A Sales Development Representative (SDR) turns a target list and the signals sitting in your CRM into qualified meetings for Account Executives. In 2026 the job is judged on meetings held and pipeline created, not on dials. A good SDR day is built around two calling blocks at the hours prospects actually pick up, with research before and follow-up after.

What an SDR does, mission by mission

Strip the job description down and an SDR has five missions. Everything else is support work.

• Build and prioritise the list. Pick the accounts and contacts worth a call this week, starting with the ones showing a signal: a website visit, a job change, a closed-lost deal from last year.
• Call. The phone is still the channel that books meetings fastest. The benchmark we built with Quentin Despas (Katana) on 1,000,000 French B2B cold calls puts the average connect rate at 11.3%, so volume matters, and so does timing.
• Qualify live. Ask how the prospect handles the problem today, confirm there is a reason to meet, and book while you are on the line.
• Hand over cleanly. Write the context the AE needs: trigger, pain, who else is involved, what was promised.
• Keep the CRM honest. Outcomes logged, next steps dated, dead contacts marked. In our experience reps use only about 20% of the signals already in their CRM, mostly because nobody keeps it clean.

Email and LinkedIn sequences sit around these five. They warm contacts up and keep the thread alive between calls. They rarely replace the call.

The SDR KPIs that matter in 2026

Dials are an input. If you pay an SDR on dials, you get dials. Measure the funnel in this order.

1. Conversations per day. Our north-star is 20 real conversations per SDR per day. At an 11.3% connect rate that means roughly 180 dials, which is only realistic with parallel dialing.
2. Meetings booked and meetings held. Held is the number that counts. A 30% no-show rate is a qualification problem, not a calendar problem.
3. AE acceptance rate. The share of meetings the AE turns into an opportunity. Below 50%, the SDR is booking the wrong people or promising the wrong thing.
4. Pipeline sourced per quarter. The number the CFO understands.

Connect rate, talk time and sequence replies are health indicators. Look at them when a result KPI drops, not as targets.

Skills worth hiring for

The skills that separate a 2% SDR from a 10% SDR are specific and measurable on a call recording.

• The opener. In the benchmark, 65% of reps open by explaining what they sell. Openers built on a trigger (a hire, a funding round, a visit to your pricing page) reach a 7-10% meeting rate against 2-3% for pitch-first openers.
• Discovery questions. Questions starting with "how" lift conversion by 190% compared with closed questions.
• Objection reflexes. Asking "What do you mean?" before answering an objection lifts conversion by 197%. It is the cheapest skill to coach and the rarest to find.
• Cadence discipline. In our experience, most connects happen within the first three attempts. The SDR who calls back on day two and day four wins.
• CRM hygiene. Boring, and the base of everything above.

SDR salary in France and Europe

We do not run a salary survey, so we give no market figures here. Pay usually combines a fixed salary with variable earnings, and it rises with seniority and a record of hitting quota; check current public salary sources for your city before you set a package.

In our experience the fixed/variable split often sits around 70/30. Variable paid on meetings held and accepted, with a kicker on pipeline that closes, keeps the SDR interested in quality. Variable paid on dials does the opposite.

The question candidates ask most is not the salary. It is the path: when and how do I become an AE? Write it in the job description.

A typical SDR day, built around pickup hours

The benchmark shows the best slots across personas are 4pm (15.8% connect rate) and 10am (14%). 8am is 9.8%. Founders pick up more around 10am, marketing around 4pm, HR around 1pm. The day should follow the data, not the calendar.

• 8:30-9:30. Review yesterday's outcomes, pull today's signal list, write the trigger for each of the top 30 contacts.
• 9:30-11:30. Calling block one, parallel dialing. Founders and sales leaders first.
• 11:30-12:30. Follow-up emails to the people reached, meeting confirmations, CRM updates.
• 13:00-14:00. HR and operations personas if they are in your ICP; otherwise sequence work and LinkedIn.
• 14:00-15:30. Call reviews, coaching, list building for tomorrow.
• 15:30-17:30. Calling block two, the best slot of the day. Marketing, and the contacts you missed this morning.
• 17:30-18:00. Log everything, book tomorrow's first block.

Two blocks of two hours. That is the whole secret. An SDR who dials from 9 to 6 without a block structure makes more dials and has fewer conversations.

SDR job description template

Copy, adjust the numbers, delete the adjectives.

• Mission. Create qualified meetings with [persona] at [ICP] companies in [territory], by phone first, supported by email and LinkedIn.
• Daily. Two calling blocks, 20 conversations per day target, 30 prioritised contacts prepared each morning, CRM updated before leaving.
• Targets. [X] meetings held per month, 60% or more accepted by AEs, [€Y] pipeline sourced per quarter.
• Skills we test. Trigger-based opener, "how" questions, objection handling, cadence discipline. We run a live mock call in the interview.
• Tools. Parallel dialer, CRM, sequence tool. We provide them from day one.
• Pay. Fixed [€], OTE [€], split [70/30], variable on meetings held and accepted.
• Path. Promotion criteria to AE or SDR lead published; typical timing 12-18 months on quota.

How Sonik approaches the SDR role

We built Sonik around the SDR day described above. The dialer runs parallel sessions so a rep gets about 5x more conversations per hour, which is how 20 conversations a day becomes normal rather than heroic.

The signals layer pulls website visitors, job changes, closed-lost and dormant leads into the morning list, so the 30 contacts an SDR prepares already carry a trigger. Half of our own pipeline comes from signals that were already in the CRM.

Call prep and coaching sit in the same screen, so the manager reviewing a day sees the opener, the questions asked and the outcome, not just a dial count.

Conclusion

The SDR role in 2026 is a conversation job measured on meetings held, with a day shaped by when people pick up. Write the job around outcomes, pay on quality, publish the path to AE. This week, take your current SDR calendar and move every dial outside 10am-12pm and 4pm-6pm into those two blocks. Count conversations on Friday.