SDR

SDR - Sales Development Representative, role at the entrance to the sales department. The task of the SDR is not to sell, but to separate: to sort out the incoming flow, weed out irrelevant requests and transfer to the manager only what suits the profile of the ideal client.

The meaning of the role is purely economic. The hour of the manager who closes the deals is worth more than the hour of the person who qualifies the applications. If a manager spends half the day talking to people who will never buy, the company is paying expensive time for cheap work.

When SDR is not needed: small flow of applications, narrow and homogeneous segment, short transaction cycle. In these conditions, qualification is done by regulations and a couple of required fields in the form, and a separate role does not pay off.

The key metric for SDR is not the number of calls, but the percentage of transferred leads that the manager considers relevant. If it is low, the SDR either lets in what is unnecessary or cuts out what is needed, and in both cases the filter does not work.