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The Roles · Who sells it

Sales development representative

Written from published sources

The first human contact between a company and a prospective customer. Sales development sits at the top of the funnel: researching accounts, reaching out, qualifying interest, and handing over a conversation that somebody else will close. The role exists because prospecting and closing reward different temperaments and different hours, and separating them lets each be done properly.

What the day looks like

  • Researching accounts well enough that the first message is about them rather than about the product.
  • Outreach at volume, across whichever channels currently reach people.
  • Qualifying: establishing whether there is a problem, a budget and a reason to act now.
  • Handing over to the closing seller with enough context that the prospect avoids repeating themselves.
  • Recording what happened, since the pattern across hundreds of attempts is the useful output.

What it answers for

  • Meetings that are genuinely qualified, rather than meetings that fill a calendar.
  • The record being accurate, since the next person works from it.
  • Representing the company in the first impression it makes.

What it is measured on

  • Qualified meetings booked, and the proportion that progress.
  • Activity: attempts, connections, conversations.
  • Pipeline generated, and eventually the revenue attributed to it.

Who it receives from

Marketing
Leads, campaigns and the reason somebody might already be interested.
Sales leadership
The territory, the target accounts and the current priority.
The closing sellers
What a good meeting looks like, which is learned rather than briefed.

Who it serves

Account executives
Conversations with people who have a reason to have them.
The company
Pipeline, which is the input everything downstream depends on.
Prospects
A route to somebody who can answer, at the moment the question is live.

Who else has a stake

  • Everybody who receives the outreach, most of whom did not ask for it.
  • The brand, which is shaped by how the first contact reads.
  • The forecast, which begins here.

What it takes

  • Resilience, since the role is built on a low response rate by design.
  • Research, because relevance is the whole difference between contact and noise.
  • Brevity in writing, held under pressure to say more.
  • Discipline with the record, since the value compounds across attempts rather than within one.

What the job turns on

Activity and qualification pull against each other. A representative measured purely on meetings books meetings, and the closing seller spends the following month discovering which ones were real; one measured on meetings that progress works slower and hands over conversations worth having. The organisations that get this right define qualification jointly with the sellers who receive the work, which turns a handover into an agreement rather than a transfer.

The published sources

Where it leads

The work itself

The Practice covers how this work is done — triage, escalation, evidence, handover — across the whole corpus.

Read The Practice