Business Development Representative

Overview

You're a BDR prospecting into enterprise accounts (1,000-100,000+ employees) to generate meetings for Account Executives. You're selling Unily, an AI-powered employee experience platform (think enterprise intranet meets employee engagement tool). Your primary contacts are HR leaders, IT directors, and internal communications teams at large companies. You report to a BDR leader who's been in role for 2 months and is actively building out the North American team.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Later-stage private company (318 employees, established product)

Size: 318 employees globally

Growth: Actively hiring BDRs in North America under new leadership, suggesting expansion phase

Market Position: Positioned as "#1 AI-native" in employee experience space - competing in crowded intranet/employee engagement market against Microsoft Viva, Workplace from Meta, Simpplr, Staffbase

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 75-80% Outbound - You're building lists, cold calling, running email sequences to break into enterprise accounts
• 15-20% Inbound - Some marketing-generated leads from website/content, but this isn't a high-volume inbound motion
• 5-10% Referrals - Customer networks and occasional partner intros

SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated BDRs feeding AEs - You qualify and book, they close

SE Support: Likely have SEs for technical demos (complex enterprise platform), but you're booking initial discovery calls with AEs

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Microsoft Viva (bundled with M365), Workplace from Meta, Simpplr, Staffbase, traditional intranet vendors like SharePoint

How They Differentiate: AI-native positioning, built for enterprises 1K-100K employees (not SMB), strong focus on unifying scattered employee tools

Common Objections: "We already have SharePoint/Teams", "What's wrong with our current intranet?", "How is this different from Microsoft Viva?", procurement cycles in large orgs

Win Themes: Employee engagement scores, productivity gains from unified tools, reducing app sprawl, AI-powered search/insights

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Cold Calling (40%) | Email/LinkedIn (30%) | Research/List Building (20%) | Internal Meetings (10%)

Key Activities

• Cold Calling: Make 50-70 cold calls per day to HR VPs, IT Directors, Internal Comms leaders at Fortune 1000 and mid-market enterprises. Most won't pick up. You're trying to get 2-3 conversations daily that lead to qualified meetings.
• Email Sequences: Run multi-touch sequences (6-8 emails over 3-4 weeks) to prospects who don't answer. You're fighting inbox noise and competing with dozens of other sales emails.
• Account Research: Build target account lists using LinkedIn Sales Nav, ZoomInfo, or similar tools. Research company size, current tech stack (do they use SharePoint? Slack? Workplace?), and find the right contacts.
• Discovery/Qualification: When you get someone on the phone, you're asking about their current employee experience tools, pain points with engagement/communication, and whether they have budget/authority to evaluate new platforms. You need to qualify before passing to AE.
• CRM Hygiene: Log every call, email, and interaction in Salesforce or HubSpot. Track your activity metrics daily because you'll be measured on calls/emails/meetings booked.
• Team Syncs: Weekly 1:1s with your BDR manager, pipeline reviews with AEs to discuss which accounts are working, what messaging is landing.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Low Connect Rates: You're calling enterprise gatekeepers. Maybe 5-10% of your dials reach a live person. Getting through to a VP of HR at a 10,000-person company takes persistence.
• Complex Buying Environments: These are large orgs with procurement processes, multiple stakeholders (HR, IT, Finance all have input), and long evaluation cycles. Even booking a first meeting can take 2-3 months of touches.
• Competitor Noise: Every company already has something for employee comms (email, Slack, SharePoint, Teams). You're fighting "good enough" and status quo bias.
• Repetitive Grind: You'll say the same pitch 50+ times a day. Most calls end in "not interested" or voicemail. It's rejection-heavy work.
• Learning Curve: You need to quickly learn about enterprise HR/IT pain points, how intranets work, what "employee experience" means, and how to talk to senior buyers who've seen every sales pitch.

What Success Looks Like

• Consistently booking 15-20 qualified meetings per month (not just any meeting - qualified opportunities AEs want)
• 50-60+ calls per day with 5-8% connect rate
• 3-5 discovery conversations per day where you're actually qualifying need
• Building pipeline that AEs can close (6-9 month lag before you see your early meetings turn into revenue)

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• VP/Director of HR or People Operations (budgets for employee engagement tools)
• VP/Director of Internal Communications (owns employee messaging strategy)
• CIO/VP of IT (concerned about security, integrations, platform management)

What They Care About:

• Employee Engagement Scores: Are employees actually using our tools? Do they feel connected to company culture?
• Tool Consolidation: We have 15 different apps - can you reduce that sprawl?
• Frontline Worker Access: How do we reach employees who don't sit at desks (retail, manufacturing, hospitality)?
• Integration Complexity: Does this work with our existing M365/Google/Slack/Workday setup?
• ROI/Productivity: Can you show measurable impact on productivity or retention?

Requirements

• Comfortable making 50+ cold calls per day to senior enterprise contacts
• Able to learn complex B2B software and explain value to HR/IT buyers
• Coachable and hungry - this is a new manager building a team, so you need to adapt as process evolves
• US East Coast based (remote, but need to cover EST hours for calling into enterprises)
• Resilient with rejection - most calls/emails go nowhere in enterprise prospecting
• Bonus: Prior BDR/SDR experience or demonstrated cold calling ability (the hiring manager literally wants you to cold call him as part of the interview process)