Sales Development Representative (SDR)

What an SDR Does Before a Deal Exists

A sales development representative (SDR) researches, contacts, and qualifies potential customers early in the sales process, then passes qualified prospects to an account executive. The exact split of work depends on how each company organizes its sales team.

Salesforce describes SDR work as top-of-the-funnel activity, which it says includes everything that happens before a prospect is ready to make a purchase (Salesforce, published June 2024 and updated October 2025). The same explainer adds that SDRs often function as a bridge between sales and marketing and handle presales work that can be both inbound and outbound. How interest gets created in the first place is the subject of lead generation. This entry covers the person who works the result.

The Core Job: Prospecting, Outreach, Qualification

Salesforce lists four responsibilities that SDRs often hold: prospecting, lead qualification, lead nurturing, and booking meetings. Prospecting means identifying companies that fit a buyer persona and reaching out to them. Qualification means researching leads to decide whether they deserve more attention. Nurturing means staying in touch with leads who are not ready yet, a practice covered in lead nurturing. Booking the meeting is the end goal.

Not every SDR does all four. Salesforce notes that SDRs are often part of a team that divides these tasks among several people, so one person may focus on a single area.

Where the SDR's Work Ends

In Salesforce's description, the SDR books a meeting and briefs the sales rep who will take it. Salesforce adds that an SDR's most important partnership is with the sales rep they set meetings for. Closing sits with someone else.

Why the SDR Title Means Different Things at Different Companies

Definitions differ so much between organizations that a single answer rarely exists. A 2023 qualitative field study of sales development in B2B firms, based on 13 interviewees from eight firms, most of them from software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, describes four lead management contexts: outbound prospect-focused, outbound account-based, inbound prospect-focused, and inbound account-based. The authors report that lead research, engagement, and handover vary across those contexts (Terho, Salonen, and Yrjänen, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, 2023; metric: number of interviewees and firms; geography not stated in the abstract; confidence: VERIFIED). The title alone tells you little.

SDR and BDR: A Convention, Not a Standard

One convention gives inbound interest to the SDR and outbound prospecting to the business development representative (BDR), but companies apply it unevenly. GitLab documents that split, with a career path from SDR to BDR (GitLab Handbook, updated March 12, 2026). Salesforce's US and Canada program runs from business development associate (BDA) to SDR to BDR to AE (Salesforce, December 2025). Read the job description, not the title.

SDR and Account Executive

The account executive (AE) role begins where qualification ends, and companies draw that line differently. GitLab's job description for a commercial account executive asks the role to prospect and close new business and to document the buying criteria, the process, the next steps, and the owners. It also asks for a healthy cadence of prospecting activity to build pipeline (GitLab Handbook, updated March 12, 2026). So prospecting is not reserved for the SDR, even at a company with a dedicated sales development team.

Product settings echo that flexibility. In Dynamics 365 Sales, an administrator chooses whether the seller or the system creates the opportunity when a lead is qualified (Microsoft Learn, updated May 29, 2026).

How SDRs and Marketing Share the Lead

The boundary between marketing and the SDR is where most definitions get tested. Salesforce describes SDRs as often functioning as a bridge between the two departments, and the documents below show how formal that boundary can become.

Inbound Leads: Marketing Creates the Interest, the SDR Follows Up

Inbound leads come from content downloads, events, and web inquiries, the territory of inbound marketing. HubSpot's documentation defines a marketing qualified lead (MQL) as a contact or company that the marketing team has qualified as ready for the sales team, and it says companies can customize these lifecycle stages (HubSpot Knowledge Base, updated July 17, 2026).

GitLab shows what the follow-up can look like in practice. Its handbook describes inbound-focused SDRs as aligned with marketing on service-level agreements and campaign feedback, and it sets a target of two work hours to respond to net new MQLs and eight work hours to answer inbound replies (GitLab Handbook, Sales Development, accessed October 19, 2026; metric: company-set response-time targets; geography: one global company; confidence: VERIFIED). Those numbers describe one company's rule, not an industry benchmark.

A separate GitLab page on MQL service-level agreements says the response timer stops when a lead's status changes from MQL to Accepted, Qualifying, Qualified, Disqualified, Ineligible, or Recycle (GitLab Handbook, MQL SLAs, modified December 13, 2024; metric: company-set response rule; geography: one global company; confidence: VERIFIED).

Outbound Prospecting Without a Marketing Trigger

Outbound work starts from a target list instead of a form fill. GitLab's handbook describes its outbound BDRs as collaborating with field marketing and account-based marketing on strategic account research. The overlap with outbound marketing is real, because both start from a chosen audience rather than from inbound interest.

What the Two Teams Need to Agree On

GitLab's job descriptions for sales development leaders spell out the shared work. The area vice president role includes working with demand generation teams so the right inquiries flow to the SDR organization, the vice president role includes recommending changes to inbound and demand generation functions based on what sales development learns, and the listed performance indicators include improvement in MQL conversion rates (GitLab Handbook, updated August 27, 2026). Feedback flows in both directions.

The friction between sales and marketing is old, and it is not specific to SDRs. A 2006 Harvard Business Review article by Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and Suj Krishnaswamy, drawn from interviews with pairs of chief marketing officers and sales vice presidents across several industries, describes the strains as economic and cultural: one budget is split between the two functions, and the two attract people who work in very different ways (Harvard Business Review, July 1, 2006; based on the publisher's summary page; confidence: VERIFIED).

Three questions need written answers on any team: who creates the lead, what counts as ready for sales, and how results travel back to marketing. Without them, the boundary is a guess.

Qualification and the Handoff to Sales

Qualification is the decision that turns outreach into a handoff. Teams usually make that decision with a framework, a set of agreed questions, or both.

Qualification Frameworks Such as BANT

BANT stands for budget, authority, need, and timeline. Salesforce says the framework was first developed in the 1950s and has been widely adopted to judge whether a lead is worth pursuing, and it lists limits as well: a focus on transactional details, the risk of treating the questions as a rigid checklist, and a view of the framework as too simplistic for complex B2B sales cycles with multiple stakeholders and an unpredictable timeline (Salesforce, September 2024). The same article suggests picking elements from several methodologies. A framework guides the conversation. It does not replace it.

What a Clean Handoff Carries

Once a lead passes, someone else owns the conversation. HubSpot says lifecycle stages track how contacts or companies move forward in the process, and it describes the sales qualified lead stage as a contact or company that the sales team has qualified as a potential customer. That stage is covered in sales qualified lead (SQL), so this entry stays on the person doing the handoff.

GitLab's lead lifecycle page shows how explicit a handoff can be. It lists nine statuses, and the MQL, Accepted, and Qualifying statuses are owned by the XDR who engages and qualifies the lead. Qualified means a sales accepted opportunity (SAO) has been created and the lead is handed off to the sales team, Recycle holds leads that may be ready later, and Disqualified holds people outside the sales cycle (GitLab Handbook, Lead Lifecycle Management, modified September 18, 2025; metric: number of statuses on one company's page; geography: one global company; confidence: VERIFIED).

CRM products build the same handoff into their records. In Dynamics 365 Sales, qualifying a lead means validating that it is a genuine sales opportunity and creating the corresponding opportunity record, and a lead that will not become an opportunity can be disqualified while keeping an audit trail (Microsoft Learn, updated April 30, 2026). The page names no job title for the person who qualifies. In Oracle's Sales documentation, converting a lead into an opportunity copies notes, interactions, and conversation messages from the lead activity stream and links the converted lead to the new opportunity (Oracle Sales documentation, page created July 3, 2026). In Oracle's model, the notes an SDR writes on a lead travel into the opportunity.

A working handoff note can stay short. One practical format, offered here as a suggestion and not as a published standard, separates four items:

• What the prospect said, in the prospect's own terms.
• What the SDR concluded from it.
• What is still unknown, such as other stakeholders.
• The agreed next step and who owns it.

Record all four in the customer relationship management (CRM) system, so the next person does not start from zero.

Measuring SDR Performance Without Mixing Definitions

SDR numbers circulate widely, and most of them describe different things. Before quoting one, ask what it counts, who was surveyed, and in which year.

Activity Metrics Versus Outcome Metrics

Salesforce lists four common ways companies judge SDRs: activity such as calls and emails, qualified prospects added to the pipeline, meetings booked, and qualified meetings booked. It adds that teams emphasizing activity spend more time on cold calling and emailing, while teams emphasizing qualified leads spend more time on research. The two groups answer different questions, and mixing them in one dashboard is where confusion starts.

One Result, Several Counts

The same week of work can be counted at three points in the lifecycle. A booked meeting is not necessarily a qualified one, and Salesforce lists them as separate measures. GitLab's lifecycle page marks Qualified as the point where a sales accepted opportunity is created, and its handbook names attainment of those opportunities against goal, and net ARR pipeline generated, as indicators for sales development. A team that reports booked meetings and a team that reports accepted opportunities are not describing the same event, even if both call the result pipeline.

Four questions keep any SDR metric honest. They are this entry's own checklist, not a published standard:

• What event is counted: a call, a booked meeting, or an accepted opportunity?
• Who confirms it: the SDR, the account executive, or the system?
• What is the denominator: leads worked, accounts targeted, or reps on the team?
• Over what time window, and how was any target set?

How AI Is Changing the Workflow

AI now touches several steps of sales development, but the strongest sources describe what the tools are designed to do, not how often teams use them or how well they work. Salesforce, itself a software vendor, takes a middle view in its explainer: AI cannot do an SDR's job, but it can speed up common tasks such as prospect research and drafting personalized emails that the rep reviews before sending.

Product documentation shows what that looks like inside a CRM. Microsoft describes predictive lead scoring in Dynamics 365 Sales as a machine learning model that calculates a score for open leads from historical data, to help sellers prioritize leads and reduce the time it takes to qualify one (Microsoft Learn, updated August 7, 2025). Building the model requires at least 40 qualified and 40 disqualified leads created and closed in the training window (metric: minimum data requirement; geography not applicable; vendor documentation of one product, not a performance result; confidence: VERIFIED). Sellers see grades from A to D and the top reasons behind a score (Microsoft Learn, updated August 20, 2025), and the seller still decides what to do with the lead.

Academic work is cautious in its own way. A 2025 framework-based literature review in the Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing reports that AI is used mainly for qualifying prospects and serving accounts, and that generative AI is underused in opening the relationship and presenting the sales message (Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing, 2025, postprint record at zaguan.unizar.es; metric: qualitative review finding; geography not applicable; confidence: VERIFIED). A 2025 article in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence presents a prototype prospecting platform and concludes that AI techniques augment human expertise to identify and engage leads at scale, but its evaluation measures lead discovery and classification accuracy, not actual sales conversions (Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, November 2025; confidence: VERIFIED as reported by the authors, who evaluated their own system).

Neither academic source gives the share of SDR work that AI performs today, and this entry does not estimate one.

Frequently Asked Questions About SDRs

What does SDR stand for in sales?

SDR stands for sales development representative. The role covers early sales work: finding potential customers, contacting them, and judging whether they should speak with an account executive.

What is the difference between an SDR and a BDR?

There is no universal answer. GitLab separates inbound SDRs from outbound BDRs, and Salesforce's US and Canada program places the BDR after the SDR in a career path. A 2023 field study organizes sales development by lead context, such as inbound versus outbound. Check the job description for the lead source and the responsibilities.

Does an SDR close deals?

Usually not. The account executive typically owns the close, though GitLab's job description for commercial account executives also lists prospecting, and Salesforce notes that SDR duties can vary considerably with how the sales team is structured.

What makes a lead ready for an SDR handoff?

The lead meets the criteria the company has agreed on. Many teams use a framework such as BANT to structure the questions, and HubSpot's lifecycle model gives sales a stage for leads it has qualified. Write the criteria down so marketing, SDRs, and account executives apply them the same way.

Which metrics does an SDR team track?

Common choices include calls and emails, qualified prospects added to the pipeline, meetings booked, and qualified meetings booked, according to Salesforce. GitLab lists sales accepted opportunity attainment and net ARR pipeline generated. Define each metric, its denominator, and its time window before comparing teams.