDR) executes outbound prospecting. SDRs find and qualify cold leads.  While an SDR might not close the deals, one of their biggest responsibilities is to warm up cold leads, nurture them, and gradually move them through the pipeline until the prospect is ready to buy. 

Whether close rates are down or up, one of the smartest offensive tactics SDRs can execute is to keep their team’s pipeline filled with quality prospects that fit their company’s ideal customer profile. The more leads you can find. And the more prospects you can introduce your brand, the better, because those are just “At Bat” opportunities to close deals in the future. 

What Skills Are Required for an SDR?

As a sales development representative, you play a pivotal role on the sales team because you are often a prospect’s first point of contact and their first exposure to your company’s brand (if they’re a cold lead). 

This means that research is critical to the success of this role. You have to know your products/services and competitors like the back of your hand. And you need to be able to clearly distinguish between your brand and others. 

You also need to do lots of research on leads to personalize your outbound messaging and increase your chances of converting and getting people to not only open your emails, etc. but respond. 

Here are some more SDR skills that are needed to thrive: 

• Finding, researching, and prospecting potential clients
• Qualifying leads
• Demonstrate the unique value of your company’s product
• Building a pipeline of sales leaders, business owners, and high-level decision-makers
• Book appointments 
• Strong sales relationship-building skills to positively impact business growth 
• Hard work ethic, positive, and coachable
• Strong communication and listening skills, with a positive approach
• Self-starter 
• Drive for excellence
• Experience with Salesforce 
• Experience with LinkedIn
• Bachelor’s degree is a plus
• Any experience with cold calling and getting past gatekeepers is a plus

What Is The Top SDR Salary? 

One of the greatest benefits of working as an SDR is that there are no fixed salary rates. You’re earning potential is limitless. Your salary depends on your experience level, the number of meetings you book, and the pipeline you generate for your team. 

According to ZipRecruiter, top SDR performers can earn as much as $75,500 in annual salary. On top of that, SDRs typically earn a commission for every appointment they book that converts into a closed sale, with the standard commission rate in SaaS sales sitting at 10%. 

Where Can SDRs Find Leads?

SDRs have several targets to hit, from outbound activity numbers like cold calls to inbound sales metrics like qualified meetings set. This is because SDRs play a crucial role in a company’s success.

According to The Bridge Group, “SDRs are responsible for generating 30-45 percent of new revenue.” Depending on the size of the company, one SDR alone can produce $3 million a year in average pipeline.

With all the revenue that SDRs have to bring in, quality leads are make or break. In fact, if you’re behind on your KPIs and metrics, being able to access a steady stream of leads to prospect and qualify is one of the fastest ways to get yourself back on track. 

If you’re looking for leads, your best bet is a B2B contact database or sales prospecting software. 

Once you start finding different sales opportunities, you’ll want to use these resources to make a great first impression, whether your first interaction is via email, cold call, or virtual:

• Write an Irresistible Cold Email
• Ultimate Guide to Cold Calling
• 10 Hooks to Skyrocket Social Media Sales

How Do You Handle Rejection as an SDR?

SDRs are typically the first point of contact and one of the first impressions people develop about a brand. With that responsibility comes a lot of pressure and a lot of rejection. 

If you think about a sales funnel, no matter what industry you sell in, there are always more leads at the top where SDRs work versus those who close on the product/service, become a client, and make it through to the bottom of the funnel. In fact, top-funnel audiences convert 47% less than bottom-funnel audiences. 

To be an SDR, you need tough skin to handle rejection (support outlets don’t hurt either when it gets overwhelming). You also need to be creative with how you work around objections. 

When all else fails, and right now just isn’t the “right time” for a prospect, an SDR has to be consistent with follow-up, build that trust, and gradually turn objections into sales opportunities. 

What Does Remote SDR Work Look Like?

More and more people are working from home, and the Sales Development Representative role isn’t any different. On average, 33% of sales reps work from home, and 26% trade between the office and home in a hybrid position.

Seamless.AI is 100% remote, meaning our employees can work from wherever they want and on their own terms. Our Outbound SDR, Connor Swanson, highlights flexibility as one of the incredible benefits of working from home. As Connor puts it, “If I were in an office, I would not be able to enjoy my breaks with my dog. Being able to take a few minutes outside with my pup here and there makes such a difference.”

For our Senior Enterprise SDR, Eduardo Reyna, working remotely means diving deep into outreach tasks without distractions. Here is Eduardo’s daily routine:

• Research and review daily reports and insights to make strategic decisions on which accounts to prioritize for the day for 30 minutes.
• Collaborate with leadership and account executives on game plans and strategies for 30 minutes.
• Make TONS of cold calls, email outreach, follow-ups, LinkedIn lead generation, and messages for four hours. This activity is done with the goal of setting up introductory meetings and building revenue pipeline. 
• Call prospects to confirm their demos for the day.
• Take intermittent breaks throughout the day to cook, do chores, work out, head to the park with the dog, etc. 

If you’re worried about maintaining a work-life balance at home, create a space at your house that’s exclusively reserved for work. It doesn’t have to be a full-on office if you don’t have the room. Just a place where, as soon as 5 PM hits, you can walk away from your work, unplug, and thoroughly enjoy your personal time with friends and family.  

What Is the SDR Career Path?

The career path of an SDR is fast-paced. On average, most SDRs only work in this role from six months to two years, depending on the results and revenue they generate. 

Typically, when an SDR is at the end of their tenure, they move on to work as an account executive (AE), where they are responsible for closing deals on leads that SDRs find and qualify. 

Related: How to be a Great SDR

Sales Development Playbook author, Trish Bertuzzi, details the common career path of the SDR role. They usually start out as an Inbound SDR and then shift to Outbound SDR. After that, they work as Senior SDRs and eventually get promoted to different AE positions, including Associate AE, Commercial AE, and Enterprise AE. 

Even though this is the typical trajectory, the beauty of the SDR role is its versatility. There are several different paths that you can take, and it all depends on your interests and natural talents:

1. Account Executive

This is a common path SDRs take because now that you’ve spent a couple of years working with leads at the top of the funnel and learning their pain points, it makes sense that the next step in your sales career would be closing deals at the bottom of the funnel. 

One of the reasons our Growth Sales AE, Kwab Ayesu, transitioned into the AE role from working as an SDR was the financial opportunities he could help create for his clients. Kwab notes that “The people we work with need us to change the trajectory of their businesses. So being able to impact our customers’ businesses positively is amazing.” 

Responsibilities:

• Negotiate Contracts
• Close Deals
• Drive Sales and Revenue

Skills Needed:

• Analytical/Problem Solving
• Negotiation
• Project Management

If you’re interested in becoming an AE, Kwab urges you not to wait until you’re an AE to start learning the skills needed for the role: 

“I can’t stress this enough, but learning how to run discovery, listen, and identify customer pain points while you’re an SDR won’t only help you as an SDR but will significantly reduce your learning curve as a new AE. And don’t be afraid to share your goals. I told my director on the second day on the job that I would be one of the fastest-promoted SDRs to AEs. I consistently talked about it and what it would look like. Then, five months later, I was an AE!”

So don’t forget to speak your success into existence!

2. SDR Manager:

If you’re passionate about your role as an SDR and a natural-born leader and teacher, then an SDR manager role is a great fit for you. Getting former SDRs into manager positions like this is great because they know firsthand what works well with a training program and what needs improvement. 

Responsibilities:

• Train and Mentor New SDRs
• Lead an SDR Team
• Identify Opportunities for Improvement

Skills Needed: 

• Leadership and Team Management 
• Sales Growth Strategies 
• Problem-Solving

 3. Customer Success: 

Customer Success Manager, Jenna Cusker, notes that she decided to make the switch from the SDR role to Customer Success because “As an SDR, I loved that your mindset focused on solving companies’ problems…but [I] wanted to be able to see the outcome of us actually helping them.” 

If you do a great job of connecting with leads and have a passion for customers and helping them win, you may want to consider venturing into Customer Success. 

Once a prospect buys and becomes a customer, it’s the Customer Success team’s job to teach them everything they need to get the greatest value out of your product/service. 

Responsibilities:

• Customer relationship-building
• Customer onboarding and troubleshooting
• Boost customer renewals and retention rates and cut churn

Skills Needed:

• Sociable 
• Active Listening
• Customer-Centric

Looking to venture into Customer Success but need some advice? Check out these gems from our CS Team:

Michelle Vecchione (Mid-Market CS Manager): “Keep making those dials! Make the uncomfortable conversations comfortable, take your manager on your growth path, and never take your focus off your goals.”

Ashley King (Enterprise CS Manager): “Know that improving your discovery questions and how to pivot that to plans of action along with follow-up are even more crucial in Customer Success to ensure all pain points are met during their service and more opportunities to for growth and a stickier customer relationship.”

How Do You Make Hiring SDRs Foolproof?

Whether you’re a startup, a medium-sized business, or an enterprise, every company needs a strong team of SDRs to get your brand in front of more people. Because more eyes on your brand means more sales opportunities and more revenue.

But how do you find the right people who are qualified for the SDR role? 

Our outstanding Sales Recruitment Lead, Kelly Keperling has multiple ways that she finds SDR talent:

• Online Job Boards: Handshake, Indeed, etc.
• Referrals: This is Kelly’s favorite way to find a candidate. She says, “I love when I bring someone on to the team and they enjoy Seamless.AI so much they want to shout it to their network!” Referrals are great for growing your team and your product sales. 
• Seamless.AI Career Page: Your company’s career page is a great resource for talent. And if you’re looking for a sales job, you can see all the roles we have open here at Seamless.AI and apply (it only takes a few minutes).
• LinkedIn (LI): With 1 billion users, LI is one of the best tools for finding top talent. And if you’re looking for SDR jobs, keep your profile up-to-date (i.e., employment history, etc.). Make sure you have your “Open to Work” banner on and make it clear in your “About Me” section that you’re looking for SDR work. Kelly urges you to follow these steps because recruiters look through hundreds of candidates a day, and they’re often on autopilot. Taking these steps will bring your profile to the front of the line when recruiters are searching for SDR candidates. 

Now that you know where to plug your skills and experience, what exactly are recruiters looking for? Do they want you to be a seasoned sales pro? Can you have equivalent experience in a different field?

For Kelly, these are some core skills and experience that could put you ahead of the pack:

• Cold calling experience: Cold calling is the bread and butter of the SDR role. So if you have some experience on the dialer, either through an internship or your current position, you’re golden!
• College sales team experience: Just like with cold calling experience, if you have any kind of sales experience, that’s always a plus. 
• Former athletes: Believe it or not, if you played sports during school, that is an incredible asset. A lot of the skills that it takes to thrive on the field are the same skills needed to succeed in sales like being a team player, bouncing back from loss and rejection, having a healthy competitive spirit, and knowing how to set and achieve goals. 

DISCLAIMER: These experiences and skills aren’t make or break. If you never picked up a football or you have ZERO sales experience, that doesn’t mean that your SDR application is dead in the water. As you’re filling out applications, think about the professional and personal experience where you demonstrated these skills. Any relevant experience is good experience!

For a lot of people, the most nerve-wracking part of the job application process is the job interview, but they don’t have to be when you know some of the more common SDR interview questions that recruiters ask:

• When you are looking for roles, what are the top three things that need to be a part of an opportunity to make it a great fit for you?  For Kelly, this is an important question because it helps her gauge a candidate’s knowledge of sales basics. Do they know what an ideal candidate looks like? This helps her understand whether a candidate is a good fit for the SDR role and Seamless.AI.  
• Please tell me a time you overcame rejection. Kelly points out that rejection is a massive part of the SDR role, so with this question, recruiters want to see how capable an SDR candidate is of bouncing back from rejection or turning a closed door into opportunity. 
• What previous experience do you have that would directly relate to a sales role? This question is more obvious, but expect to hear it in any SDR job interview. And remember, any relevant experience is good experience, even if it isn’t in sales. 

Here’s a bonus SDR interview question that’s a bit unusual and unexpected, but Kelly loves to keep this one up her sleeve: 

Describe an experience when something unexpected happened at work or school and you needed to adapt quickly. How did you handle it? 

This is a question you might hear if you’re interviewing with a startup. According to Kelly, this gives the recruiting team insight into how a candidate deals with change, which is crucial if your company is a startup (where changes happen daily). 

How Do You Develop a Successful SDR Team?

To have the most successful SDRs, you have to provide a comprehensive curriculum and lots of hands-on practice. 

While some companies have a fast SDR onboarding and ramp-up, arguing that you get the best results out of new SDRs when you teach fast, at Seamless.AI, SDRs participate in a four-week training program. 

The reasoning behind this is whether you’re new to SaaS and sales or if you have some experience. By the end of the program, our trainers’ goal is to ensure that the playing field is even and that everyone has a fair shot at success. 

According to our SDR training manager, Garrett Salyer, “Sales is a skill that requires practice, real-time feedback, and repetition…This hands-on experience is crucial for building confidence and efficiency in real-world sales scenarios.”

Here’s a summary of some of the major topics the Seamless.AI SDR Training Program covers week to week: 

• Week 1: New hire orientation essentials are covered, as well as a tech stack breakdown and process training, so reps are comfortable with the tools they will have to use every day. Reps will learn secrets from the best in their field by shadowing top-performing SDRs and practicing cold calls (role-play and sales prospecting sessions).
• Week 2: Trainees dive deeper into the role with sales pitch and objection-handling training so they feel more prepared to handle cold calls. In addition to process reviews, there are Q&A sessions with top account executives so SDR trainees can learn more about their potential career path at Seamless.AI. 
• Week 3: SDR trainees do a competitor deep dive to understand the SaaS market. They also learn about our most common buyer persona (their pain points, goals, etc.), as well as hold rate training and more prospecting sessions.
• Week 4: Trainees do a discovery question deep dive to learn the right qualifying questions to ask. We wrap up with more hands-on prospecting sessions, and new SDRs get assigned to teams. 

Once training wraps up, the SDR career development doesn’t stop there. There are daily sales team stand ups and team standups where SDRs (and anyone else) can ask questions and work through any problem areas they’re facing, from specific objections to follow-up. Reps also get weekly one-on-ones with their sales manager for more personalized training. 

In addition, SDRs get access to free sales development books, video courses, and a library of product training to read on their own time so they can become experts in their role and at Seamless.AI. 

SDR FAQs

Is an SDR Job a Good Job? 

We hope this article highlights all the benefits of the Sales Development Representative role because it is a fantastic job opportunity and a great introduction to sales.

As an SDR, you enjoy: 

• Unlimited earning potential. The harder you work, the more money you make
• An exciting, fast-paced work environment that forces you to grow
• Great team camaraderie
• Connecting with people and introducing them to products and services that can change their lives

Is It Hard Being an SDR?

There’s not a single job in the world that’s a cakewalk. Every job has its challenges. 

There will be days when you don’t feel like being on the phone. Meeting your quota is going to be stressful at times. But the rewards of the SDR role outweigh the negatives. If you work with a supportive sales team, avoid these pitfalls, and put in the hours, the sky’s the limit. 

What Should an SDR Resume Include?

Be sure to highlight:

• Any cold-calling experience
• D2D (door-to-door) experience
• Customer service experience 

It's also helpful to include an “About Me/Summary” section at the top of your resume that covers what you’re looking for. 

Here’s an example: 

"I'm a December 2023 grad from (insert college name) with a degree in Business Admin. In the next career stage, I would like to join a company as an SDR. With my experience as an intern at ABC Company, I learned the art of cold calling as I was making 70 dials a day. This also taught me how to overcome rejection, which will be a helpful tool I can bring to my next company."