Sales Development Representative (BDR / SDR)

How to hire a Sales Development Representative for your SMB

Before you write the job posting, settle three questions. They decide whether the hire is the right lever and which profile you actually need.

Question 1: Do you need an SDR, an Account Executive or an Inside Sales? The SDR generates pipeline through outbound and qualifies upstream, without closing. The Account Executive takes over with deep discovery, negotiation and closing. Inside Sales often does both on short cycles and small basket sizes. If your average sales cycle is under 30 days and your basket size under 5 k€, you are probably looking for an Inside Sales, not an SDR. If your current AEs spend more than 40 percent of their time cold calling, you are looking for an SDR to take the load off. Settle this ratio before writing the ad, otherwise you attract mismatched profiles.

Question 2: Outbound-heavy or marketing-fed? In an SDR position the range is wide: 90 percent cold calling (you are starting the sales engine) or 30 percent outbound with 70 percent qualification of inbound marketing leads (you have a mature inbound funnel). The ideal profile differs strongly: an outbound-heavy SDR needs very high resilience to rejection and an almost industrial cadence discipline; a marketing-fed SDR needs qualification discipline and reactivity (an inbound lead not called back within 5 minutes loses half its value). Without this framing you attract candidates looking for the opposite and disappointed after hiring.

Question 3: First SDR or n-th in an existing team? The first SDR builds the prospecting machine from zero: choosing the ICP, sequences to test, tooling to set up, rituals to establish with the AEs. They need more autonomy and more closeness to the Sales Manager. The n-th joins an existing cadence: they have to integrate into an established structure without rebuilding everything. You recognize these two profiles through different interview questions (see the Evaluation section).

If the three answers converge on a full-time SDR position (and not an AE, an Inside Sales or a marketing reinforcement), see the ready-to-use template on the Job description tab. An indicative capacity calculation: an SDR typically generates 8 to 15 qualified meetings accepted by the AEs per month in the outbound-heavy mode, 15 to 25 in the marketing-fed mode. Above 30, check whether qualification holds; below 8, check the quality of the ICP or the opening.