After 12 to 24 months as an SDR, most reps have four realistic paths: Account Executive, SDR team lead or manager, Revenue Operations, and Customer Success or Account Management, with pre-sales as a fifth for technical products. AE is the default and pays the most at the ceiling; the others pay well, carry less variance, and fit people who liked different parts of the SDR day. Choose on what you enjoyed, not on the title.

The default path: Account Executive

Most SDRs move to AE, usually after 12 to 18 months on quota. The job changes more than the title suggests. An SDR has 20 conversations a day and a result every week; an AE has four or five live deals, a 60 to 120 day cycle, and a result every quarter.

In the offers we see from French customers in 2026, the move typically lifts OTE by 50-80%, from roughly €45,000-65,000 to €85,000-130,000 in Paris SaaS, with a 50/50 split instead of 70/30. The variance rises with it. An AE who misses two quarters can earn less than the senior SDR they replaced.

Pick this path if you liked the discovery part of the call more than the dial, and if you can live with a quarter's worth of uncertainty.

Four alternative paths that pay

• SDR team lead or manager. Usually opens at team size five to eight, when the sales director stops being able to coach every rep. The job is hiring, onboarding, call reviews, list quality, and arguing for tools and territories. Pay in France sits close to a mid-level AE on fixed, lower on variable. Pick it if you spent your SDR months helping new hires and rewriting the playbook without being asked.
• Revenue Operations. CRM architecture, sequences, dialer configuration, dashboards, territory and comp design. RevOps teams in European SaaS are small and growing, and ex-SDRs who kept a clean CRM are in demand because they know what reps actually do with fields. In our experience reps use only about 20% of the signals in their CRM; the person who makes the other 80% usable is a RevOps hire. Pay is mostly fixed, steady, and often reaches AE fixed levels within three years.
• Customer Success or Account Management. Onboarding, renewals, expansion. Less cold rejection, more long relationships, and a variable tied to retention. Pick it if your favourite calls were the "How have you been?" ones to known contacts, which in our benchmark convert about 10% versus 1.5% for a standard cold open.
• Pre-sales or Solutions. For technical products: demos, proofs of concept, technical discovery. Fixed-heavy pay, high demand in DACH and the Nordics. Pick it if you were the SDR who read the API docs.

What each path demands

Here is the skill each path tests first, so you can start building it while still an SDR.

• AE: multi-threaded deals. Track ten open threads in one account without dropping one.
• SDR manager: coaching from data. Listen to a call and name the one change that moves the number, then check it moved.
• RevOps: systems thinking. Explain why the sequence tool, the dialer and the CRM disagree on how many calls happened yesterday, and fix it.
• CS/AM: account planning. Know a customer's renewal date, their usage trend and their internal champion's next promotion.
• Pre-sales: product depth. Run a demo that answers the prospect's question rather than the script's.

A self-test from your SDR day

Pull your last month and answer honestly.

1. Which hour of the day did you look forward to: the 4pm calling block, the call review with the new hire, the afternoon fixing the CRM, or the follow-up with the customer who closed?
2. Which number did you check first on Monday: your meetings, the team's, the dashboard's accuracy, or a customer's usage?
3. What did colleagues ask you for help with?

Three answers pointing the same way is your path. If they point to AE, good, that is the default and the market is ready for you. If they point elsewhere, say so early; the alternative paths are rarer and need a seat planned ahead.

Timing and how to raise it

Decide between month ten and twelve, not month eighteen. Promotion decisions in European SaaS follow the budget cycle, and seats are planned in Q4 for the year after. Book a career conversation with your manager with three things: the path, the number you have already built toward it (six months on quota for AE, two reps you onboarded for manager, a CRM clean-up you ran for RevOps), and the skill you want to build in the next quarter.

Managers rarely say yes on the spot. They do remember who asked with a plan.

For managers: make the paths visible

SDR turnover in Europe is expensive and mostly self-inflicted. Reps leave around month 14 when they cannot see the next seat. Publish the criteria for AE, open the manager seat at team size six rather than ten, give RevOps and CS a standing invitation to recruit from the SDR team, and hold a career conversation every quarter, not at the annual review. The cheapest retention plan is a visible path.

How Sonik approaches SDR careers

Our founder went from AE at Google Cloud (five years, quota from €1.5M to €10M) to building a sales tool, which is a sixth path nobody lists. What made it possible was the same thing that makes the other five possible: a record of what worked on the phone.

On teams using Sonik, that record exists by default. Connect rate by slot, conversations per day, conversation-to-meeting rate, AE acceptance and scored calls give a rep a portfolio to bring to any of the five conversations above, and give a manager the data to say yes with confidence.

Conclusion

AE is the default SDR career path and the right one for most. Manager, RevOps, CS and pre-sales are real paths with steadier pay, for people who liked a different part of the day. This week, run the three-question self-test on your last month, and book 30 minutes with your manager before the end of the quarter.