SDR (Sales Development Representative)

Overview

You're cold prospecting into finance, revenue operations, and billing teams at B2B SaaS companies. Your targets are companies with usage-based pricing, consumption models, or complex billing needs—think infrastructure/dev tools companies, vertical SaaS, or anyone migrating from flat subscriptions to usage. You're trying to book qualified meetings for Account Executives by explaining why their current billing setup (Stripe Billing, homegrown systems, or legacy tools) isn't cutting it.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series B (estimated based on 90 employees and active hiring)

Size: 90 employees

Growth: Aggressively hiring SDRs (want 2 more in 15 days), team of ~7 total

Market Position: Challenger in billing infrastructure—competing against Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Zuora, and homegrown solutions. Focused on the newer usage-based pricing wave.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 30% Inbound - Companies researching billing solutions, some product-led signups for docs/trials, content downloads about usage-based pricing
• 60% Outbound - Cold calling and email sequences to target accounts (SaaS companies showing signals of usage pricing)
• 10% Referrals/Partner ecosystem

SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated SDR team (you're one of ~7) feeding a smaller AE team. SDRs own all top-of-funnel prospecting.

SE Support: AEs likely have SE support for technical demos, but you're not involved.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Zuora, Recurly, homegrown billing systems

How They Differentiate: Built specifically for modern usage-based pricing vs legacy subscription tools; cleaner developer experience than Stripe Billing; more flexibility than all-in-one platforms

Common Objections: "We already use Stripe", "Our engineering team built something custom", "We're not ready to rip out our current system", "Is this really better than just using spreadsheets for invoicing?"

Win Themes: Revenue leakage from manual billing processes, inability to experiment with pricing, finance team drowning in spreadsheets, engineering wasting time on billing logic

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Prospecting (60%) | Follow-up (25%) | Internal/Admin (15%)

Key Activities

• Cold Calling: 50-70 calls/day to VPs of Finance, Rev Ops Directors, Billing Managers at target SaaS companies. You're trying to get past gatekeepers and have a 3-minute conversation about billing pain. Most calls go to voicemail or get screened.
• Email Sequences: Writing personalized first-line emails researching their pricing model (public pricing pages, job postings mentioning usage pricing, LinkedIn signals). Sending 60-80 emails/day across multiple sequences.
• LinkedIn Outreach: Connection requests and InMails to decision-makers. Lower response rate but sometimes breaks through when calling doesn't.
• Qualifying Inbound: Working warm leads from website form fills, content downloads, or people requesting demos. Still need to qualify them properly—some are students, some are too early-stage, some are just researching.
• Meeting Coordination: Booking time on AE calendars, sending calendar invites, confirming meetings, sometimes doing intro calls yourself before handing off.
• List Building: Using tools to identify companies with usage-based pricing signals (job postings, tech stack, pricing page changes, funding announcements).

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Low response rates: Finance and ops people are busy and cautious about sales calls. You'll make 50+ calls to book 1-2 meetings. Email response rates are 2-5% on cold outreach.
• Complex pain identification: You need to quickly understand whether a company has billing complexity worth solving. Not every SaaS company is a fit—transactional/simple pricing companies don't care.
• Long research cycles: Prospects often say "we're evaluating options" and ghost for months. Your pipeline is full of "checking in" follow-ups.
• Competing with "do nothing": Biggest competitor is companies just living with manual billing processes or homegrown systems. Finance teams are risk-averse about switching billing infrastructure.
• Technical learning curve: You need to understand usage-based pricing, metering, billing cycles, revenue recognition—enough to have credible conversations with finance people.

What Success Looks Like

• Booking 15-20 qualified meetings per month that show up and convert at >30% to opportunities
• Building a pipeline of warm prospects who aren't ready now but will be in 3-6 months
• Getting good at pattern recognition—spotting which companies have real billing pain vs just mild annoyance

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• VP Finance / Head of Finance (Series A-C SaaS companies)
• Revenue Operations Directors/Managers
• Billing/Invoicing team leads at larger companies
• Sometimes CFOs at smaller startups (<100 people)

What They Care About:

• Revenue leakage from billing errors or missed usage charges
• Engineer time wasted maintaining homegrown billing systems
• Inability to quickly test new pricing models
• Manual work reconciling usage data with invoices
• Audit trail and compliance for revenue recognition
• Not breaking their existing Salesforce/NetSuite/systems

Requirements

• Recent college grad or ~1 year SDR experience (they're explicit about this)
• Comfortable making 50-70 calls/day and getting rejected constantly
• Quick learner on technical concepts (usage metering, billing cycles, SaaS metrics)
• Self-motivated and competitive—you're measured on meetings booked and there's nowhere to hide
• Based in San Francisco, in office 3x/week (not fully remote)
• Interest in AI/tech (they mentioned this—probably selling to AI companies with usage-based models)
• Resilient to long prospecting cycles and low response rates