SDR · BDR (Sales Development Reps)
Sales Development Representative / Business Development Representative
What is an SDR?
- Focused on finding and qualifying early-stage leads
- Hands “qualified opportunities” to AEs
- Split prospecting from closing to boost productivity
In an organization where one salesperson carries everything alone, from building the list to cold calling, proposals, negotiation, and signing the contract, only an hour or two a day is left for actual sales conversations. Separating prospecting fills the AE’s calendar with meetings, but the organization then has to settle a new question: 'what counts as an opportunity worth handing over?' What the split changes is not headcount but how time is allocated and what the handoff criteria are. If those criteria aren’t put in writing, the split just adds labor cost.
An SDR takes the inbound inquiries marketing generates (MQL) and qualifies them by phone and email, while a BDR breaks into target accounts directly, starting with no list at all. In Korean B2B and SaaS organizations, it is common to pair one or two SDRs with each AE. One person typically makes 40–60 call or email touches a day, aiming for 5–8 qualified meetings a week. BANT is a checklist for quickly confirming budget, authority, need, and timing, while MEDDIC digs into the decision-making process and the internal champion on large, long-cycle deals. So it makes sense to switch qualification tools depending on deal size. An SDR is there to filter leads, not to persuade them, and that is what separates the role from telemarketing or inside sales.
The most common mistake in practice is setting a single KPI for SDRs: the number of meetings. To hit the number, SDRs push through meetings with individual contributors who have neither budget nor authority, and AEs end up finishing 7 of 10 weekly meetings in 30 minutes and eventually going back to working their own lists. Agreeing on the SQL definition and rejection rules should come before hiring. Another is treating the SDR seat as a short stop for new hires; if they quit within 6 months, scripts and account contact history vanish with them. Sharing the AE promotion criteria at hiring does far more for retention.
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Jaehyuk ParkHands-on instructor in B2B technical sales and AI-driven sales strategyA role model that took shape as B2B and SaaS sales became more specialized, popularized by books such as Aaron Ross’s Predictable Revenue.
Consider a hypothetical case: Company A, with 90 employees and annual revenue in the KRW 14 billion (≈ US$10,474,300) range, sells industrial equipment monitoring SaaS. Its 6 AEs each handled their own trade-show business cards and website inquiries, so each managed only 3 meetings a week, and new contracts had been stuck at 9 per quarter for a year.
- The VP of Sales approved a 6-month pilot. They cut 2 AE positions, used that budget to hire 3 SDRs, and said plainly at the kickoff: 'From today, working the prospect list is no longer an AE’s job.'
- The marketing lead and the SDR leader sat together for two days and wrote the handoff criteria down as a single sentence. A lead goes to the AE only if it meets all three: '300+ managed assets, access to the executive in charge, and an adoption review within 6 months'.
- Two inbound SDRs followed a rule of calling back within 10 minutes of each inquiry and worked 25 calls a day each. One outbound BDR listed 200 food and pharmaceutical plant accounts and booked 3 first meetings a week.
- In month 3, the AEs pushed back, saying 'too many meetings where they only ask about specs and have no budget'. In response, the team added a rejection ticket system that sends a lead back with the reason written out. The rejection rate fell from 38% in the first month to 14% by month 4.
- Six months later, weekly meetings per AE rose from 3 to 7, and the meeting-to-contract conversion rate climbed from 12% to 21%, taking new contracts from 9 to 19 per quarter.