Sales Representative (SDRs & BDRs)

Finds and starts the conversations your firm is not having. Day to day that is building and researching target lists, then outbound contact by email, phone and LinkedIn. Following up with people who went quiet. Qualifying the responses, and booking meetings for whoever closes. It also includes keeping the CRM honest and reporting on what is actually working. What they do not do is replace the relationship-building that wins work in this industry. In professional services the meeting is the handoff point. A rep can get you in the room. A principal is who the client is actually buying. Firms that expect a remote rep to close technical work end to end are usually disappointed. It is worth being clear about that before anyone starts, because the disappointment is a briefing failure rather than a hiring one.

Where the conversation starts. A sales development representative works inbound: someone downloaded, inquired or requested something, and the SDR qualifies them and books the meeting. A business development representative works outbound: they build the list, reach cold, and create interest that did not exist. The skills differ more than the titles suggest. Inbound is about speed and qualification, and the firms that win it are usually the ones that reply first. Outbound is about research, persistence and a message worth reading, and it takes longer to produce anything. A firm with steady inbound volume needs the first. A firm whose pipeline depends entirely on referrals and wants a second source needs the other one. It should also expect that route to be considerably slower before it produces anything at all.

They can open the conversation. They should not be asked to be the expert. In technical selling the rep's job is to be genuinely useful in the first exchange. Understand the industry. Ask a question a prospect finds relevant. And know when to bring in somebody who can go deeper. That is achievable with good onboarding and does not require an engineering degree. What fails is a rep pretending to expertise they do not have, which a technical buyer detects in one question and never forgives. So the handoff to a principal or a technical lead is designed in from the start rather than treated as a fallback. Set that boundary explicitly before the first call is made.

By activity first, outcomes second, and the order matters early on. In the first weeks the honest measures are process: contacts researched and reached, response rate, conversations held, and meetings booked. Those are within a rep's control and they tell you quickly whether the approach is working. Outcome measures such as qualified opportunities, proposals and closed work take longer and depend on a chain of people, not just the rep. Meeting quality is worth watching more than meeting quantity, because a calendar full of unqualified meetings is worse than an empty one. Agree the qualification criteria in writing at the start. Without them, everyone measures a different thing, and the engagement gets judged on a misunderstanding rather than on the work itself.

A defined target, a real reason to call, and somewhere to put the result. The target is specific: which sectors, project types, company sizes and roles, and who is explicitly out of scope. The reason is the message, meaning what your firm offers that a prospect would care about, with proof rather than adjectives. Then the infrastructure: a CRM, an email domain configured so messages arrive, a calendar link, and the collateral a first conversation needs. There is also a compliance layer worth knowing about, since commercial email in the United States is governed by CAN-SPAM and calling is governed separately. Preparing all of that takes a week or two. It is also the difference between outreach and noise, and a prospect can tell which one they are reading within a sentence.