What does a Sales Development Representative do?
A sales development representative opens conversations rather than closing them — researching accounts, running cold calls and multi-touch email and LinkedIn sequences, qualifying interest, and booking meetings an account executive can work. Indian SaaS teams run this as a measured, high-volume function with weekly activity and meeting targets, and it remains the most common entry point into a tech sales career.
A sales development representative usually has around 0–3 yrs of experience and earns typically ₹4L–₹12L/yr including incentives in India. The day-to-day blends Cold calling, Email sequencing, LinkedIn prospecting and more — this page gives you a ready-to-use sales development representative job description template you can copy, plus the exact skills and salary employers expect.
Sales Development Representative job description template
Copy the 9 responsibilities, 6 requirements and 9 skills below into your job post, then edit the parts that are specific to your company — pay band, location and reporting line.
Select the text above to copy it manually if the button is unavailable.
What are a Sales Development Representative's key responsibilities?
A sales development representative is typically responsible for the 9 duties below, which cover the day-to-day work most employers expect the role to own outright. Paste them into your job post as they are, or cut the ones another team already handles — a responsibility list that claims work the hire will not actually do is the fastest way to lose a candidate at offer stage:
- Research target accounts and build prospect lists matching the ideal customer profile
- Run daily cold-call blocks and handle the first thirty seconds of resistance
- Write and run multi-touch sequences across email, phone and LinkedIn with tested messaging
- Qualify inbound demo requests and marketing leads within an agreed response window
- Apply a qualification framework to separate genuine fit from polite curiosity
- Book and confirm discovery meetings, cutting no-shows with reminders and pre-call context
- Log every touch, disposition and objection so messaging can be improved with data
- Hand over qualified opportunities with research, pain points and next steps documented
- Test subject lines, openers and call scripts and share what worked with the team
What qualifications does a Sales Development Representative need?
Employers hiring a sales development representative in India usually ask for the 6 qualifications below, typically alongside 0–3 yrs of experience. Keep only the ones you will genuinely screen on: every extra must-have narrows the pool, and in the Indian market a long mandatory list filters out strong candidates whose background simply reads differently on paper:
- Comfort making cold calls daily and absorbing rejection without losing pace
- Clear, concise written English suited to short prospecting emails
- Curiosity to research an industry and speak credibly about its problems
- Consistency against activity, meeting-booked and pipeline-created targets
- Discipline with CRM records and sales-engagement tooling
- Coachability — willingness to change a script based on recorded call reviews
What skills should a Sales Development Representative have?
These are the 9 skills employers name most often on live sales development representative listings in India. Treat the first few as the ones worth screening for directly and the rest as signals a candidate can pick up on the job — asking for all of them at once is what turns a reasonable role into an unfillable one:
Listing the three or four skills you genuinely screen on — rather than all 9 — is what keeps a sales development representative posting from filtering out candidates who could do the job.
What does a Sales Development Representative earn in India?
Typical salary (India)
typically ₹4L–₹12L/yr including incentives
Experience range
0–3 yrs
These are typical ranges and vary by city, company and skills. For live, role-specific pay data, see the OnJob salary guide.
Sales Development Representative job description — FAQs
What targets does an SDR carry?
Targets stack in layers: activity at the base — calls, emails, connects — then meetings booked, then qualified opportunities accepted by the sales team, and finally pipeline value created. Mature teams weight the later metrics more heavily, because booking meetings nobody can work inflates a dashboard without producing any revenue.
Is cold calling still effective in India?
Cold calling still works when the list is researched and the opener earns the next thirty seconds by naming a specific, plausible problem. Random dialling from a purchased database does not. Most teams pair calls with email and LinkedIn touches, because a warm second channel raises the odds that a name is recognised when the phone rings.
What career path follows a prospecting role?
The usual progression is a senior prospecting seat, then a closing role as an account executive, typically after twelve to twenty-four months of consistent performance. Alternative routes lead into sales operations, revenue enablement, partnerships or product marketing, all of which value someone who has heard hundreds of real objections first-hand.
What makes a prospecting email get a reply?
Replies come from relevance and brevity — a specific reason for reaching out now, one sentence describing a problem in the reader's own language, light proof that similar companies solved it, and a small ask such as a fifteen-minute call. Long paragraphs, feature lists and flattery about the company website reliably get deleted.