Business Development Representative (BDR) Manager

**About the Role** Cobalt is hiring a BDR Manager to lead a team of BDRs spanning North America and EMEA. This role owns outbound execution and coaching, partners closely with Marketing and Sales on SQO generation, and plays a hands-on role in optimizing our AI SDR engine for inbound. This is a player-coach role built for someone who's confident operating a maturing playbook. You'll spend most of your time coaching and developing reps, and a meaningful chunk of your time building and improving the systems around them—tooling, process, and messaging. **What You'll Do** **Team Leadership & Coaching** \* Manage, coach, and develop a team of outbound BDRs across North America and EMEA time zones. \* Run regular 1:1s, call reviews, and pipeline coaching to improve conversion at each funnel stage. \* Coach reps on executive-level communication, discovery, account research, and strategic prospecting for enterprise and mid-market conversations. \* Own hiring, onboarding, and ramp planning for the outbound team. \* Set and manage quotas, and hold reps accountable to activity and outcome metrics. \* Drive improvements to messaging, sequencing, and personalization. \* Build a high-performance, low-ego team culture rooted in continuous improvement and candid feedback. **Pipeline & SQO Generation** \* Partner with Growth Marketing and Sales leadership to translate campaign and ABM priorities into outbound execution. \* Own the outbound contribution to SQO targets; report on pipeline health, conversion, and forecast accuracy. \* Establish operational rigor around activity metrics, conversion rates, and pipeline quality, ensuring consistent execution across the team. \* Diagnose and fix bottlenecks in the outbound funnel (deliverability, response rates, meeting-to-SQO conversion). \* Bring front-line market and prospect feedback back to Growth Marketing and Sales leadership to sharpen targeting and messaging. **AI SDR Optimization** \* Partner cross-functionally with Growth Marketing and RevOps to co-own and maximize the performance of our inbound AI SDR engine. \* Monitor response quality, conversion, and escalation accuracy; drive iterative improvements to prompts, routing logic, and qualification criteria. \* Recommend and implement process changes to improve human/AI handoff on inbound leads. * * * **What We're Looking For** \* 5+ years managing an outbound BDR/SDR team in cybersecurity. \* Demonstrated ability to build process, not just execute an existing one: you've written a playbook, fixed a broken funnel, or stood up a program with limited resources. \* Proven track record hitting SQO/pipeline targets through a managed outbound team. \* Experience managing distributed teams across multiple time zones. \* Hands-on fluency with sales engagement tooling (Salesloft or Outreach), sales intelligence tools (Apollo, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator), AI SDR tools (Qualified), and dialers (Orum, Nooks). \* Comfort working with or overseeing AI-assisted sales tooling: you don't need to build it, but you need to evaluate and improve it. \* Strong analytical skills; you can read a funnel report and immediately spot where the leak is. \* Direct communication style; comfortable giving and receiving candid feedback. \* High tolerance for ambiguity and fast iteration; you're energized by "figure it out" environments, not looking for a fully built machine. **Must Have** \* Experience in cybersecurity, PTaaS, or a related technical B2B category. \* Prior exposure to AI SDR or conversational AI tooling in a GTM context. \* Direct experience building a BDR playbook from a blank page. **Success Metrics (First 6 Months)** \* Team ramped and hitting activity/outcome quotas within 90 days. \* Measurable improvement in outbound-sourced SQO conversion rate. \* Clear ownership and at least one measurable optimization delivered on the AI SDR engine. * * * **Why You Should Join Us** \* Grow in a passionate, rapidly expanding industry operating at the forefr…