An SDR creates and qualifies opportunities; an Account Executive (AE) turns them into signed revenue. They work the same funnel at different stages, with different KPIs, different pay structures and different daily rhythms. The SDR seat is the usual entry point and the AE seat the usual next step, 12 to 18 months later once quota has been hit.

Who does what in the funnel

The SDR owns the top. List building, cold calls at the hours people pick up, inbound follow-up, live qualification, a booked meeting and a handover note. The SDR's week ends when the meeting is held and the AE accepts it as an opportunity.

The AE owns the rest. Discovery, demo, proposal, pricing, negotiation, procurement, signature, and often the first months of the account. The AE's week ends when a deal moves a stage or closes.

The split exists because the two jobs need different rhythms. Prospecting is a volume game with a daily routine; closing is a judgment game with a calendar full of other people's constraints. A rep asked to do both does the one with the nearest deadline, which is always the deal, and prospecting stops the week pipeline looks fine.

How each role is measured

SDR KPIs. Conversations per day (our north-star is 20), meetings held per month, AE acceptance rate, pipeline sourced per quarter. Dials and connect rate are diagnostics.

AE KPIs. Closed revenue against quota, win rate, average deal size, sales cycle length, pipeline coverage (usually 3x quota). Activity barely appears.

The link between the two is the acceptance rate. If AEs accept under 60% of SDR meetings, either the SDR is booking the wrong people or the two roles disagree on what qualified means. Fix the definition before you fix the SDR.

Pay: the gap and why it exists

We do not run a salary survey, so these are the ranges we see in offers from our French customers in 2026. A Paris SDR sits around €32,000-45,000 fixed and €42,000-65,000 OTE depending on seniority. A Paris SaaS AE sits around €50,000-70,000 fixed and €85,000-130,000 OTE, higher for enterprise. The split moves from 70/30 at SDR to 50/50 at AE.

The gap is not about seniority. It is about variance. An SDR's variable is predictable: meetings held, month after month. An AE's variable depends on three or four deals a quarter, each of which can slip. A junior AE who misses two quarters can earn less than a senior SDR who hits every month. The ceiling is higher; so is the drop to the floor.

I spent five years as an AE at Google Cloud, with a quota that went from €1.5M to €10M. The best months were spectacular and the slow quarters were long. SDRs who want the AE seat should want that variance, not just the ceiling.

What AEs expect from an SDR-sourced meeting

Ask any AE what a good handover looks like and you get the same five items. Put them in the handover template.

• The trigger. Why this account, why now: a hire, a funding round, a website visit, a closed-lost deal from last year.
• The pain in the prospect's words. Not "interested in efficiency" but "they have three reps dialing by hand and booking two meetings a week".
• Who else is involved. The decision-maker, the user, the person who said no last time.
• What was promised. The agenda the SDR set on the call. An AE who opens with a different agenda loses the meeting in the first minute.
• Timing. Budget cycle, contract end date, anything with a date.

In the benchmark we built with Quentin Despas (Katana) on 1,000,000 French cold calls, discovery questions starting with "how" lift conversion by 190%. The SDR who asks "how do you handle this today?" gives the AE the pain in the prospect's words for free.

Ratio and collaboration

The common ratio in European SaaS is two to three SDRs per AE on outbound-heavy motions, one per AE when inbound is strong, and none under five salespeople, where a full-cycle AE with a parallel dialer usually wins. The right number depends on how many first meetings an AE can run per week (about 8-12 for a mid-market AE) and how many a prepared SDR books (7-10 a week at a trigger-opener meeting rate).

Three habits keep the pair working:

1. A written qualification definition both roles signed.
2. A 15-minute weekly review of every meeting: held, accepted, why not.
3. SDRs sitting in on one discovery call a week. It is the best training for the next role and it improves the handover immediately.

Moving from SDR to AE

The path is normal, not automatic. Managers promote on four numbers: consecutive quarters on quota, meeting-to-opportunity conversion, pipeline sourced that actually closed, and the quality of discovery on recorded calls. In our experience the move takes 12 to 18 months for reps who hit quota from month four, longer for reps who ramped slowly.

What transfers: resilience, cadence discipline, opener craft, CRM hygiene. What has to be built: deep discovery, multi-stakeholder deals, pricing conversations, and the patience to run a 90-day cycle. Shadow AE calls from month six. Run your own discovery on a small inbound deal from month nine. Ask for the promotion criteria in writing at month ten.

How Sonik approaches the SDR-AE handoff

Sonik keeps the two roles on the same data. The SDR's session in the dialer records the trigger, the questions asked and the outcome, and the handover note is generated from the call rather than typed from memory. The AE opens the meeting with the prospect's own words on screen.

The signals layer also works for AEs. Closed-lost deals and dormant leads from the AE's own book resurface as calls for the SDR, with context. Half of our pipeline comes from signals that were already in the CRM; many of them were AE deals from a year earlier.

Conclusion

SDRs make opportunities; AEs make revenue. Same funnel, different stage, different variance in pay, and a clear path between the two. The handover is where most of the value is lost. This week, write the five-item handover template above, and have your AEs grade the last ten SDR meetings against it.