探花精选

I worked as a sales development representative (SDR) at IBM for the first five years of my sales career. I learned then (and appreciated even more as an account executive) that SDRs are often the unsung heroes of high-performance sales teams. I still appreciate the critical role that SDRs play in gathering account intelligence and building credibility with campaign responders when they call or email me when my research crosses paths with their campaigns.

My experience in this role provided me with a sales development process and a foundation of sales skills. As my career progressed, I often applied the ice-breaking and credibility-building skills I learned as an SDR to be a more successful inside sales and field sales rep. I learned how to build rapport and engagement with prospects, use value-based selling techniques, actively listen to prospects and customers for signals, ask questions, and handle objections.

In this post, I’ll define SDR sales and what an SDR is. Next, I’ll dive into the skills every sales development rep needs to master and, finally, how to succeed as an SDR.

Table of Contents

• What is SDR sales?
• 11 Essential SDR Skills
• What is an SDR?
• What does an SDR do?
• How to Succeed as a Sales Development Rep
• Improve Your SDR Skills

Next, let’s review what SDRs do and how their responsibilities differ from other sales roles.

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What is an SDR?

A sales development representative is a sales or marketing team member who is responsible for prospect outreach and lead qualification related to inbound marketing campaigns. They are often confused with business development representatives (BDRs) who develop leads through outbound prospecting within a defined territory or industry.

As an inside sales team member, an SDR focuses on inbound prospecting, moving leads through the pipeline, and qualifying the leads they connect with. While SDRs don’t close deals, they help sales reps by determining whether a lead will be an ideal customer fit.

What does an SDR do?

According to , which surveyed 1,000 sales leaders, 70% expect to add more SDRs to their team in the next year. The field appears to be growing, but what exactly does the role entail?

SDRs are measured on their ability to move leads through the sales pipeline. They focus on qualifying, contacting, and nurturing quality leads — strengthening relationships with the right people by offering value.

, co-founder at , says, “SDRs are the real engine behind any company’s pipeline — they figure out who’s actually worth the sales team’s time. Their channels? Grinding through cold calls, firing off emails, and sliding into LinkedIn DMs.”

According to Gartenhaus, SDRs need research chops, a thick skin for rejection, and the ability to talk to strangers “without sounding like a robot.”

“ At the end of the day, their paycheck depends on setting up meetings and making connections that stick,” Gartenhaus says.

He adds that he isn’t looking for order-takers or script-readers at his company. “The SDRs who crush it aren’t just playing the numbers game — they’re studying their data, crafting messages that feel like they were written just for you, and constantly tweaking their approach based on what actually works,” he explains.

And what does the 9-5 of an SDR involve?

, director of sales and partnerships at , talks about a general day in the life of an SDR at the organization he works at.

• 9-10 a.m. Catching up on emails and responses from prospects, as well as following up while the leads are still warm. On Monday, the company-wide all-hands meeting takes place.
• 10 a.m.–12 p.m. Proactively reaching out to potential customers (either through cold-calling, email, WhatsApp, pre-booked meetings, or any other channel the prospect prefers). If it’s Monday, we’ll have our weekly sales team meeting before lunch. At 12 pm, we have our lunch break.
• 1 p.m.–5 p.m. More meetings and follow-ups. Any team meetings we had planned in advance usually happen around this time. Depending on the day of the week, a weekly one-on-one meeting takes place between an SDR and their manager. At the end of the day, we encourage planning for the next day or week to ensure a smooth start. On Fridays, the sales team catches up on their weekly metrics and quarterly OKRs, and prepares for the following week.

While SDRs qualify and cultivate leads, sales reps are measured on their ability to close deals that meet or exceed their quota for a given time period. Although the two are different, these roles rely on each other to meet their individual and business goals.

From start to finish, the inside sales team structure functions like this:

1. The marketing team sends lead information to the SDRs.
2. The SDRs are responsible for qualifying and nurturing leads until they’re ready to purchase.
3. Sales reps or account executives take over at this stage to position the right products at the right time to close the deal.

This workflow is simple and serves as the foundation for most sales operations.

There are eleven essential skills that will help you succeed as an SDR. If you’re an SDR, bookmark this list for reference. If you’re a manager, you’ll want to share this list with your team in your next sales meeting.

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1. Video Prospecting

Video prospecting has gained popularity over the last few years, and for good reason.

Simply put, video prospecting is customized outreach in a short video clip, usually lasting less than two minutes. Unlike a phone call or an email, the prospect can connect with you on a more personal level without the time commitment of scheduling a Zoom call. An SDR doesn’t need to be a technical master or Oscar-worthy movie star to create effective videos — you just need to be comfortable on screen.

At 探花精选, we’ve seen great results with video prospecting. Our team uses — an easy-to-use tool that lets you quickly create videos using your webcam and screen share function. You can embed video clips in your emails, LinkedIn posts, Google Slides decks, and it also .

If you are experiencing on-camera fatigue or camera shyness or want to perfect your video delivery at scale, you can even create an that (according to Vidyard) looks and sounds like you.

There are many more software options for video prospecting, including and . I’ve tried these apps for giving guided demo tours and sharing recorded presentations. I find they enrich emails and LinkedIn posts with more humanity.

Pro tip: Practice your video skills by creating short, engaging clips to interview yourself, deliver value with a quick tip, and ask to schedule a call. Review the video and take note of your delivery and how it might come across to a viewer.

You can also optimize your process by monitoring the performance of different types of videos to see what prospects prefer best. The more videos you make, the more efficient your workflow will be. In time, you’ll be able to whip up customized videos like they’re emails.

2. Highly Customized Outreach

As an SDR, balancing quantity and quality when prospecting can be tricky. You want to build a healthy pipeline for your sales reps, but you know that connecting with qualified leads takes time.

, a sales manager at 探花精选, balanced quality and quantity in his outreach efforts. Emails were personalized and timely for the prospect and addressed an immediate need. Here’s an example he shared with me:

Hi Michael,

I hope this email finds you well! Based on my research on LinkedIn, you seem to be heading marketing initiatives that focus on Dunder Mifflin’s overall growth strategy.

After doing some research on Dunder Mifflin, a bunch of things stood out to me as reasons to have a timely conversation about how inbound marketing 探花精选 could help:

• Employees at Dunder Mifflin have explored our all-in-one solution before. However, the timing wasn’t right.
• You’re currently using a few different marketing tools — A, B, C, D, and E. I’m curious how things are going with them and if you’d be open to a conversation about 探花精选 and using an all-in-one marketing automation platform.
• Looks like you understand the importance of content marketing inbound marketing based on the blogs, white papers, & testimonials — but there’s a huge missed opportunity because it doesn’t seem to be gated.
• You’ve got “buy now” and “order” options on the site, but you’re missing out on converting at least 90% of your total website traffic to the site.
• Here at 探花精选, we’ve had some exciting product updates to the marketing & sales platforms as of January 2025.

Are you interested in connecting sometime this week? Feel free to book 15 minutes with me here [insert link].

Thanks in advance,

Brandon

Pro tip: Develop a scalable process for writing customized emails and prospect research. can help you gather important information about a business in one glance. Once your prospecting blitz is underway, a tool like 探花精选’s can help you plan calls to connect.

3. Active Listening

How can SDRs continue to add value to a sales process that is becoming more automated every year — especially in the prospecting stages?

In my opinion, the best way for an SDR to demonstrate their value-add is to adopt active listening techniques. A chatbot might be able to qualify a lead, but it can’t ask layered sales questions or listen to information as well as a human being (at least not yet). The interaction between a prospect and an SDR should be genuine and helpful — not robotic and forced.

No matter what your company sells, you must be highly attuned to phrases that indicate a prospect could be a good fit for your company’s products or services. This is where active listening comes in. An adaptable and empathetic SDR focuses on gathering valuable information that will help them move a prospect further down the pipeline rather than checking lead qualification boxes.

For example, my sales team had a weekly SDR “film club” where we would review a seasoned SDR’s recorded call. In one of the call reviews, this SDR discovered that the prospect’s company offered a freemium version of its product. The prospect confirmed the annual value of an average new customer, and the SDR immediately moved on to the next topic.

Swing … and miss. The SDR could have explored the following with his prospect:

• How many new freemium users do you generate a month?
• How do you nurture relationships with freemium users? Customers?
• What percentage of freemium users convert to paid users?
• What are common triggers for freemium users to upgrade?
• How do you re-engage users who used the free product once several months ago?

The answers to these questions would have been crucial to understanding how to solve a major pain point for the prospect. In general, these questions can uncover a wealth of information about virtually any business that offers a free or reduced-price trial of their product.

These questions help an SDR understand the opportunities within the prospect’s company. Plus the prospect can reflect on things they may have been putting off for another time simply because no solution existed yet.

I remember working on an outbound campaign, connecting with customers who my company wanted to migrate off their legacy platform to the modern SaaS technology. I called the CTO of a government agency, who surprisingly answered the phone on the second ring. We had several interesting conversations, and I used active listening skills that I had just learned in sales methodology training.

The customer was very interested in migrating to the latest technology and had managed the modern platform in his former job. Yet he had some public sector procurement policies to follow before he could invest in the migration.

We built a strong relationship, and fortunately for me, I moved to a field sales role where I could close this deal, which ended up being a seven-figure sale, including services and applications.

The CTO told me that I was the only person he liked working with at my company because I listened to his needs and was responsive and proactive in meeting his expectations. He also said he realized he could be demanding to work with and had been voted the most difficult customer by another IT firm. I think I learned more from working with this customer than any other throughout my sales career.

As you can see from my story above, practicing active listening means being adaptable. That means straying away from a prepared checklist and recognizing when an opportunity to dig deeper presents itself. A successful SDR understands the value of being present and having a real conversation.

Pro tip: To improve your active listening skills, level up your sales conversations by:

• Taking notes and telling the prospect you are doing so.
• Regularly confirming important statements the prospect makes.
• Monitoring your body language so you’re not signaling boredom or lack of attention.

Active listening means knowing when it’s time for you to speak up and when it’s time to sit back and listen.

When you’re an active listener, you engage with the prospect/lead and gather the pivotal information you need before you send them further down the sales pipeline.

4. Strong Follow-Up

According to sales professionals, the are meeting in person and phone calls. Ideally, SDRs want to speak with a prospect on the phone, but sometimes, a voicemail is the next best option.

But leaving a good voicemail is harder than it sounds.

In a short amount of time, you have to entice a prospect you’ve never spoken with to call you back. Some people like to be concise: “Hi, I’m [Salesperson] from [Company]. I would like to speak with you about X strategy. Give me a call back at XXX-XXX-XXXX.”

Personally, I like to add a snippet of value to this equation: “I saw you are building a new manufacturing facility in X. I would like to tell you how we helped our customer, Dunder Mifflin, manage their production and distribution growth.”

Leaving a good voicemail is an indispensable skill for an SDR and thus requires practice.

What other channels are there? For the , 1,000 sales leaders were asked what KPIs their SDRs are tracked on. The results were:

• 75% said calls.
• 70% said emails.
• 41% said LinkedIn messages.
• 40% said texts.

Pro tip: Don’t simply go through the motions so you can log activity in your CRM — be committed to quality touchpoints across all the activities you complete to move a prospect through the pipeline.

5. Coachability

Coachability is one of the most essential traits an SDR can have. Confidence is important, but an SDR’s ego can cloud their ability to receive and implement candid feedback.

The best SDRs proactively seek out coaching from high-performing peers and crave honest feedback from their managers. Getting real-time feedback is best, but you can also build out a list of all the questions or challenges you faced in a given week and debrief them with your manager during a scheduled one-on-one.

Feedback is crucial as it offers a third-person perspective on your performance and areas of improvement. People often have certain biases that shape how they view themselves — an external viewpoint helps counteract these biases and provides a more objective approach.

I had some great managers as an SDR, yet I admit there were times when I wasn’t as receptive to their coaching guidance as I should have been. I remember times when it was difficult to connect with someone on the phone, which made getting into a coachable mindset challenging. It felt like the only coaching I could apply was voicemail etiquette. Yet, on the occasions I did speak with a live prospect, I was more confident navigating through discovery calls to qualify leads.

Pro tip: A great way to champion coachability is to seek coaching and development opportunities. You can attend sales training and ask others (like mentors or coworkers) for feedback on your performance to evaluate your skills and better your processes. If it’s challenging to receive feedback, consider that you and the person giving it have one common goal: improving the sales process as a whole.

6. Self-Awareness

As an SDR, you should be aware of your strengths and weaknesses and let them guide the technical depth or business breadth of your calls. It makes the prospect feel they are speaking with an advisor who wants to understand their business challenges — not just a telemarketer. When you know what you’re amazing at and where you can grow, you can create strategies for dealing with a bad call or rejection.

For example:

• An SDR who lacks organization skills might create a physical checklist they can keep handy for every call so they don’t miss any steps.
• An SDR who is really good at building rapport might need to set a timer for each call so they don’t spend too much time with a single prospect and get off track.
• An SDR who finds themselves interrupting prospects when on call might keep a sticky note on their desk with a reminder to briefly pause before responding.

Pro tip: Self-awareness will help you and your sales manager analyze your performance, including the wins and setbacks, and reflect on what went well and what didn't.

Self-aware SDRs will ask for feedback from managers and colleagues to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for growth. They’ll also take the time to review their past performance, like sales call transcripts, to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for growth.

7. Organization

Sales processes vary from person to person, but adopting and sticking with them is critical to staying organized. Schedule management helps SDRs manage their days and prioritize the activities that are key to their success (e.g., email outreach, calls, and meetings.)

When you’re organized, it’s easier to keep track of your leads, qualify your pipeline, and design a workflow that helps you nurture important relationships that lead to closed deals down the road.

Pro tip: Organizing your day-to-day sales processes will help you master your outreach cadence so you can have thoughtful and meaningful prospect interactions.

You could write out a to-do list to prioritize your tasks for the day and plan for upcoming ones. Or integrate your Google or Outlook calendar and use the of your CRM to keep track of key dates in your process.

8. Curiosity

Successful SDRs are curious and eager to learn. Being curious about learning a new product, industry, or organizational knowledge can help them in their current role, but it will also help them as they grow in their career.

SDRs should initially have a solid foundation of their company’s products and services and clearly understand their buyer personas and the everyday challenges prospects face. This helps them to position the strengths of their company and its solutions relative to prospect needs and competitive solutions in the marketplace. However, they should be guided on how deep they dive into customer needs and solution details before passing an opportunity to a more senior salesperson.

When I was an SDR at IBM, I always asked lots of questions in meetings and training sessions. My colleagues relied on me to ask the questions they wanted to but were concerned they might look silly for asking them. I probably tested the adage, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” several times. However, my curiosity was an asset as an SDR, and I think it is today as an avid researcher and writer.

Pro tip: Curiosity is something that you can build, and you can remain curious as an SDR if you:

• Continuously seek out new leads to broaden your pipeline.
• Take the time to prospect and learn about leads.
• Ask questions during conversations.
• Commit to continuous learning on the job.

Gathering new information is relatively easy and often free through internal resources offered by your organization, online research through blogs (like 探花精选), training sessions from sales professionals, industry events, and meetings with colleagues. Learning is a continual process that great SDRs should prioritize.

9. Relationship-Building

say that building relationships and connecting with people is the most important part of selling.

Effective SDRs are able to build genuine, trusted relationships with prospects. They should prepare them for your company’s multi-tiered sales process before turning them over to your account manager for deal closure.

I found the best way to build relationships with prospects was to help them understand what an SDR’s role and responsibilities are and to assure them that I would be their advocate.

To be a successful relationship-builder, you must be able to communicate with a wide variety of people across multiple channels. Whether you are connecting with a contact over email, presenting to a prospect in a virtual meeting, or sending them a pre-recorded video, you’ll want to clearly communicate your points and ideas that keep them engaged.

It’s also important for SDRs to have sufficient emotional intelligence to connect and empathize with prospects and understand their goals and needs.

Pro tip: A great way to become an effective relationship builder is to build rapport with prospects. It’s easier to do so if you’ve researched their business and their role within it so you can have conversations centered entirely around them and their needs. Finding common ground during your research can help you break the ice with casual conversations about your shared interests.

10. Resilience

There’s no doubt that SDRs have a tough job. Unlike sales reps, whose main goal is to close deals, most SDRs don’t get that type of glory.

I remember challenging days from my time as an SDR when it was difficult to get prospects on the phone or respond to voicemails or emails. I was doing A/B testing on my voicemail scripts, icebreaker lines, and emails before I knew what A/B testing was.

In addition to the hard skills we’ve reviewed, maintaining a positive mindset is a soft skill that — for many people — can’t be learned in a book. Resilience takes practice. If you’re flat or discouraged one day, it can resonate over the phone. Your prospect will pick up on your low energy and may consider it a red flag about working with your company.

At the same time, bad calls happen to the best of us. Recovering and learning from them is challenging yet necessary for progressing in your sales career. Whether a prospect was rude or you made a mistake, it’s okay to feel frustrated. However, allowing those feelings to derail your motivation for the rest of the day will negatively impact your next batch of calls.

Pro tip: Resilience is not necessarily something that can be taught, but becoming more resilient as an SDR means:

• Understanding that a “no” isn’t personal.
• Knowing that having a bad day doesn’t define your skills.
• Reframing setbacks as an opportunity to figure out how to improve the situation instead of getting stuck in it.
• Practicing objection handling.

Don’t let these temporary roadblocks ruin your day — or the prospect’s day, either. Resilience is crucial for keeping your head in the game. Developing this ability now will also be invaluable down the road when you have to recover from losing a big deal without skipping a beat.

11. Overcoming Objections

This last skill is critical to sales development rep success: objection handling. It’s true that 35% of sales reps say that overcoming price objections is their biggest challenge — but that doesn’t have to include you.

Overcoming objections is a skill that most reps develop over time. They learn the solutions their business offers and develop an understanding of their value and how they work. When you can position these solutions to eliminate a pain point for the prospect, you start to develop trust — which is a key factor that influences whether they’ll buy or not.

I discovered that my best discovery calls were when I asked open-ended questions in the beginning and allowed prospects to describe their current state and challenges. I would wait for the prospect to fully describe their needs and priorities before describing how my company could address their needs.

I found that a better understanding of the big picture helped me to thoroughly address objections and how my company (and possibly its partners) could help them address their business challenges. Interrupting to discuss product features and functions often could take the conversation off on a tangent that wasn’t an effective use of the prospect’s time (or mine).

Pro tip: Handling objections can be one of the biggest obstacles sales reps overcome in their careers. Our free offers templates and best practices you can start using today in your calls and emails.

You can also implement the practices I’ve mentioned on this list, like gathering peer feedback on how you handled objections or even partnering with more experienced SDRs and salespeople to learn more about how they handle objections and move on from them.

How to Succeed as a Sales Development Rep

I spoke to former SDRs along with sales and marketing leaders on tips to succeed as a sales development rep. Here’s what they advise:

1. Keep the focus on the prospect, not on you.

, a former Fortune 500 C-Suite executive who now helps sales leaders become better at authentic selling tactics, says that fear is often the biggest obstacle to success for business development.

He thinks the key to overcoming that fear is to focus on the prospect, their needs, and how you can help them — not on yourself.

“It shows up as sales reluctance, even in the most experienced rep. We tend to learn our lessons a little too well, both good and bad. The bad experiences stick with us, making us hesitant. The good experiences make us comfortable and potentially complacent. The key to long-term success is committing fully to an outcome that genuinely benefits your client or prospect,” Ramey says.

He adds that when you shift your focus outward, fear takes a backseat, and authentic connections drive results. “When it is no longer about you, the pressure is no longer on you,” explains Ramey.

2. Master the art of efficient follow-ups.

, CEO of , a sales SaaS platform, who also has a background in enterprise sales, says, “It’s normal for sales reps to focus more on the first touchpoint but fail to engage prospects consistently going forward. I find that reps who create a structured follow-up cadence (calls, emails, even SMS) tend to see better results.”

He’s seen firsthand how persistence separates top SDRs from the rest in his company. For example, one rep recently helped close a high-value deal after seven touchpoints over two weeks — something that wouldn’t have happened if they had stopped after one or two attempts.

“The key is to add value at each interaction rather than just ‘checking in.’ Whether it’s sharing a relevant case study or addressing an objection, every touchpoint should move the conversation forward,” he mentions.

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3. Remain flexible and adaptable.

“Adaptability is one of the most important qualities of a successful SDR. Every prospect and deal is different, so you can’t always trust one script, however perfectly thought-out it might be. So, read the room and adjust your approach based on the conversation,” says from Omnisend, who specializes in tech sales in SaaS companies across his decade-plus sales career.

He mentions that his willingness to adapt shaped his whole career. For example, when he first joined his current company, he initially aimed for a partnership role. However, after discussing with the team, realized that sales fit better.

Additionally, he advises that sticking to the basics of your company’s onboarding plan might yield only average results.

“But if you’re curious enough to find answers to questions and customer pains yourself, you’ll accomplish more and move ahead faster because you’ll naturally look for out-of-the-box solutions. This won’t just set you apart — it will also allow you to quickly adapt to different prospects, situations, and the constantly changing market,” says.

4. Get buyer-side exposure from the start to truly understand the other perspective.

, CEO at , an agency specializing in growth strategy, SDR acceleration, and marketing systems that drive pipeline, says, “Ask any sales manager what they do to onboard SDRs, and they’ll give you the same responses: cold call scripts, email cadences, CRM training. The problem? None of those are going to teach how to sell.”

His agency handled the process a bit differently for a client. Instead of putting new SDRs into outbound directly, the agency had them reverse-engineer the sales process first. How?

• Hearing real sales calls.
• Breaking down objections.
• Rewriting email pitches from lost deals.

They learned sales from the buyer’s side first, then started prospecting.

“SDR ramp time dropped from six months to 45 days. Their first cold calls were warm because they already knew the conversations buyers were having,” he adds.

5. Having the right mindset matters.

, a former SDR manager, says that he stepped into tech without ever making cold calls, sending a cold email, or ever using or knowing what a CRM was. Seven months later, he had already surpassed the senior SDR role and was promoted to SDR manager over a team of 12-13 SDRs.

How did Hutchinson do this?

He credits positive self-talk and vivid imagery. “I truly convinced myself that becoming a top rep and making a massive impact was inevitable, and that’s exactly what happened,” says Hutchinson.

The biggest piece of advice he would give to anyone who wants to perform at a high level as an SDR and find long-term success (not just in software sales but in life) is learning to “see” and “feel” the end from the beginning. But what does that mean?

“It means your perception truly does shape your reality. If, on day one as an SDR, you are already vividly imagining yourself as a top SDR manager or account executive, whatever path you want to take, your actions naturally begin to align with those thought patterns, and what you once considered a dream starts to materialize into your reality,” he explains.

Improve Your SDR Skills

In my opinion, consistent practice is key to mastering SDR skills. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and continuous learning (and taking action) will help as you grow in your career. For me, the most foundational skill is self-awareness. If you are aware of your strengths and weaknesses, you will be more open to coaching and improvement, and you will be more attentive to the needs of your prospects.

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