Sales Development Representative
also referred to as: sales development representatives · sdr · sdrs
60 statements across 29 episodes · 25 bullish · 13 bearish · 21 people on the record · first statement Jan 24, 2018 by Mark Roberge · across every show →
Everything said about Sales Development Representative, oldest first
Jan 24, 2018 negative
Roberge: Blending inbound and outbound duties on SDRs fails
“Salespeople will always find the path of least resistance to get to their number, and when you give someone a taste of inbound leads, and then you force them to cold call too, they're, it's, they're really gonna struggle to pick up the phone.”
Jul 3, 2019
Sep 19, 2019 positive
Lawrence: Promoted SDRs ramp 600% faster than external SMB sales hires
“In fact, when I look at my performers across SMB, the ones that came in through the SDR org, like, hands down, the most successful people. Right? You already know that they're a culture fit. You're sure of the competence fit. And they ramp 600% more quickly th…”
Mar 18, 2021 positive
Dec 30, 2021 bullish
Benfer: Predicted in 2021 that sales teams would adopt AI by 2024
“It actually is a cost saver, and you're not going to be so headcount reliant the more system intelligence that you have to feed your team. So, That's what I would change, because we're still in too much of a manual process, and there are incredible tools out t…”
Dec 30, 2021 positive
Appleyard: SDR hiring is the biggest lever for company-wide diversity
“As any sales leader knows, especially if you have an SDR organization, if your company has a goal of changing sort of the composition of the organization, we hire so many people in sales, and they, we hire them in so much in that entry level role, and they can…”
Dec 30, 2021 neutral
Baird: Outreach runs a five-week transition program preparing SDRs for AE roles
“We also have them doing a, there's a five week that they get nominated into preparing them to be an SMB AE, so our small business AE team. They have a five week, they get nominated into it, they get to work with the AEs, they get to learn what that's like, pre…”
Dec 30, 2021 positive
Appleyard: Mandating Deal Shadowing for SDRs Accelerates Account Executive Ramp Times
“Like it happens maybe because it's a big deal or because somebody is being mentored, but if that were actually built into the program, you would need more SDRs because they would have less time and, But I think if you did that, it would make the ramp time into…”
Jan 27, 2022 positive
Delatorre: AE-led outbound pipeline generation increases volume and lead respect
“When you have AEs feeling that it's their responsibility to generate pipeline, now, number one, there's more pipeline, that's great, but number two, whatever pipeline they get from their SDRs or inbound for marketing is a gift from the heavens, and they treat …”
Jun 24, 2022
Jul 26, 2022 positive
Zocchetto: Outbound SDRs, not AEs, drive growth in sales-driven SaaS
“And it's not AEs, so people closing deals that are driving, you know, the figures, the growth, but it's the SDRs, and especially SDR outbound, which will you know, generate new leads on top of the leads that will be generated by marketing.”
Aug 16, 2022 negative
Dec 1, 2022
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Nilsson: Hire Two SDRs Before a Head of Sales or Marketing
“And so the second role that I advocate for a very early stage founder after that content person is two SDRs. There is no head of revenue. There's no head of marketing. It's a content person and two SDRs, and those SDRs should be booking meetings for the founde…”
Dec 1, 2022
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Nilsson: Snowflake's 223 SDRs Make 10,000 Dials and 25,000 Emails Daily
“We have 223 SDRs at Snowflake. They report to twenty-twenty-one frontline SDR managers who report to four second line directors. At the end of every given day, we have over 10,000 dials. Probably have sent 25,000 emails. This is on a daily basis.”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Dec 1, 2022
Nilsson: Inbound Leads From Active Prospects Should Bypass SDRs
“You don't want your SDRs following up on a lead from an active in-flight prospect. You want your sales reps. So if you do this right, An inbound lead operation should make sure that leads are getting dispensed and dispersed to the right people, and you have th…”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Nilsson: SDRs Should Shadow Every Discovery Call They Schedule
“The smart thing also to do is make sure that your SDRs are on the call that they help set up for their AEs. They should be on every call. They'll learn the language. They'll learn what it is the product can do. They'll hear all the use cases and the stories.”
Dec 1, 2022
Nilsson: Deals Under $25k Should Bypass SDR Qualification Entirely
“In my opinion, if you are selling a product or a service for less than 25,000, that should take, you know, that should take Right? If you're selling something for a thousand or 3000 or 10,000, you got to do that in days, if not one or two weeks. You do not wan…”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Nilsson: Early SDR Teams Need One Engagement Tool and Two Data Providers
“If I was an early stage founder and I was just starting to get to revenue after I had the person that's generating content and messaging, I would get sales engagement tool, and I would get two data providers. That is all an SDR needs to get going.”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Nilsson: Compensate SDRs on Executed First Meetings, Not Pipeline Progression
“The SDR can control the meetings that they set up. They can control the quality of the qualification information. What they cannot do is they cannot control whether or not that meeting that executes becomes an opportunity and goes on to close. That is the job …”
Dec 1, 2022
Dec 1, 2022 negative
Nilsson: Untriaged Inbound Leads Cause SDR Burnout
“When SDRs are used to just manage inbounds You might overtake them and burn them out, because at the end of a long day of going through a bunch of inbound leads from a trade show, not like Saster and they get 99 out of a hundred blanks, and they've left 99 voi…”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Nilsson: Hire Raw SDR Candidates Over Those With Prior Experience
“I don't need to see a track record of success in anyone. In fact, I'm not looking. I don't want any bad habits that people, for SDRs that come from other operations, I want to take someone raw, and I want to kind of teach them the way I was taught when I got m…”
Dec 1, 2022
Nilsson: Hiring a Single SDR Risks a One-to-Two-Year Operational Setback
“If you hire one SDR and you put them on the front lines, you will not know if they work out for three to six months. And if you're a founder that's never done this before, it might take you even longer. When you figure out that you've made that mistake, now yo…”
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Apr 5, 2023 positive
Jul 12, 2023 negative
Jul 12, 2023 negative
Lemkin: Full-stack AE model does not work for most SaaS companies
“He talked about how even Brex, which is, which was still relatively SMB for a long period, how the AE's had to do half of their own deals through outbound, and so he really described, in a way, a full stack AE, right, and people talk about that, and I think th…”
Jul 12, 2023 positive
Jul 12, 2023
Aug 15, 2023
Cassidy: Outbound SDRs cost $1,000 to $2,000 per qualified meeting
“And if somebody told me, I'm not sure how accurate is, but it seems accurate, you know, on average, like with an outbound SDR, it's like basically like a thousand, you know, somewhere between a 1002 thousand dollars cost per sort of qualified meeting.”
Oct 27, 2023 neutral
Nov 23, 2023 positive
Jan 4, 2024 negative
Enterprise startups with long sales cycles should avoid SDR revenue quotas
“I think when you're at a more enterprise company and it takes six to nine months for a deal to close, it's really hard to put SDRs on a revenue quota because they're really only in the role for nine months to a year and a half.”
Jan 4, 2024
Always hire two SDRs initially to accelerate learning and benchmarking
“When you do hire your first SDR, hire two because they will be able to share learnings with one another and really accelerate the time to effectiveness because they're trying and failing, they're trying and succeeding, and then they can share both the failures…”
Jan 4, 2024 positive
Kelly: Recruiters make ideal early SDR hires due to transferable skills
“And then I would say also, if you're not just hiring directly from college, if you're actually getting people that have some work experience, which I highly recommend, especially for first time hires, if you don't have systems and process in place, I've had a …”
Jan 4, 2024 neutral
Top-of-funnel SDR quotas drive quantity while down-funnel quotas drive quality
“The way that I think about this is the further up the funnel you go, which sales qualified opportunity is towards the top, what you are solving for is more quantity over quality. And the further down the funnel you make the SDR performance measurement, like wh…”
Jan 4, 2024 positive
Jan 4, 2024 negative
Kelly: Arbitrary SDR dial quotas lead to box-checking behavior
“If you tell a rep to make 70 dials,
Guess what they're going to make?
70 and have a very hard stop at 70.
And so eliminating like the, what I'll call this like checking the box type of activities throughout the day and like truly getting to a point where you h…”
Feb 9, 2024
Jun 13, 2024 positive
Jul 5, 2024 neutral
Jul 10, 2024 negative
Jul 19, 2024 negative
Cabane: Full AI SDR agents from YC startups produce mediocre results
“For example, like all of the YC companies that are doing like AI agents that does the entire SDR for you, like the output of that is like, eh, it's not great. It's okay, but it's not great, ok? What we're seeing working, however, is like very specialized LLMs …”
Jul 19, 2024 bearish
Aug 28, 2024 negative
Lerman: Replace outbound SDRs with equity-backed advisors for direct executive introductions
“Instead of investing heavily in BDRs and SDRs and outbound to generate demand, Use your stock options to bring on advisors who can make a fast introduction to the top people immediately and get you in. No BDRs can be able to get a meeting with the CEO of some …”
Sep 19, 2024
Lemkin: Great sales leaders constantly cultivate reps ready to join them
“Any great sales leader always has a couple of folks ready to go with her the next day. They, and I know you got to be careful with this word this day, but it's true. This word, they groom them. They groom them. The best sales leaders are meeting with tons of f…”
Sep 19, 2024
Lemkin: Stretch Sales Leaders Must Have Recruited Quota-Hitting Reps
“Make sure, even in a stretch candidate, that they have hired two to three salespeople that hit quota before. Not 20, not 200, but it's not enough if they inherited a team. It's not enough if they were on a sales team. It's not enough if they were an SDR that g…”
Oct 18, 2024
Oct 18, 2024 bullish
Nov 1, 2024 neutral
Persson: Snowflake employs 300 SDRs and hires 200 annually across cohorts
“So we have about 300 SDRs and they are in seats for 15 months. Then they move into inside cells, which means that we're hiring 200 SDRs every year. So we have 10 different cohorts in our cells development academy joining every month essentially.”
Dec 18, 2024 positive
Lemkin: Greenhouse Reached $10M ARR via Outbound with CEO Managing 12 SDRs
“The CEO, for whatever reason, in the early days, maybe loved is the wrong word, but he enjoyed managing, he managed 12 SDRs himself before he hired a sales leader... So greenhouse got to ten million through outbound, right?”
Jan 8, 2025 positive
Blonde: Brex AE-sourced outbound generated exponentially higher ACVs than SDR-sourced pipeline
“The AE sourced opportunities converted at a significantly higher rate to customers, and they generated far more revenue. So the ACV of AE sourced outbound opportunities was significantly, almost exponentially higher than the SDR sourced opportunities.”
Dec 10, 2025 bearish
Lemkin: Most SDRs and qualifying BDRs will be eliminated by 2026
“And I really think most SDRs will die next year, but the meat, and I know we throw around these terms differently. The BDR that sort of smarmily qualifies you that that's going to die. Like we just, there's no need for that with these tools.”
Dec 10, 2025 positive
Dec 10, 2025 bullish
Feb 11, 2026 negative