Marketing or Sales: Where Should SDRs/BDRs Report?

Determining where Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) or Business Development Representatives (BDRs) fit within your marketing and sales organization can be tricky. I’ve seen teams position these roles under either marketing or sales, and the optimal arrangement really depends on your business model and goals.

To make the right choice, you need to assess the role these positions play in your funnel. Let’s explore when SDRs and BDRs should sit under marketing, when they should belong to sales, and why companies often struggle with this alignment.

Understanding the Role: How SDRs and BDRs Fit Into Your Funnel

The first thing to consider is what their primary goal is. Are these reps responsible for handling inbound leads or outbound prospecting? The answer to that question helps determine where these teams fit best in your organization.

1. When SDRs Belong in Marketing

If your business is generating a high volume of inbound leads—people requesting demos or seeking more information about your product—an SDR team acts as a bridge between marketing and sales.

In this case, the SDR’s role is to qualify leads and book meetings for the sales team. This setup focuses on managing interest from prospects who are already warm. The SDR isn’t generating new demand but rather engaging leads marketing has already nurtured.

Since their goals are aligned with high-level, top-of-funnel activities, SDRs should likely report into marketing. This ensures seamless collaboration, clear messaging, and smooth handoffs between marketing efforts and sales engagement.

2. When BDRs Should Sit Under Sales

On the other hand, your business might rely heavily on outbound efforts—hunting for new opportunities through personalized outreach to targeted accounts. In this scenario, BDRs spend a lot of time working closely with sales reps to develop strategies and prioritize accounts.

This structure is common in enterprise sales or industries with long buying cycles. For companies selling to large accounts or multiple decision-makers, BDRs are more focused on creating and nurturing opportunities rather than just booking meetings.

Here, the BDR team needs to work in tandem with account executives to coordinate outreach, follow up on accounts, and maintain communication across a long, complex sales cycle. In this environment, BDRs fit best under sales, where their activities align with shared sales targets and revenue goals.

Why Companies Struggle with SDR/BDR Alignment

Many companies struggle with where to place SDRs and BDRs for several reasons:

1. Lack of a Clear Plan: Without a well-defined strategy, companies can find it difficult to align the activities of SDRs or BDRs with broader business goals. This leads to confusion about roles, responsibilities, and handoff points between marketing and sales.
2. Diverse Product Portfolios: When a company offers multiple products with different price points, the complexity grows. A simple SaaS tool requiring only director-level approval won’t have the same sales cycle as a $1 million enterprise software deal that involves multiple stakeholders. These distinctions require tailored approaches, and often companies fail to adjust their SDR/BDR roles accordingly.
3. Different Metrics for Different Products: Using the same metrics for vastly different products creates friction. For instance, qualifying a lead for a small, fast-sale product is very different from managing a 12- to 18-month enterprise sales cycle. As the sales process becomes more complex, the need for BDRs to closely partner with account executives grows.

The Role of Marketing in Supporting SDRs and BDRs

Regardless of where SDRs and BDRs report, marketing plays a crucial role in ensuring their success. Outbound and inbound teams need to engage with multiple personas within a target organization—such as C-level executives, engineers, and end-users—and this requires strategic messaging.

Crafting the right message for each persona at scale is not easy. What resonates with a CTO won’t land the same way with a data analyst. This is where marketing’s involvement is critical. Marketing helps create targeted messaging frameworks, segment content by persona, and provide tools that make personalized outreach more efficient.

In other words, marketing ensures that outbound efforts stay aligned with the company’s brand and voice, helping SDRs and BDRs connect with prospects on a deeper level.

Conclusion: Aligning Goals to Find the Right Fit

Ultimately, whether SDRs and BDRs sit in marketing or sales depends on your business model and the role they play in your funnel. If your model focuses on managing inbound interest, SDRs are better off reporting to marketing. If your team is doing heavy outbound prospecting or managing long enterprise sales cycles, BDRs should work closely with sales.

The key to getting this right is clarity—clear goals, clear alignment, and clear processes. By understanding how each role supports your funnel and ensuring the right collaboration between marketing and sales, you can build a structure that drives better results.

That's it for now... Leave a comment or share some of your tips below.

Thanks for reading!

Michelle