Account strategy
Prioritises accounts and stakeholders using fit, trigger, influence, access, and opportunity evidence.
Treats a purchased company list as a territory plan.
Sales & Customer Success
Business Development Representative Job Description
A Business Development Representative opens new commercial opportunities by identifying suitable organisations, engaging decision-makers, and qualifying whether a problem warrants deeper sales discovery.
Use this version for a genuinely outbound or market-development remit and state clearly where prospecting ends and opportunity ownership begins.
Candidate-facing template
Edit the description for your organisation
Replace bracketed details, remove anything that is not genuinely required, and obtain the appropriate internal approval before advertising.
Ready-to-edit job description
Copying excludes all recruiter notes below.
Business Development Representative
- Location
- [Location or working arrangement]
- Employment type
- [Full-time or part-time]
- Reports to
- [Business Development Manager or Sales Development Director]
About the role
[Company name] is hiring a Business Development Representative to develop new opportunities across [market or territory]. You will prioritise target organisations, build multi-contact engagement plans, test commercial hypotheses, and progress credible conversations into well-prepared discovery.
What you will be responsible for
- Segment and prioritise target organisations using agreed fit, need, timing, and strategic criteria.
- Map relevant stakeholders, likely influence, existing relationships, and account-specific engagement routes.
- Create coordinated outbound plans across approved email, calling, networking, social, event, and referral channels.
- Explore business context, current approach, impact, urgency, decision landscape, and next-step commitment.
- Maintain reliable account plans, contact records, qualification evidence, objections, and follow-up in the CRM.
- Share market learning with sales, marketing, product, and leadership to improve positioning and account selection.
What success looks like
- Priority accounts receive relevant, sequenced outreach rather than disconnected contact attempts.
- Qualified opportunities contain enough commercial and stakeholder context for productive discovery.
- Market feedback improves the team’s target profile, messaging, content, and territory assumptions.
Essential qualifications
- Experience creating new customer, client, partnership, or stakeholder conversations through proactive outreach.
- Strong account research, written communication, questioning, and commercial prioritisation.
- Ability to manage longer follow-up cycles and several contacts without losing context.
- Comfort working with targets while protecting data quality and customer relevance.
- Professional judgement about contact permissions, claims, confidential information, and escalation.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience in [sector, territory, buyer group, enterprise segment, or partner ecosystem].
- Familiarity with account-based sales, territory planning, intent data, or complex B2B buying groups.
- Experience collaborating with marketing campaigns, events, alliances, or field sales.
Tools and working knowledge
- CRM and account-planning platform
- Sales engagement, calling, and meeting tools
- Company intelligence, intent, contact, and professional-network data
Package: [Add base range, currency, on-target incentive, qualified-opportunity rules, ramp, payment timing, benefits, and any accelerators.]
[Company name] will discuss reasonable adjustments for the hiring process and role, including communication exercises, travel, or equipment where applicable.
How to apply
Apply through [method] with a brief account-development example showing the research, stakeholders, approach, and result.
Performance expectations
What good performance looks like
Use these outcomes to replace vague activity lists with the evidence the hiring manager expects to see after the person joins.
Territory effort is concentrated on defensible priority accounts and buying groups.
Opportunities accepted by sales meet the agreed problem, fit, stakeholder, and next-step threshold.
Longer-horizon account work has visible progress evidence even before a meeting is booked.
Hiring-manager intake
Questions to settle before advertising
Record specific answers so sourcing, screening, and interview decisions use the same definition of the role.
- 1
How is this role distinct from SDR, Account Executive, partnership, and field-sales responsibilities?
- 2
Which accounts, sectors, territories, personas, and languages are in scope or excluded?
- 3
What evidence is required before an opportunity is accepted and credited?
- 4
How are multi-touch, multi-contact, event, partner, and marketing contributions attributed?
- 5
What proportion of success is near-term pipeline versus learning and entry into strategic accounts?
Evaluation criteria
Evidence to use in a Business Development Representative scorecard
Agree the criteria before interviews begin, then score examples against the same evidence standard.
Commercial curiosity
Explores the operating problem and impact before proposing a product conversation.
Uses surface personalisation but quickly returns to a fixed pitch.
Persistent organisation
Coordinates purposeful follow-up across contacts and channels while respecting clear boundaries.
Confuses persistence with repeated identical messages or cannot explain account progress.
Structured interview
Business Development Representative interview questions and strong signals
Ask the same core questions in the same order, then use follow-ups to understand the candidate’s individual contribution.
1
How would you decide which 20 accounts deserve attention first in a new territory?
Strong answer signal
Creates explicit fit, trigger, value, access, timing, and learning criteria rather than ranking only by company size.
2
Describe an account where the first contact was not the eventual sponsor.
Strong answer signal
Maps influence, learns from the first conversation, earns introductions, and preserves relationships across the group.
3
What useful evidence can show progress before an account agrees to a meeting?
Strong answer signal
Mentions contact coverage, engagement, referrals, verified change, objections, timing, and a documented next action.
Related titles
Check the scope behind the title
Sales Development Representative — often covers higher-volume inbound and outbound qualification.
Market Development Representative — may focus on establishing a new segment or geography and generating learning.
Partnership Development Representative — usually targets alliance, referral, or channel relationships rather than end customers.
Common hiring mistakes
Problems to remove before publishing
Copying an SDR description while labelling the role strategic business development.
Assigning a named-account territory without data access, marketing support, ownership rules, or time for research.
Paying only for meetings when the role is expected to develop multi-stakeholder enterprise accounts.
Continue the hiring workflow
Related roles and recruiter resources
Related job descriptions
Helpful recruiter resources
Recruitment Sales CRM
Track target accounts, contacts, opportunities, and commercial evidence.
Recruitment Sales Pipeline Management
Define stages, qualification evidence, ownership, and next actions.
Recruitment Fee Calculator
Model an agency fee when a commercial conversation reaches a live requirement.
Staffing and Recruiting Sales Software
Review how recruitment businesses organise business-development work.
Source and review notes
How this template was prepared
- Language
- International English
- Prepared by
- ATZ CRM Editorial Team
- Review
- ATZ CRM Recruitment Editorial Review
- Last reviewed
- 2026-08-05
O*NET: Sales Representatives of Services
Reference for occupation tasks, knowledge, skills, abilities, and work activities.
ESCO: occupations and skills
Reference for internationally recognised occupation and skills terminology.
Qualifications, compensation, licences, working conditions, and equal-opportunity wording must be checked for the role and location before use.
Recruiter questions
Business Development Representative job description FAQs
What is the role of a Business Development Representative?
A BDR identifies and develops new commercial opportunities through account prioritisation, stakeholder mapping, outbound engagement, early qualification, and disciplined hand-off.
What is the difference between a BDR and an SDR?
Many employers use the titles interchangeably. Where they differ, BDR often means outbound, new-market, or named-account development, while SDR may include more inbound and higher-volume qualification.
Should a BDR close deals?
Usually the role hands qualified opportunities to an Account Executive, but some organisations include smaller deal closure. State the commercial stage, authority, quota, and incentive rules clearly.