What is an SDR (sales development representative)?

In sales, SDR stands for sales development representative: the person who opens new conversations with potential buyers and turns the interested ones into meetings for the sales team.

Gartner’s sales glossary (archived January 2026) defines the role as someone who specializes in identifying prospective buyers by reaching out to new prospects and qualifying incoming leads. That one sentence holds both halves of the job: outbound, where the SDR starts the contact, and inbound, where a lead has already raised a hand and the SDR decides whether it is worth an account executive’s time.

The letters mean other things outside sales. At the International Monetary Fund, SDR means special drawing rights, a reserve asset the IMF created for its member countries. In engineering it can mean software-defined radio. If you searched for the sales role, you are in the right place.

An SDR’s day is a cycle of choosing accounts, researching them, reaching out by phone, email and social messages, following up, and qualifying the replies, with the target of booking meetings that actually happen.

The Bridge Group’s 2025 report on 351 B2B companies gives the shape of that day in medians: 112 activities, made up of 44 calls, 41 emails, 19 social touches and 8 texts or other, which produce about 4.1 quality conversations. Most of the effort goes into reaching people; a small share of it turns into a real conversation. The sample day below is built from those medians.

The research at the start of the day decides how the rest goes. A call or email with a real reason behind it is easier to answer than one sent to a filtered list. Salesforce’s State of Sales report (6th edition, 2024, 5,500 sales professionals) found that reps spend 70% of their time on non-selling tasks; for an SDR, list building and research are among them. Our guide to B2B sales prospecting covers how to choose and research accounts.

An SDR and a BDR do much the same job of finding and qualifying new buyers, while an account executive takes the qualified meeting and runs the deal to a signed contract.

In the Bridge Group’s 2025 data there were about 2.4 account executives for every SDR, and the most common setup was one SDR supporting two account executives. Titles vary by company, so read the job description, not the title. Our guide to SDR vs BDR covers the two titles in depth.

An SDR is measured mainly on qualified first meetings that are held, and on the pipeline those meetings become, with activity counts used as a check on effort rather than as the goal.

Two cautions keep the numbers honest. Count meetings held, not meetings booked, because no-shows inflate the booked number. And agree with the account executives in writing what a qualified meeting is, so both sides count the same thing. Our guide on how to qualify leads sets out the questions behind that definition.

The median SDR in the Bridge Group’s 2025 report has on-target earnings of $80,000 a year, about $55,000 base salary and $25,000 variable pay.

On-target earnings are what the SDR is paid at 100% of quota, so actual pay moves with results. The median has not changed since 2022, and over the past decade it grew by only about 0.56% a year before inflation. The report also puts median on-target earnings for an SDR manager at $146,000.

For the employer, salary is only part of the cost. With benefits at 30.0% of private-industry employer compensation costs (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 2026), an $80,000 package comes to about $114,000 a year, by our calculation, before tools, data, recruiting and a manager’s time. Our guide to outsourced SDR cost compares that cost with outside options.

The usual SDR career path is about two years in the role, then a move to account executive or to leading a team of SDRs.

Turnover is the employer’s side of the same path. An SDR who is promoted after two years leaves a seat that takes recruiting time and another three months of ramp to fill, so plan for it from the first hire. Account executives are measured on closed revenue, not meetings, so an SDR who wants that move gains most from sitting in on discovery calls with an account executive before the promotion.

In AI, SDR usually appears as “AI SDR”: software that does parts of a sales development rep’s job, such as finding companies, researching them, drafting outreach and following up.

An AI SDR is not a person and does not replace the whole role. It is strongest at the repetitive work at the start of the day in the table above, research and drafting, and weakest at live calls and turning a reply into a relationship. The category is still young: 2025 was the first year AI SDRs appeared as a separate category in the Bridge Group’s survey, at 1% of respondents. Our guide to what an AI SDR is explains how the software works and where it falls short.

Companies get SDR capacity in four ways: hire SDRs, rent them from an outsourced SDR firm, buy AI SDR software, or combine software with a person who works inside their own sales system.

Each route has its own trade-off. Our guide to SDR as a service explains how outsourced SDR firms work, and outsourced SDR vs in-house sets the two side by side on cost, ramp and control. Whichever you choose, the inputs decide the result: a written ideal customer profile, a list of accounts worth working and a message that has already won a meeting or two. Without those, a new SDR, an agency or a tool will mostly send more of a message that does not work. If the founder still closes every deal, start with founder-led sales.

SalesOne does the research half of the SDR job and leaves the conversations with people. S1 deep research agents check each company against your ideal customer profile, keep it or turn it down with the reason, and every buying signal they find is dated and links its source. In SalesOne’s own runs, S1 agents checked 1,051 companies and kept 249, all 802 rejects kept their reason, and each account kept took about 31 searches and 7 pages read (how we measure).

A person approves every message, and every approval is recorded with who gave it. When your team is short of time, a SalesOne SDR is an outsourced SDR who works inside your SalesOne workspace on the accounts S1 agents have already researched, and the SDR’s sequence emails wait for approval. SalesOne is not the right fit if you want outbound run entirely outside your team without approving messages; an agency suits that better.