BDR Salary Guide For North America In 2023 | Does Location Impact Salary?

A guide to Business Development Rep (BDR) salaries in the tech industry and the factors that affect them

(All figures are current as of January 25, 2023.)

What Is A Business Development Representative Really Worth?

Considering a Career Change into tech sales and want to know whether it’s the right financial move? Have an interview lined up and want to set your salary expectations ahead of time? Or are you an employer looking to attract the best talent with competitive compensation?

This guide is a great place to start. We break down the current market rate for BDRs across North America, from Los Angeles to Montreal. But more than that, we dive into what factors affect the BDR salary – from skills to experience to location.

Compensation comes down to more than salary alone, so we also take a look at the most common salary and commission structures that BDRs can expect in today’s job market.

Finally, we answer the hottest question in sales salaries: does remote work matter? It turns out, there is a difference for telecommuters – and we’ll tell you all about it.

Arm yourself with the insights you need to take the next step in your career!

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A Day In The Life: Breaking Down The BDR Role

Before we break down what the job’s worth, let’s talk a little more about how you’ll earn that paycheck.

BDRs specialize in the first steps of the sales cycle. They’re essential to the team as the hunters who seek new business to feed the sales pipeline. It’s up to BDRs to find the best prospects for your product or service, initiate the first point of contact, discover prospects’ needs, qualify the best leads, hook them with a pitch and book a meeting with your team.

During a typical day, you may find yourself:

• Identifying companies or contacts who are a good fit for your product
• Reaching out to decision-makers via call, social media, or email
• Talking to prospects about their specific needs, challenges, and concerns
• Positioning the product or service you offer and how it addresses those needs
• Moving qualified leads to the next step in your sales process

In most sales organizations, BDR positions are considered entry-level jobs. So if you’re new to sales, you’ll likely start here to learn the ropes and gain experience with the products you sell and the customers you serve.

6 Must-Have BDR Skills

You’ll be a great fit as a BDR if you are:

• Resilient
• Adaptable
• Empathetic
• Curious
• Communicative
• Collaborative

So What Do BDRs Earn On Average?

The average BDR salary ranges between US$49,848 to US$53,177 in the U.S. and between C$49,107 and C$49,999 in Canada.

Salaries vary quite widely, to the point where top earners can expect to make roughly twice as much as the lowest-paid employees in the category. Specifically, U.S.-based BDRs may see salaries as high as US$74,000 or as low as US$37,000. In Canada, the reported range is C$75,000 on the high end and C$34,000 on the low end.

That’s just the salary, though. In many sales positions, commissions, and bonuses apply as well, and both influence the amount of pay a BDR takes home. These numbers can vary greatly depending on the compensation structure offered by the employer, but in very broad strokes, the average total OTE for a BDR in the U.S. lands between US$35,000 and US$81,000, while in Canada, the average falls between C$39,000 and C$84,000.

These numbers represent BDR roles across all industries and on a country-wide basis. Think of this as a starting point from where we’ll go with this conversation because there’s more nuance to dive into as we start slicing and dicing the data. It provides a useful benchmark against which we can measure and evaluate more specific tech sales salaries.

Based on average data from PayScale, Glassdoor, Compgauge, and ZipRecruiter.

On-target earnings (OTE): The pay a salesperson earns, including salary, commission, and bonuses, if they meet their targets.

3 Key Factors that impact BDR salary

Though there is a large range in BDR salaries, three key factors appear to have a large influence over how much you’ll make as a BDR in tech sales: skills, experience, and location. Let’s break those down one by one.

Skills

BDRs with more specialized skills tend to have a salary advantage over the baseline. This includes skills that are in high demand within tech companies. According to Payscale, for example, the following tech industry skills can make a measurable impact on the salary a BDR earns in a year:

• New business: ↑ 106 percent
• Strategic marketing: ↑ 21 percent
• Market research: ↑ 7 percent
• Technical sales: ↑ 6 percent
• B2B sales: ↑ 4 percent

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Experience

The more sales experience a BDR has, or the longer they’ve been in their career, the more they tend to make in annual salary.

Over 70 percent of BDRs have four years of on-the-job experience or less:

• 39 percent report they have one year or less of experience
• 33 percent say they have two to four years of experience

Payscale’s U.S. data shows that early-stage BDRs with less than one year of experience earn an average of US$46,000 a year, while those with between one and four years earn US$50,000. Compare that with seasoned sales reps who have 20-plus years of experience: they hit their peak with an average salary of US$64,000.

Compgauge, which measures salaries for tech sales in particular, tracks a similar trend in the States. Tech BDRs with two years of experience or less earn an average salary of $51,492, with a large bump up to $55,332 when they hit three years.

We see a bump in salary for Senior Business Development Representatives, too: compared to average BDR salaries, those with Senior” in their title may earn anywhere from 28 to 34 percent more.

Location

The cost of living varies from city to city, as does the cost of doing business. So it’s no surprise that there are geographical differences in average salaries for BDRs in the tech industry.

Software BDR salaries across North America

Let’s Talk Commission

Commissions are extremely common in sales roles. BDRs can expect their compensation package to include both fixed salary (which we’ve been talking about up until now) and variable commissions or bonuses. That variable portion is typically tied to quotas or performance: the more you sell, the more you earn.

About half of all sales organizations use a salary-plus-commission compensation plan. The exact scale can range anywhere from 100 percent salary to 100 percent commission, with the most common splits landing in between.

According to The Bridge Group, a fixed-to-variable split of 65:35 is most common for B2B BDRs. Hubspot suggests that 60:40 is fairly standard, though 70:30 is common when sales reps have to educate prospects on a complex or technical product.

Alternately, BDRs may receive commissions or bonuses calculated by other means, like gross margins, team performance, or territory volume.
While salary, commission, and bonuses are important parts of a BDR’s compensation package, they aren’t the only things to consider. Benefits matter, too – and they appear to be on par for BDRs with added tech skills.

Remote vs. In-Office

Remote work quickly became the status quo in tech sales for many companies over the Course of the pandemic. And many employers have plans to maintain a remote sales force in the years to come. But does that come with salary strings attached?

In a recent report, Payscale found that employees who telecommute 100 percent of the time don’t earn any less than their fully in-office counterparts; rather, on average, they earned more. Employees who work in a hybrid environment – some days in the office and some days at home – had the highest compensation of all three groups.

The technology sector saw the second greatest difference of all the industries measured, with fully remote employees earning 5.5 percent more than their office-going colleagues after taking compensable factors (e.g. job title and location) into consideration. Tech companies were also the most likely to report adopting a flexible or hybrid office post-pandemic, and the least likely to say they’d return to a traditional office space.

Sales jobs are uniquely well suited for remote work, and it shows in the numbers. Measuring by occupation, fully remote sales workers were higher earners, taking home 6.5 percent more than non-remote colleagues.

Based on these figures, we think it’s reasonable to conclude that remote jobs for BDRs in tech are likely to be more lucrative compared to in-person work.

Is Becoming A Tech BDR The Next Step In Your Career Journey?

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Regardless of your sales training or background, you can set yourself up for greater success as a BDR straight out of the gate with live classes, practical experience, and agency services, all purpose-built to land you a great job in tech sales.

Take charge of your career and take the next step with Uvaro today!