Sales Development Representative (SDR)

Overview

You qualify inbound leads and run outbound prospecting to book meetings for Drata's commercial AE team. Your targets are typically Series A-C tech companies who need SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA compliance to sell to enterprise customers. You'll make 50-60 calls per day, send 80-100 emails, and aim to book 12-15 qualified meetings per month.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series D+ (well-funded scale-up)

Size: 687 employees

Growth: Hiring SDRs in SF and NYC, expanding commercial team

Market Position: Leader in compliance automation - selling into a hot category where companies need certifications to close deals

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 50% Inbound - demo requests from website, content downloads (whitepapers on SOC 2), product-qualified leads from free tools
• 50% Outbound - cold calling and email sequences to target accounts (startups raising Series A-C, growing tech companies)

SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated SDRs book meetings, hand off to commercial AEs who run full cycle

SE Support: SE joins qualified discovery calls to answer technical questions

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Vanta, Secureframe, traditional compliance consultants

How They Differentiate: Deepest automation, fastest time to certification, continuous monitoring

Common Objections: "We're too early for this", "We'll just hire a consultant", "Your competitor is cheaper", "What's the ROI?"

Win Themes: Speed to cert (weeks vs months), reduced ongoing burden, integration ecosystem

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Calls/Emails (50%) | Research/List Building (20%) | CRM/Admin (15%) | Team Meetings (15%)

Key Activities

• Inbound lead follow-up: You get 3-5 inbound leads per day. Call within 5 minutes, qualify their timeline/authority/need, book a demo if they're real. Half are tire-kickers or students doing research. You're separating signal from noise.
• Outbound prospecting: Work through sequences targeting engineering/security leaders at companies that recently raised funding or are hiring sales/CS teams (signals they're selling to enterprise). Make 50-60 dials/day, send 80-100 personalized emails. Most don't respond. You're looking for the 2-3 who reply.
• Discovery/qualification calls: 20-30 minute calls with prospects to understand their compliance needs, timeline, who's involved in the decision. You're asking: When's your next audit? Who's driving this? What happens if you don't get certified? Then deciding if it's worth an AE's time.
• CRM hygiene and activity logging: Log every call, email, outcome in Salesforce. Update lead status, record next steps, track why deals didn't qualify. Your manager reviews your pipeline weekly - messy data means a coaching conversation.
• Team standups and training: Daily 30-min standup sharing what worked, what didn't. Weekly training on new objection handling, competitive intel, product updates. Monthly ride-alongs with AEs to see what happens after the handoff.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Rejection is constant: Most calls go to voicemail. Most emails get ignored. You'll hear "not interested" 20 times per day. The grind is real - it takes discipline to keep dialing when you've been hung up on 15 times in a row.
• Technical conversations on day one: Prospects ask detailed questions about integrations, security frameworks, audit requirements. You're not a compliance expert - you'll spend your first 3 months learning enough to not sound stupid. Expect to say "Let me loop in our solutions engineer" a lot.
• Inbound quality varies wildly: Some inbound leads are hot - CISO ready to buy next week. Others are a college student writing a paper. You waste time on bad leads if you're not ruthless about qualification.
• Meeting quality scrutiny: AEs will kick back meetings if the prospect isn't qualified. You'll get feedback like "they have no budget" or "no project timeline" - feels bad when a meeting you worked hard to book doesn't count. You learn to qualify harder.

What Success Looks Like

• Book 12-15 qualified meetings per month with >75% show rate
• 50+ calls/day, 80+ emails/day consistently logged in CRM

• 80% of meetings accepted by AEs (not kicked back for poor qualification)

• Ramp to full quota within 90 days of onboarding

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• VPs of Engineering / CTOs at Series A-C startups (50-200 employees)
• Security/Compliance Managers at growing tech companies
• Finance/Operations leaders preparing for enterprise sales motion

What They Care About:

• Unblocking enterprise deals (prospects literally say "we can't close X customer without SOC 2")
• Speed to certification (they're 3 months from losing a deal)
• Reducing manual audit prep work (security team drowning in spreadsheets)
• Ongoing compliance maintenance (staying certified, not just one-time project)

Requirements

• 0-2 years in sales or SDR role (they'll train you on compliance/security)
• Comfortable making 50+ calls per day - you can handle rejection without spiraling
• Coachable and curious - willing to learn technical concepts (APIs, security controls, audit frameworks)
• Strong work ethic - this is high activity, metrics-driven, daily accountability
• Located in SF or NYC (in-office role)