Outbound Sales Development Rep (BDR)

Overview

You're an outbound BDR selling Ironclad's AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform to legal operations, general counsel, procurement, and IT teams at enterprise companies across EMEA. Your day is spent researching target accounts, making 50-70 cold calls, sending personalized emails, and running LinkedIn outreach to book discovery meetings for Account Executives. You're measured on qualified meetings booked and pipeline generated.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Growth stage (794 employees, expanding EMEA presence)

Size: 794 employees globally

Growth: Actively hiring BDRs in London to support EMEA expansion, signals they're investing in outbound motion

Market Position: Established player in CLM space competing against legacy providers and newer AI-focused competitors

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 80-90% Outbound - You're building lists of enterprise companies, finding the right legal/procurement contacts, and cold calling them
• 10-20% Inbound - Some inbound from marketing (webinars, content downloads) but this is primarily an outbound role
• Partners/Referrals - Minimal for BDRs

SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated BDR team feeding meetings to EMEA AE team

SE Support: AEs likely have SE support for deeper demos, but not relevant for your role

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: DocuSign CLM, Icertis, Agiloft, ContractPodAi, legacy manual processes (Word docs + email)

How They Differentiate: AI-powered automation and workflow capabilities, modern UX compared to legacy tools

Common Objections: "We already have DocuSign," "Our current process works fine," "Not a priority right now," "Need to talk to legal/procurement first"

Win Themes: Speed to contract, reducing legal bottlenecks, visibility into contract data, integration with existing tech stack

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Calling/Emailing (60%) | Research/List Building (25%) | Internal Meetings (15%)

Key Activities

• Cold Calling: You make 50-70 calls per day to legal ops directors, general counsel, procurement heads, and IT leaders. Most calls go to voicemail. You're trying to catch them live and get 30 seconds to explain why CLM matters. Expect a lot of "not interested" and gatekeepers blocking you.
• Email Sequences: You send 100+ personalized emails per day through Outreach or Salesloft. You research each company's contracting pain points (job posts mentioning contract chaos, news about M&A, etc.) and reference them. Response rates are typically 1-3%.
• LinkedIn Outreach: You connect with prospects on LinkedIn, comment on their posts, and send InMails. This is supplementary to calling and email.
• Account Research: You spend 1-2 hours daily researching target accounts—reading annual reports, checking LinkedIn for contract management pain points, identifying the right contacts, and building call lists.
• Meeting Handoffs: When you book a meeting, you brief the AE on what the prospect cares about and attend the first 5 minutes to intro them.
• Weekly Pipeline Reviews: You join team meetings to review activity metrics (calls made, emails sent, meetings booked, no-show rate) and get coaching on messaging.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Rejection is constant: You'll hear "no" or get ignored 95%+ of the time. Most calls go to voicemail. Most emails get deleted. You need thick skin.
• Gatekeepers: Getting past EAs and receptionists to reach general counsel or procurement directors is difficult. You'll spend a lot of time getting blocked.
• Long buying cycles: Even when you book a meeting, deals take 6-12 months to close (if they close at all). You won't see immediate results from your work.
• Repetitive grind: You're saying similar things 50-70 times per day. The work is repetitive and can feel monotonous.
• No-shows: You'll book meetings that prospects don't show up to. Your AEs will ask you to re-engage them.
• Internal pressure: There's a leaderboard. Your activity and results are visible to the team. You're competing with other BDRs for promotion to AE.

What Success Looks Like

• Booking 15-20 qualified meetings per month consistently
• Converting 40-50% of booked meetings to accepted opportunities (AE agrees it's a real deal)
• Maintaining 50+ calls per day and 100+ emails per day activity levels
• Getting promoted to AE within 12-18 months if you hit quota consistently

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• VP Legal Operations / Director of Legal Ops (most common entry point)
• General Counsel (harder to reach, but higher authority)
• VP Procurement / Chief Procurement Officer (if contracting pain sits here)
• VP IT / CIO (if they own legal tech stack)

What They Care About:

• Speed: Contracts take too long to get signed (legal is a bottleneck)
• Risk: No visibility into what's in their contracts, compliance exposure
• Manual chaos: Word docs, email threads, version control nightmares
• Scaling: Legal team can't keep up with volume as company grows
• Data: Can't report on contract metrics (renewals coming up, spend by vendor, etc.)

Requirements

• Comfortable making 50-70 cold calls per day to senior legal/procurement contacts
• Resilient in the face of constant rejection and no-responses
• Coachable and competitive—willing to learn from feedback and improve messaging
• Strong research skills to personalize outreach and find the right contacts
• No prior sales experience required, but need to prove you can handle the grind and hit activity/meeting quotas
• Fluent in English; additional European languages a plus for EMEA coverage