Staff Sales Development Representative

Skills at this level

Communication

— Contacts prospects by phone, email, and LinkedIn using clear, persuasive messaging that establishes rapport quickly and moves a cold or marketing-sourced lead toward agreeing to a meeting.

Persuasion

— Moves a prospect from initial contact to a booked meeting by handling early objections and convincing the lead that a conversation with a higher-level rep is worth their time.

Persistence

— Sustains high-volume outbound effort across long cadences, repeatedly finding and re-contacting new prospects despite low individual response rates to hit activity and meeting targets.

Data literacy

— Reads sales performance metrics — call and email volume, connect rates, meeting-to-SQL conversion — and gathers, presents, and reports this data to track progress against goals.

CRM proficiency

— Manages prospect pipelines, logs activity, and configures automations in Salesforce and HubSpot so that lead status, sequence membership, and hand-off readiness stay accurate.

Sales tool fluency

— Uses sequencers like Outreach and Salesloft to run cadences, contact databases like ZoomInfo and Apollo to source prospects, and conversation intelligence like Gong to review calls — coordinating them into one prospecting workflow.

Market research

— Studies the company's services and the target market to identify new lead sources and ideal-customer-profile segments that expand the top of the funnel.

Lead qualification

— Applies qualification formulas to turn marketing-qualified leads into sales-qualified leads, scoring fit and intent so that only meetings worth an AE's time are booked.

Reporting

— Consolidates individual and team prospecting data into reports that show meeting volume, conversion, and progress toward sales goals over time for leadership review.

Prospect research

— Uses LinkedIn Sales Navigator and contact databases to find decision-makers at target accounts, verify contact details, and import qualified prospects into the CRM.

Coaching and enablement

— Guides SDRs through discovery, objection handling, and closing via playbooks and live call review, raising individual conversion and building repeatable prospecting behavior.

Sales development strategy

— Designs prospecting approaches, cadence structures, and new lead-generation methods, and fine-tunes the end-to-end SDR process to lift pipeline efficiency at scale.

Team performance management

— Sets and monitors booked-meeting and SQL targets for SDRs, holds individual contributors accountable, and manages leveling and career progression across the team.