Sales Development Representative Resume Example

By Curtis Maynard, Head of Recruiter Outreach · Updated June 27, 2026 · ~9 min read

What a Sales Development Representative actually does

A Sales Development Representative (SDR) is the top of the sales funnel — the rep who finds and qualifies the people a company wants to sell to, then books the first meeting. Where an Account Executive (AE) runs discovery, demos, and the close, the SDR sits one step upstream: they research target accounts, reach out cold and warm across phone, email, and social, qualify whether a prospect is a real fit, and hand a vetted opportunity to an AE who carries it to signature. The SDR almost never closes revenue themselves. Their product is the qualified meeting, and their number is a meeting or pipeline quota — typically a target of qualified meetings booked per month, or a dollar figure of pipeline sourced. The whole job rolls up to one question: how much qualified pipeline did you put on the board?

Day to day, the concrete responsibilities usually include: building and researching target-account and prospect lists using tools like ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator; running multi-touch outbound sequences across cold calls, personalized email, and social touches in a sales-engagement platform such as Outreach or Salesloft; making a high volume of dials and sending personalized emails every day; qualifying inbound and marketing-sourced leads against a framework like BANT or a lighter fit/interest screen; booking qualified meetings or demos onto AE calendars; logging every activity and contact in a CRM such as Salesforce or HubSpot with clean data; collaborating with marketing on campaigns and follow-up; and handling the objections and rejection that come with cold outreach without losing momentum. SDRs live in their activity and conversion metrics — connect rate, reply rate, meeting-set rate, show rate, and the percentage of their booked meetings that AEs accept as genuine qualified opportunities.

The setup shapes the role. An outbound SDR cold-prospects net-new accounts and lives on the phone and in sequences; an inbound SDR (sometimes titled MDR, Market Development Rep) qualifies hand-raisers from marketing — demo requests, content downloads, webinar signups — and speed-to-lead matters most. Many companies use "BDR" (Business Development Representative) for the same work, often skewed toward pure cold outbound. Whatever the flavor, the resume's job is identical: prove, with numbers, that you were handed a meeting or pipeline quota and you hit it — and that the pipeline you sourced was real enough for AEs to close.

What hiring managers & ATS look for

SDR resumes face two readers. First a parser files your text into searchable fields, and a recruiter runs literal keyword searches — "Sales Development Representative," "SDR," "Salesforce," "Outreach," "outbound prospecting," "SQL." If those terms aren't written in plain text, you don't appear in the search, full stop. Second, a sales manager or SDR-team lead skims the top third for one signal above all: proof you can generate pipeline and survive the grind of outbound. Because SDR is an early-career role, they are also reading hard for coachability and work ethic. They scan for five things in particular:

The single most common reason a strong SDR gets passed over is a resume that lists activities ("made cold calls," "sent emails," "prospected accounts") instead of output. Those phrases describe motion, not results, and they contain none of the searchable nouns or numbers a sales manager hires on. Every bullet should pair an action with a measurable result — meeting-quota percentage, SQLs accepted, pipeline sourced, conversion rate lifted.

The full resume example

Here is a complete, single-column, ATS-safe example for an experienced SDR in B2B SaaS who is positioning for an AE promotion or a senior SDR role. The title, summary, skills, and bullets are written the way our strategists actually build them — every metric is the kind a sales manager checks, and every bullet leads with a result.

Notice what the example does. The summary front-loads the exact title, years, meeting-quota average, pipeline sourced, ranking, and SQL acceptance rate. The skills block guarantees keyword coverage and groups the stack — prospecting motions, CRM and engagement, data and intelligence, metrics — so a recruiter reads it in two seconds. Every role states the quota in its subheading, and every bullet lands on a top-of-funnel metric: meetings booked, SQL rate, pipeline sourced, connect and reply rate, conversion. That is the whole pattern, repeated.

Key hard & soft skills

SDR hiring weights output heavily, but the soft skills are what actually keep a rep producing through 60-plus rejections a day — and a sales manager reads them between the lines of your numbers. Mirror the hard skills the posting names; let the soft skills show through your bullets rather than as adjectives.

A rep who can read a script will lose to one who can research an account, write a relevant first line, hold a conversation when a prospect picks up, and bounce back from a no without slowing down. Prove those through the work: "tightened pre-call research to lift SQL acceptance," "built sequences adopted across the team," "sustained 65 dials a day through a lean-lead quarter." Those phrases show coachability, work ethic, and resilience as outcomes, not claims.

ATS keywords to mirror

These are the literal terms recruiters and parsers search for on SDR and BDR roles. Pull the eight to twelve that genuinely match the specific posting, confirm you can defend each in an interview, and place each one both in your skills block and, proven, inside a bullet. Do not list a tool you opened once.

Two exact-match details SDR candidates miss: include both the spelled-out and short forms once where relevant — "Sales Development Representative (SDR)," "Business Development Representative (BDR)," "Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)" — because a recruiter may search either, and use the market-standard job title ("Sales Development Representative," "Outbound SDR," "Enterprise BDR") rather than a quirky internal one like "Pipeline Hunter" or "Growth Ninja."

Realistic salary & OTE range

Treat any single number as a starting point, not a ceiling. The biggest levers are segment, location, and tenure: a senior outbound BDR at an enterprise software company in a major metro can earn well above an inbound SDR at an SMB. Most SDR variable pay is tied to meetings booked, SQLs accepted, and pipeline sourced rather than closed revenue, so accelerators are smaller than an AE's — but the role is a launchpad, and the clearest path to a step-change in pay is the promotion to Account Executive. Anchor your expectations to your specific segment and market, and remember that your quantified attainment — the percent of meeting quota you hit and the pipeline you sourced — is exactly what justifies a number at the top of the band, and the promotion that lifts you out of it.

Common resume mistakes Sales Development Representatives make

The throughline across all six: a parser needs clean, named sales text, and a sales manager needs proof you generate qualified pipeline through the grind. Most rejected SDR resumes fail one or both — not because the rep couldn't prospect, but because the page never proved the pipeline was real.

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