Glossary / SDR (Sales Development Representative)

SDR (Sales Development Representative)

The role responsible for the top of the funnel — researching prospects, making first contact, and qualifying interest before handing a real opportunity to a closer.

SDR work splits the sales function in two: the SDR generates and qualifies opportunities, and an account executive closes them. The split exists because the two jobs reward different behaviour — prospecting is volume and resilience, closing is depth and patience — and because most people are not good at both on the same day.

In a small MSP there is usually no SDR; the owner is the SDR, the closer, the technician, and the person who forgot to follow up. That is the specific gap automation gets pointed at, and also why claims about "AI SDRs" deserve unusual scrutiny: the failure mode is not a missed quota, it is your company sending something embarrassing to a prospect under your name.

The questions worth asking of any automated SDR are narrow and answerable: what can it send without a human, what stops it, where is that stop enforced, and what record exists afterward of what it actually sent.

How Nexus handles this

The Nexus autonomous SDR only sends after an operator turns it on, and every send passes server-enforced bounds — kill switch, opt-out, suppression, per-tenant daily rate limit — and lands in an immutable audit trail.

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