SDR (sales development rep): what the role does, SDR vs BDR, pay, and tools

Sales development exists because closing deals and finding new ones are different jobs. An AE who spends half the week prospecting has less time for discovery calls, demos, and negotiation. So the company splits the funnel: SDRs work the top, from a cold account to a first meeting, and AEs take it from the meeting to a signed contract.

The work of an SDR breaks into a few stages. They pick accounts from a target list or from inbound leads, research the company and the person, and reach out across channels until someone responds. When a prospect engages, the SDR qualifies them against the team's criteria (budget, need, timing, or whatever framework the team uses), books the meeting, and writes a handoff note so the AE does not start from zero.

It is usually an entry-level sales role, and for many people it is the first job in tech sales. The usual next step is a promotion to AE, often after a year or two, though some SDRs move into SDR management, sales operations, or GTM engineering.

Plenty of companies use the two titles for one job, and a job post titled BDR at one company may describe exactly what an SDR does at another. Where a company does split them, the line is usually inbound versus outbound.

Some companies flip the definitions, and others use BDR for reps who prospect into partners or new markets. The job description tells you more than the title does.

Activity numbers are easy to count, so they are what most dashboards show first. The ones that matter are further down the funnel. A good SDR scorecard has a few activity inputs to coach on, and is paid on outcomes.

The most cited source on SDR pay is the Bridge Group's SDR Metrics report. Its 2025 edition (published February 6, 2025, surveying 351 B2B companies, mostly North American SaaS) reports these medians:

Variable pay is usually tied to meetings held or opportunities accepted, sometimes with a kicker when those opportunities close. Paying on booked meetings alone tends to fill AE calendars with no-shows. Expect pay above these medians in New York and the Bay Area, and for SDRs selling into enterprise accounts.

The Bridge Group's 2025 survey found a median of one SDR for every 2.4 AEs, a ratio it says has barely moved since 2018. The right number for your team depends on how much pipeline each AE needs and how much of it comes from inbound. A team with strong inbound can run fewer SDRs. A team selling into a large outbound market, or one where AEs do no prospecting at all, often runs closer to one to one.

SDRs usually report to an SDR manager who sits in sales, and a few companies put sales development under marketing because it works so many inbound leads. Either way, the SDR team and the AEs need one written definition of a qualified meeting, or the handoff becomes an argument. The sales operations guide covers how that gets set up.

A lot of an SDR's week used to go to work that software now does well: building lists, finding contact data, reading a company's site and news before a call, and drafting a first email. A GTM engineering setup automates that layer. It pulls the accounts that match the ideal customer profile, scores them, watches for buying signals, and puts a short brief in front of the rep. The SDR spends the saved hours on conversations.

AI SDR products go a step further and try to run the outreach themselves, from prospecting to booking. They can work for simple, high-volume motions. The usual failure points are reply handling and messages that are confidently wrong about the prospect, which is why I keep a person approving anything that goes out under a real name. The AI SDR tools page compares the products with published pricing, AI sales agents breaks the job down task by task, and AI SDR alternatives covers building your own instead.

The likely outcome is smaller SDR teams covering more accounts, each rep with better data. When OneGTM built Coastal Recruiting a scored, signal-driven outbound system with people approving the messages, accepted candidate intros went from 72 in April 2026 to 340 in August (the Coastal Recruiting case study has the details). It also changes the SDR career path. Many GTM engineers started as SDRs, because they already knew which parts of the job were worth automating. The State of GTME report and the GTM engineer salary calculator show what that role pays.