What does an SDR FTE own?
A Sales Development Rep FTE owns the top of the sales funnel: account research, outreach sequences, reply triage, meeting booking, and CRM hygiene. It is accountable for qualified pipeline booked in your CRM, with the constraint that every sequence is approved before it sends.
It works inside the CRM and the mailbox you connect, so the pipeline it builds and the records it maintains are yours. There is no separate tool where the leads live.
How does outreach get approved?
A sequence arrives in Approvals with every step previewed as it will send, the contact list it will go to, and the suppression list it has applied. The manager approves the sequence, not a description of it, which is what makes the control real.
Personalisation comes from fields already in the CRM rather than from invention. If a field the sequence relies on is empty for a contact, the FTE flags the contact rather than sending a message with a gap in it.
What happens with replies?
Replies are triaged each morning. Routine replies, such as a request to send information or a simple scheduling response, get a drafted answer that waits for approval. Anything non-routine, including objections, complaints, or a reply from someone senior, is escalated with the full thread.
As with every ftes.ai role, routine reply classes can earn autonomy from approval history, and non-routine ones keep their gate. Meetings are booked into the calendar you connect, and the CRM record is updated in the same action.
- Morning: pipeline brief with replies, meetings booked, and records updated
- Sequences: previewed step by step and approved before sending
- Replies: routine ones drafted for approval, non-routine ones escalated
- Records: CRM fields kept current, with a log of every change
- Friday: which messages earned replies and meetings, with proposed changes
Why is CRM hygiene part of the role?
CRM hygiene is part of the SDR FTE's job because stale records are where pipeline quietly dies. It keeps fields current from the conversations it handles, marks outcomes, and logs every change so the history stays auditable.
This is one of the less visible and more valuable parts of the role. A human SDR under pressure updates the CRM last; the FTE updates it as part of the same action that produced the information.
What does it need, and where does it start?
To start, the SDR FTE needs access to the CRM and the mailbox it should send from, your ideal customer profile and the accounts to avoid, and the approval rules for sequences and replies. It begins at Level 0, proposing every sequence and every reply.
Missions extend the routine: booking meetings with a defined target list by a deadline is a production mission, replies fell, why is a diagnostic mission with ranked hypotheses about deliverability, list quality, messaging, and timing, and which segment next is a strategy mission built from your closed-won accounts.
What does an SDR FTE cost, and what does the sales leader see?
An SDR FTE consumes tokens for research, drafting outreach, qualifying leads with evidence, CRM hygiene proposals, and its morning brief, bounded by a per-FTE budget and visible daily; approving sends and confirming CRM changes cost nothing. Any tooling it uses on your account, such as an enrichment source, is billed by that provider and kept on a separate line. In the first weeks every send is gated, so the manager's approval minutes are the main human cost, falling as cold first-touch outreach earns autonomy from a clean record.
The sales leader sees, in the morning brief, outreach waiting for approval with the research attached, replies that arrived and were routed to reps, leads qualified with evidence per criterion, and hygiene proposals grouped by rep. In the Performance tab they see qualified pipeline created against target, the approval rate with send-back reasons, and usage per role, and once a month the FTE's own report stating what it delivered, missed, and recommends. The pipeline diagnostic mission answers why pipeline moved with ranked hypotheses from the CRM, which is the question most pipeline reviews cannot answer with evidence.