BDR vs SDR vs AE: A Practical Guide to Improving Sales Team Performance in 2024

What Are BDR, SDR, and AE Roles? The Quick & Dirty Definitions

Welcome to the alphabet soup of sales. If you’ve ever felt like you need a secret decoder ring to understand sales team structures, you’re not alone. Let's cut through the jargon. In a traditional setup, these roles are like specialists on an assembly line, each with a distinct job to move a prospect from a stranger to a happy customer.

Business Development Representative (BDR): The BDR is the hunter. Their main job is outbound prospecting—they actively seek out and engage potential customers who may have never heard of your company. Think of them as the scouts, exploring new territories and finding potential talent.

Sales Development Representative (SDR): The SDR is the qualifier. They typically handle inbound leads—people who have already shown some interest by downloading a guide, signing up for a webinar, or contacting you directly. Their mission is to vet these leads to see if they're a good fit and ready to talk to a salesperson.

Account Executive (AE): The AE is the closer. Once a lead has been qualified by a BDR or SDR, it’s handed off to the AE. Their focus is on running demos, negotiating terms, and ultimately, closing the deal and bringing in revenue. They're the star players who score the goals.

BDR vs SDR vs AE: A Quick Comparison

Here’s a simple breakdown of how these roles stack up against each other:

Key Responsibilities and Skills: A Deeper Dive

Now that we have the basics down, let's look at what a day in the life really looks like for each role and the skills needed to crush it.

The BDR: The Hunter

BDRs live on the front lines of outbound sales. They are responsible for creating new opportunities from scratch, which requires a blend of research, persistence, and creativity.

Typical Responsibilities:

• Researching and identifying potential companies and contacts that fit the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

• Executing cold outreach campaigns via email, phone, and social media (especially LinkedIn)

• Crafting personalized messaging to break through the noise and capture interest

• Booking initial discovery meetings for Account Executives

• Methodically tracking all activity in the CRM

Skills Needed: Resilience (you'll hear "no" a lot), strong research abilities, excellent written and verbal communication, self-motivation, and organization.

The SDR: The Qualifier

SDRs are the gatekeepers of quality. They ensure that the sales team spends its time on leads that are actually worth pursuing. In some organizations, the SDR and BDR roles are blended), but when separate, the SDR focuses on warm leads.

Typical Responsibilities:

• Responding quickly to inbound leads from the website, marketing campaigns, etc

• Conducting discovery calls to understand a prospect's needs and pain points

• Qualifying leads against a defined set of criteria (like BANT or MEDDIC)

• Nurturing leads that aren't quite ready to buy yet

• Scheduling qualified meetings and handing them off to an AE with detailed notes

Skills Needed: Active listening, curiosity, empathy, strong organizational skills, and the ability to think on your feet and ask insightful questions.

The AE: The Closer

The AE takes the baton from the SDR/BDR and runs the final leg of the race. This is a high-stakes role focused on navigating complex buying cycles and turning qualified opportunities into closed-won revenue.

Typical Responsibilities:

• Conducting in-depth product demonstrations tailored to the prospect’s specific challenges

• Building relationships with key decision-makers and champions

• Creating and presenting proposals and quotes

• Negotiating contracts and pricing

• Managing a pipeline of deals and forecasting revenue accurately

Skills Needed: Deep product knowledge, strategic thinking, strong presentation and negotiation skills, relationship-building, and persistence.

How These Roles Actually Work Together

In theory, the handoff from BDR/SDR to AE is a smooth, seamless process. A qualified lead, tied up with a neat little bow, is passed over, and the AE works their magic. In reality? It's often a mess. Notes get lost, context is missing, and the prospect is forced to repeat themselves. It’s the business equivalent of a dropped call.

This is where modern sales teams need to evolve. It's not just about the handoff; it's about the feedback loop. AEs need to provide feedback to SDRs on lead quality. SDRs need to share insights from the front lines with marketing about which messages are resonating. BDRs need to know which of their outbound accounts actually turned into revenue.

This is where a unified platform becomes critical. When everyone is working from the same playbook, with the same data, the process becomes less of a relay race and more of a synchronized team effort. A platform like Topo acts as that connective tissue, ensuring all prospect information, outreach history, and qualification notes are in one place. The AE can see exactly what the BDR did to get the meeting, making the transition feel like a continuation of a single conversation, not a brand new one.

Career Progression & Salary Benchmarks

For ambitious sales pros, understanding the career ladder is just as important as knowing the job descriptions. The SDR/BDR role is the most common entry point into a tech sales career, and for good reason—it’s a trial by fire that teaches you the fundamentals.

The typical progression looks like this: SDR/BDR → AE → Senior AE/Team Lead → Sales Manager/Director.

Moving from an SDR to an AE role usually takes 12-24 months and depends on consistently hitting your targets and demonstrating the skills needed for a closing role. Here’s a rough idea of what you can expect in terms of compensation in the US market, based on data from sources like RepVue and Glassdoor (these can vary widely by location and company):

• SDR/BDR: $60,000 - $85,000 OTE (On-Target Earnings)

• Account Executive: $120,000 - $180,000 OTE

• Senior Account Executive: $180,000 - $250,000+ OTE

As an SDR, my day was a numbers game—dials, emails, meetings booked. Moving to an AE role was a shift from quantity to quality. Now, I might only manage 10-15 active deals at a time, but each one is a deep, strategic relationship I have to nurture. The skills I learned as an SDR—resilience and organization—are still the foundation of my success.

Specialized vs Full-Cycle: Which Model is Right for Your Team?

The traditional, specialized model has its merits. You get experts at every stage of the funnel. But it can also create silos and inefficiencies. This has led to the rise of the full-cycle sales model), where one rep handles everything from prospecting to closing. This is especially common in startups and smaller businesses trying to stay lean.

So, which is right for you? There’s no magic answer, but here’s a breakdown to help you decide.

The Case for Specialized Roles (BDR/SDR + AE):

• Pros: Deep expertise at each stage, clear career progression, easier to train and onboard new reps into specific functions

• Cons: Potential for bad handoffs, higher total headcount cost, can create a siloed team culture

The Case for the Full-Cycle Model:

• Pros: A single point of contact for the customer, reps have full ownership of their deals, lower headcount cost, greater agility

• Cons: Reps can get spread too thin, risk of burnout is high, requires a “jack-of-all-trades” skillset that can be hard to find

To figure out what fits, ask yourself: Is our sales process highly complex? (Advantage: Specialization). Are we a small team that needs to be nimble? (Advantage: Full-Cycle). Is our main bottleneck finding new leads or closing them? (This can help you decide where to specialize first).

How AI is Rewriting the Sales Playbook

Here’s the thing: the debate between specialized and full-cycle models often misses the point. The real question isn't which structure is better, but how you can make your chosen structure smarter. This is where AI changes the game entirely.

The most time-consuming, soul-crushing parts of the BDR and SDR jobs are the manual, repetitive tasks: finding companies that fit the ICP, hunting for correct contact data, writing and sending hundreds of emails, and endless data entry. This is exactly where reps burn out. But what if your BDRs didn't have to spend 80% of their day just finding who to talk to?

This is Topo's entire philosophy. We believe the future of sales is a powerful synergy between human expertise and AI automation. Our platform provides you with AI SDRs that handle the heavy lifting of outbound sales:

• Audience Building & Prospecting: Our AI agents identify companies and contacts that match your ICP based on thousands of data points and intent signals, like new job postings or tech adoption

• Data Enrichment: No more manual searching. The AI finds and verifies contact information automatically

• Personalized Outreach: The AI executes multi-channel campaigns, sending tailored messages and follow-ups at scale

This doesn't make your human reps obsolete—it makes them superhuman. By automating the grind, Topo frees your BDRs and SDRs to focus on strategy and high-value conversations. It empowers your AEs by delivering a steady stream of genuinely qualified meetings, complete with all the context they need to close. It makes a full-cycle model sustainable by automating the top-of-funnel work that leads to burnout. An AI SDR doesn’t replace your team; it becomes its most efficient member.

Conclusion: Build a Smarter Sales Engine

Whether you structure your team with distinct BDRs, SDRs, and AEs or opt for a full-cycle model, the goal is the same: create a repeatable, efficient engine for growth. The traditional lines between these roles are blurring, not because the jobs are disappearing, but because technology is allowing us to redefine them. The best structure is one that leverages automation to free up your talented humans to do what they do best—build relationships and solve problems for customers. By embracing the synergy of AI and human skill, you can build a sales team that is not only effective but also more strategic and resilient.