Sales Development Representative resume keywords
The most important ATS keywords for a Sales Development Representative resume are cold outreach, prospecting, Salesforce, Outreach, lead qualification, email sequences, cold calling, CRM. Include the ones you genuinely have, phrased exactly as the job description phrases them — applicant tracking systems rank resumes by keyword match, and about 75% of resumes are filtered out before a human reads them.
Hard skills and tools
These are the concrete, matchable terms an ATS scans for on a Sales Development Representative resume.
Soft skills
👉 Want to know which of these you're missing for a specific job? Paste your resume and the job posting into the free ATS checker — instant match score, no sign-up.
How to use these keywords
- 1. Mirror the posting. Use the employer's exact wording — if they write "cold outreach", don't write a synonym.
- 2. Put them in context. A keyword inside an achievement bullet ("cut build time 40% with cold outreach") beats a bare skills list for the human reader, and still matches.
- 3. Only claim what's true. Keyword stuffing skills you don't have fails at the interview stage.
- 4. Spell out acronyms once. Write the full term and the abbreviation so either search matches.
- 5. Re-tailor per application. Tailored applications are associated with roughly 2.5x more interviews.
What a Sales Development Representative is hired to do
Hiring managers for this role are looking for evidence of booking qualified meetings for AEs, building top-of-funnel pipeline, testing and improving outreach messaging. Frame your bullets around those outcomes, with numbers wherever you have them.
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