An SDR, or Sales Development Representative, opens conversations. The role approaches companies, works out in the conversation whether there is a real need, and books a meeting for the colleague who owns the close. From that meeting onward the account executive takes over: detailed needs analysis, proposal, negotiation, signature. Both roles work towards the same revenue, but at different points in the process, with different skills and different measures of success. If you are opening the German market from outside it, one more thing is true: the role does not simply transfer. What an SDR does stays the same, but what makes the work succeed changes.
An SDR creates qualified conversations, an account executive turns them into orders. That split is well understood. What foreign companies underestimate is that pointing an existing SDR team at Germany changes the job in ways that are invisible from the home market.
What does an SDR actually do?
The work breaks down into four parts that repeat daily.
Preparation. Before a company is approached, it has to be clear why this company. Sector, size, situation, likely trigger. Without that groundwork the approach becomes guesswork, and the person on the other end notices within the first twenty seconds.
The approach. Calls, follow-ups, and occasionally a written note that prepares a call. The aim is not to sell anything. The aim is to reach the right person and get into a real conversation.
Qualification in the conversation. Is there a topic here? Who else decides? Is there a timeframe? A good SDR also closes the conversation cleanly when the answer is no, and records why. Those refusals are often worth more to the sales team than another half-warm meeting.
The handover. The meeting is booked and the colleague receives everything needed to walk into it prepared. This is where the chain most often breaks, and it is the part most companies plan least. A workable qualification standard depends on agreed criteria, not on instinct.
How does an SDR differ from a closing salesperson?
The difference becomes clearest at the question of what each is measured on.
| SDR | Account executive | |
|---|---|---|
| Task | open and qualify conversations | carry conversations to signature |
| Point in the process | before the first meeting | from the first meeting onward |
| Output | a qualified meeting | a signed order |
| Time horizon | weeks | months to quarters |
| Core skill | opening, listening, fast judgement | solution design, negotiation, relationships |
| Measure | number and quality of meetings handed over | win rate and deal value |
The table also explains why merging the two roles almost always costs you new business. An account executive with a live negotiation will not prioritise prospecting, and that is a rational choice, because the negotiation is closer to revenue. The result is the familiar wave: a full pipeline, then a closing phase, then three quiet months, because during the closing phase nobody opened anything.
What changes when the market is Germany?
This is where teams entering from abroad get surprised. The role description does not change. The conditions under which it works do.
Language is not a preference, it is a filter. A German decision maker who is addressed in English in a first cold conversation will usually be polite and will usually not continue. Not because of the language ability, which is often good, but because an unprepared approach in a foreign language signals that the caller has not done the work. This is different from the Netherlands or the Nordics, where an English opener is far more likely to survive.
More people are involved, and earlier. The person who takes your call is rarely the person who decides alone. Technical evaluation, procurement and management often each hold a veto. An SDR working the German market therefore has a different qualification job: not only is there a need, but who else has to be in the room, and when.
Silence is not rejection. A German buyer who goes quiet for three weeks is frequently checking internally rather than declining. Teams trained on faster markets read that silence as a lost deal, drop the contact, and give up exactly at the point where the work was starting to pay. How this plays out across a full entry is covered in our guide on entering the German market without a local team.
Proof beats claims. Superlatives that work elsewhere read as unserious. A concrete, checkable statement about what the product does, including what it does not do, carries further than a strong promise. The same pattern shows up in the wider set of reasons foreign companies fail in Germany despite a good product.
Does the split make sense for your entry into Germany?
For most German companies it does not, and that is worth knowing before you model your own approach on theirs. The Federal Statistical Office reports that 99.3 per cent of the 3.2 million enterprises in Germany are small and medium-sized, with 2.6 million of them micro-enterprises employing no more than nine people. The size classes behind that figure are defined by headcount and turnover, so the distribution is easy to check for yourself. In most German companies the owner or a small team sells, and there is no separate role for first contact at all.
For a foreign company entering the market, the calculation is different. You are not deciding whether to specialise an existing sales floor. You are deciding whether the first conversations in a market you do not know yet should be run by someone who knows it. Three conditions make the split worth it: enough target companies to keep the role busy, a deal value that carries the effort per customer, and a sales process long enough that closing work will otherwise crowd out prospecting.
The practical question that follows is where the role sits. Hiring a native German-speaking SDR in your own team is the cleanest long-term answer and the slowest to arrange. Placing the function outside the company gets you into conversations sooner and tells you within a quarter whether the market responds at all. Both are defensible, and the trade-off is set out in our comparison of building an in-house SDR function against buying it.
What should you measure, and what misleads?
The most common metric is the least useful one: call volume. It is easy to collect and says nothing about the outcome. It rewards speed over preparation and produces exactly the calls that people remember badly. Measure calls and you will get calls.
Three other numbers hold up. Conversations reached with the right person shows whether the approach works at all. Meetings handed over that meet the agreed criteria is the actual output. The share of those meetings that lead to a genuine next step is the quality control. If the third number falls while the first two hold, qualification has gone soft.
For a market entry, add a fourth: the reasons given for saying no. In a new market these are the cheapest research you will ever get. They tell you which promise does not land, which competitor is already in the building, and whether you are talking to the wrong function entirely. Two months of well-recorded refusals will teach you more about the German market than any desk study.
What has to come with the handover?
A meeting without context is half a meeting. The colleague running the conversation needs three things before picking up the phone.
- The contact and their role. Who is in the room, what they are responsible for, who else has a say.
- The notes from the conversation. What was said, in whose words, what prompted the interest, which objections came up. The buyer’s own wording matters more than the summary.
- The agreed next step. What exactly was promised, with what expectation, and by when.
This structured handover is the point at which most chains break. A meeting that appears in the calendar without context forces the account executive to repeat the first conversation. The buyer tells the same story twice and draws a conclusion about the organisation calling them. In Germany, where preparation is read as a proxy for reliability, that conclusion is expensive.
If you are working with an external partner, the handover is the thing to inspect before you sign. Ask what form it takes and what is actually written in it. The answer tells you more about how a team works than any client list, as does a straight answer on when a lead counts as qualified. Whether you are buying booked meetings or broader coverage of a segment is a separate question, and one that is often confused at the point of ordering.
Frequently asked questions
Can our existing SDR team simply cover Germany as well?
They can make the calls, but the results will usually not match the home market. The obstacles are language in first contact, a wider group of people involved in the decision, and a slower response rhythm that a team trained on faster markets tends to misread as disinterest.
Is an SDR the same as a telemarketer?
No, and the difference is in the measure. An SDR works towards a qualified conversation and is judged on its quality. Where the number of calls is the leading metric, a different way of working follows: faster, shallower, and with no interest in understanding a no properly.
How long before a new SDR is productive in a new market?
It depends on how much the product needs explaining. A simple offer can be discussed confidently within a few weeks. For technical products the ramp is longer, because the buyer asks specialist questions and an evasive answer ends the conversation.
Should we start with meetings or with market research?
In practice they are the same activity if the conversations are recorded properly. The first hundred conversations tell you whether demand exists, which function actually cares, and what wording gets a second meeting. Treating early outbound purely as a booking exercise wastes the more valuable half of it.
What happens to meetings our sales team rejects?
They go back into the discussion, with reasons. Rejected meetings are the fastest correction available for the criteria. If they are quietly discarded, both sides spend months working to different definitions of a good meeting, and in a market with long decision cycles that error only becomes visible a quarter later.