SDR (Sales Development Representative)

Overview

You spend your day cold calling office managers, HR teams, and workplace experience leads to book demos for HUNGRY's catering and workplace food services. You're prospecting into companies with 100+ employees who might need regular catering, group ordering platforms, or office snacks. Your job is to get them interested enough to take a 15-30 minute discovery call with an Account Executive.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Growth-stage (319 employees, appears to be scaling)

Size: 319 employees

Growth: Actively hiring SDRs, indicating expansion or high turnover

Market Position: Challenger in a crowded corporate catering/food services space competing with ezCater, Fooda, Grubhub Corporate, and traditional caterers

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 10% Inbound - website inquiries, referrals from existing customers
• 90% Outbound - you're building your own pipeline through cold calls, LinkedIn outreach, and email sequences
• Minimal partner/channel activity

SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated SDRs pass qualified meetings to closing AEs. You don't touch deals after handoff.

SE Support: No sales engineers - this isn't technical enough to need one.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: ezCater (market leader), Fooda, Grubhub Corporate Accounts, CaterCow, plus hundreds of local caterers and restaurant delivery services

How They Differentiate: HUNGRY partners with "top chefs" and positions as premium/curated vs commodity ordering platforms. They offer full-service (catering + group ordering + snacks) rather than just one piece.

Common Objections:

• "We already use ezCater/our own vendors"
• "We're mostly remote now, don't need catering"
• "Budget is frozen for workplace perks"
• "Just send me info" (translation: not interested)

Win Themes: Quality of food, variety, ease of use for admins managing team meals, better-for-you options

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Cold Calling (50%) | Research/List Building (20%) | Email/LinkedIn (15%) | Internal Meetings (15%)

Key Activities

• Cold Calling (60-80 dials/day): You work through lists of companies in your territory, calling office managers, HR coordinators, and executive assistants. Most calls hit voicemail. When you reach someone, you have 10-15 seconds to explain why catering matters before they say "not interested" or "send me an email." You're trying to identify companies doing regular team meetings, events, or who want to bring people back to office.

• List Building and Research: You use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, or similar tools to find companies in the 100-500 employee range with offices in your region. You look for signals like return-to-office announcements, new office openings, or culture-focused companies likely to invest in food perks. You build call lists and research contacts.

• Email and LinkedIn Sequences: You send follow-up emails after calls, connection requests on LinkedIn, and run multi-touch campaigns. Response rates are low (1-3%). Most of your meetings come from calls, not emails, in this transactional space.

• Meeting Handoffs and CRM Hygiene: When you book a meeting, you write detailed notes on what the prospect cares about, their current catering situation, budget timeline, and pain points. You attend the first few minutes of handoff calls to introduce the AE. You spend time in Salesforce logging activities and updating lead status.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Rejection volume is brutal: You'll make 60-80+ calls per day. Maybe 10-15 people pick up. Of those, 1-2 might be interested enough to book a meeting. You hear "no thanks," "not interested," and click (hang up) all day long. If you take rejection personally, this will burn you out fast.

• You're a vendor to gatekeepers: Office managers and admins get called by catering companies, snack vendors, and meal services constantly. You're competing for attention with dozens of similar pitches. Many prospects are annoyed before you even start talking.

• Post-COVID catering is a tough sell: A lot of companies went remote or hybrid. Many cut catering budgets. You'll hear "we're not back in office enough" or "we don't do team lunches anymore" dozens of times per week. Finding companies actually buying catering takes volume.

• Low ACV means high activity requirements: These aren't $100K deals. Monthly catering contracts might be $2-5K/month. That means you need to book a LOT of meetings to hit team revenue targets. The pressure for activity (calls, meetings booked) is constant.

What Success Looks Like

• Hitting your meeting quota consistently: If quota is 20 qualified meetings/month and you hit 18-22 every month, you're solid. Missing quota two months in a row puts you on a performance plan.

• Good meeting-to-opportunity conversion: If 60%+ of your booked meetings turn into real opportunities that AEs can work (not no-shows or unqualified), you're doing well at qualifying. Below 40% means you're booking junk meetings just to hit numbers.

• Promoting to AE or moving to another company: Most SDRs either promote internally to closing roles after 12-18 months or leave for AE jobs elsewhere. Very few people stay in SDR seats long-term because the work is repetitive and the comp caps out.

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• Office Managers / Workplace Experience Managers (day-to-day catering decisions)
• HR Directors / People Ops leads (employee engagement, perks budget)
• Executive Assistants to C-suite (ordering for leadership meetings/events)
• Facilities Managers (larger companies with centralized vendor management)

What They Care About:

• Ease of use: They're busy and don't want complicated ordering systems or high-touch vendors
• Reliability: Food shows up on time, correct orders, good quality - they get blamed if catering fails
• Variety and dietary accommodations: Need options for vegetarians, vegans, allergies, cultural preferences
• Budget predictability: Want transparent pricing, no surprise fees, ability to track spending
• Making employees happy: If team loves the food, it reflects well on them; if people complain, it's their problem

Requirements

• Comfort with high-volume cold calling: If you hate making 60-80 calls per day or freeze up when people are rude on the phone, this isn't for you. The manager (Joe) is a "Cold Calling Evangelist" - expect a call-heavy culture.

• Resilience to rejection: You'll hear "no" or get hung up on 50+ times per day. You need to shake it off and dial the next number without losing energy.

• Based in Nashville or willing to relocate: This is an in-office role. They want you on-site, likely for training, team energy, and manager oversight.

• Coachable and competitive: You'll get a lot of feedback on your talk track, objection handling, and qualifying questions. You need to take coaching and iterate. If you're competitive and like leaderboards/contests, that helps with motivation.

• CRM discipline: You'll live in Salesforce or similar CRM. Need to log every call, email, and outcome accurately because your manager tracks activity metrics closely.

• Previous SDR/BDR experience helpful but not required: They'll train you on their process, but if you've done high-volume outbound before (SaaS, B2B services, etc.), you'll ramp faster.