For most of the last decade, the Sales Development Representative (SDR) role was the default entry point into technology sales.
Historically, companies have hired SDR reps in large cohorts to prospect, qualify leads, and book meetings for Account Executives (AEs). While this model has been contracting for several years, AI has accelerated the contraction by absorbing repetitive prospecting work.
Go-to-market (GTM) leaders are filling the gap in several ways, from AI agents and automation specialists to redesigned entry-level roles that carry entirely new titles.
One of these titles is the Sales Development Analyst (SDA). We highlight this role and many others in our latest Betts Compensation Guide, which explores the widespread emergence of artificial intelligence across the tech industry.
The High-Volume SDR Hiring Model Has Been Unwinding Since 2023
The contraction began well before generative AI became a daily tool for sales teams; specifically, when economic pressure after the pandemic-era hiring surge pushed many SaaS companies to freeze or cut GTM headcount.
In 2024, we reported that SDR recruitment across the startup market had fallen to roughly half of its 2020 to 2021 levels, with many companies eliminating their SDR programs altogether. As a result, AEs absorbed more lead generation work, while Sales Managers stepped back into sales calls to help close deals.
By 2025, entry-level GTM hiring had still not returned to pre-pandemic rates. Instead, competition for the remaining SDR openings intensified. While some AI startups continued hiring sales development reps, many of them also folded prospecting responsibilities into AE roles or hired only technical sellers. Consequently, the traditional path from SDR to AE (which supplied internal sales talent) became far less travelled with each hiring cycle.
The contraction shows up clearly in our own placement activity, where entry-level roles have dropped from 20 to 30 percent of the positions we fill to just ~2 percent. From what we have observed so far in 2026, the SDR candidates still competing for limited openings are more technically capable than those in earlier cohorts. The searches themselves also run differently than they did during the era of high-volume hiring. Your plan for sales development therefore starts from a smaller and more selective talent market than the one many GTM leaders used to build their first teams.
Companies Are Filling the Sales Development Gap in Several Directions
The prospecting, research, and qualification work that SDRs performed still needs to happen, but companies are redistributing it across software, specialists, and redesigned roles. For smaller accounts and transactional sales, AI agents can act with considerable autonomy, prioritizing inbound demand and managing outreach at scale to engage accounts that sellers could not profitably serve before. At many technology companies, a single operator running automated outbound systems can now cover work once performed by an entire SDR team.
Other companies are honing in on the human side of sales development, with specialized titles taking on narrower and more technical versions of the traditional SDR mandate. Enterprise SDRs, for example, handle fewer accounts in greater depth across longer and more complex sales cycles. We are also seeing companies adopt junior analyst roles modeled on the consulting approach at firms like Bain and McKinsey.
The emergence of the Sales Development Analyst role is yet another way tech companies are rebuilding the top of their funnel. Each approach answers the same underlying question of who or what owns the prospecting and research work. The most effective combination for your organization depends on your deal sizes and buyers, as well as how much of your outbound motion is already handled through automation.
Titles Vary Widely From Company to Company
At Betts, we have never seen so many new roles emerge in such a short period of time. Consequently, the Sales Development Analyst title currently describes meaningfully different jobs depending on the company. Hiring managers benchmarking their own role against the market will find the same title attached to very different responsibilities and performance expectations.
At many companies, the title describes a sales analyst in the traditional sense. In this case, the role centers on reporting, dashboards, and forecasting that supports sales leadership with performance insight. At other organizations, the Sales Development Analyst takes on some of the prospecting and account research duties that SDRs once performed, using AI tools to carry that work with fewer people. The overlap between them is a reason why candidates and hiring teams often arrive at interviews with different assumptions about the job.
The most useful way to define the role for your team starts with the work you need done and the outcomes you plan to measure. Clear scoping also protects you from comparing candidates against a version of the role your organization never intended to hire for.
AI Fluency From Day One Anchors the Role as We Define It
Despite the range of definitions, fluency with AI tools is a defining characteristic of the Sales Development Analyst role. Across entry-level GTM titles, companies expect new hires to use AI for prospecting, analytics, and reporting from their first day. The analyst title attaches that expectation directly to sales development. SDRs who can build and refine prompts for AI-assisted outreach are among the most in-demand entry-level profiles.
For hiring managers, assessing AI fluency during interviews requires more than asking candidates which tools they have used, since tool familiarity reveals little about how someone turns automated tasks into pipeline.
Prioritizing Job Scope Clarity for Better Hires
With companies hiring fewer but more technical early-career professionals, the high performers often move through promotion timelines faster than their predecessors did in volume-based programs. Across tech, the SDR, BDR, and mid-market AE functions remain the most vulnerable to automation as sequencing, prospect research, and templated outreach becomes increasingly agent-based. Some companies are removing these positions entirely, while others are consolidating entry-level teams around the work that still requires human judgment.
The Sales Development Analyst fits most naturally at companies choosing consolidation, where a smaller number of AI-fluent hires carry research and outreach work that once required a full SDR cohort. The role also allows organizations to continue developing future AEs at a time when many traditional on-ramps into tech sales are disappearing.
Deciding which version of the role you need before opening the search will sharpen your screening criteria and give candidates a clearer picture of where the job leads.
Build the Next Version of Your Sales Development Team With Betts
Betts Recruiting has spent over 15 years helping technology companies build GTM teams through every major shift in how software is sold, including the current redesign of sales development. Whether your organization needs AI-fluent early-career hires, specialized SDRs, or the GTM Engineers who build automated outbound, our recruiters source the talent these new structures depend on.
Contact Betts here to scope the right entry-level role for your team and start building the sales development function your next stage of growth demands.