What Is a BDR? Responsibilities, SDR Differences, and Sales Handoffs
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Last Updated:
Category: Marketing Glossary
Authors: Shusaku Yosa
BDR stands for Business Development Representative: a role that develops prospect relationships, checks fit and needs, and hands suitable opportunities to sales. Some organizations focus BDRs on new outbound accounts, but the boundary between BDR and SDR is not universal. Define the audience, activities, qualification evidence, and sales acceptance conditions before relying on the title.
The role should help sales spend time on appropriate conversations. Booked meetings, held meetings, accepted opportunities, and wins are different outcomes. A team that rewards bookings without checking those later stages can increase workload while making the pipeline less useful.
Compare BDRs, SDRs, and account executives by responsibilities
Role | Common responsibility | Boundary to agree |
|---|---|---|
BDR | Research accounts, initiate contacts, and qualify fit | New accounts only, existing contacts, or both |
SDR | Respond to enquiries and develop prospective opportunities | Inbound and outbound responsibilities |
Account executive or other sales owner | Discover needs, propose solutions, negotiate, and close | Acceptance point and conditions for returning an opportunity |
Sales operations | Maintain definitions, routing, records, and reviews | Ownership of data quality and decision rules |
Salesforce’s BDR guide notes that BDR and SDR titles can be used interchangeably. Its SDR overview includes both inbound and outbound activities. Therefore, “BDRs always do outbound and SDRs always do inbound” is an unreliable job-design rule. An account executive is also not necessarily a field-only salesperson.
Use the outbound sales guide for contact-channel decisions and the ABM guide for coordinated account selection. ABM is a strategy; hiring a BDR does not automatically create it.
Agree four decisions before hiring or launching the role
- Specify suitable and unsuitable accounts. Include the problem you can address, delivery requirements, and constraints rather than an industry name alone.
- Agree sales acceptance criteria. Record confirmed needs, the prospect’s desired next action, and unresolved questions, not just title and company size.
- Define contact and recordkeeping rules. Preserve information sources, appropriate contact conditions, ownership, and stop requests across the team.
- Check capacity. Allow time for research, conversations, meeting preparation, and records, then confirm that sales can receive the resulting opportunities.
An ideal customer profile describes relevant characteristics. It is not the same as a researched list of actual accounts. Use the profile to identify candidates, check present fit, and build the working list. Within one account, distinguish users, approvers, and contracting contacts. Information availability is not unconditional permission for any contact method.
Use an explicit research-to-handoff record
Stage | What to record | Completion check |
|---|---|---|
Account research | Fit reason, source and date, constraints, exclusions | Facts and assumptions remain distinguishable |
Contact | Basis, person, message, response, and preferences | An agreed next action or stop decision is clear |
Meeting preparation | Purpose, participants, time, and open questions | Prospect and sales owner share expectations |
Handoff | Acceptance decision, owner, next date, and rejection reason | Sales explicitly accepts or returns the opportunity |
Review | Unsuitable contacts, missed meetings, and later progress | The stage requiring improvement is identifiable |
A fictional handoff might say: “Confirmed: separate departmental spreadsheets support monthly budget work. Hypothesis: reconciliation is burdensome. Unknown: access requirements and implementation timing. Agreed next action: the operational contact and manager will explain the current process.” Do not invent a budget or turn an inferred problem into a confirmed statement.
A booking followed by missing context is a handoff problem, not necessarily a volume problem. Define where an opportunity goes if timing is unsuitable; lead nurturing may be appropriate when it matches the person’s wishes. Include the condition for reconsidering it.
Worked KPI example: preserve the denominator
The following figures are fictional. During one period, a team makes 100 contact attempts involving 50 people, books 10 meetings, holds eight, and passes four opportunities accepted by sales. The example assumes at most one booking per person; several people may belong to one company, which must be tracked separately.
Metric | Fictional calculation | Definition to preserve |
|---|---|---|
Booking rate by person | 10 ÷ 50 = 20% | Repeated attempts do not add people |
Booking rate by attempt | 10 ÷ 100 = 10% | Keep separate from the person-based rate |
Attendance after booking | 8 ÷ 10 = 80% | Specify when rescheduled meetings become final |
Acceptance after a held meeting | 4 ÷ 8 = 50% | Keep acceptance criteria consistent |
Cost per accepted opportunity | JPY 200,000 ÷ 4 = JPY 50,000 | Declare cost scope and observation maturity |
The fictional JPY 200,000 covers the research, contact, and recordkeeping costs defined for this example. In practice, state which labor, tools, and external services are included, and avoid counting the same cost twice. JPY 50,000 per accepted opportunity does not establish profitability without information about subsequent revenue, margin, and delivery costs. None of these rates is an industry benchmark.
For win rates, follow the same contact cohort and allow comparable time for opportunities to mature. Dividing this month’s wins, including older opportunities, by this month’s contacts mixes populations. Report immature opportunities separately rather than treating them as losses.
Review quality and capacity alongside activity
Investigate unsuitable contacts, refusals, missed meetings, and sales rejection reasons. More bookings are not automatically better if sales cannot respond or the booked meetings are irrelevant. There is no universal promise of multiplied pipeline or a fixed number of months to establish the role.
- Keep account, person, attempt, and meeting units distinct.
- Preserve the difference between confirmed needs and assumptions.
- Share stop requests with every relevant owner.
- Separate bookings, held meetings, acceptance, and wins.
- Check sales capacity and response commitments.
The conversion and KPI hierarchy guide helps define outcomes, while the CRM implementation guide explains company, contact, and deal relationships. Start with decision-ready definitions rather than a long list of activity targets.
Connect the next decisions
For related decisions, see outbound sales practice, CRM implementation, conversion and KPI design.
Xtrategy provides company, contact, and deal records alongside project planning and monthly budget-versus-actual management. Review the Xtrategy feature list to decide whether those management functions fit your team’s workflow.
