Step 5: Pass The Baton (When Is An Opportunity Qualified?) A question I get from every client is, “How do you define a qualified opportunity?”, that is, one which the inside Sales Development Rep (SDR) should pass to an Account Executive (AE), and that the SDR can be compensated on. In this section, I’m going to be using the terms “Sales Development Rep” and “Account Executive” a lot, so while I’m not a fan of acronyms, I sometimes will use “SDR” and “AE” for brevity. This process below was just for the outbound sales process. Salesforce. com had different qualification criteria for leads coming in through the website (“inbound leads”), which were routed to a totally different Market Response Reps team. After lots of experimentation, these simple guidelines worked the best for our outbound generated opportunities…. The Basics Apart from the qualification criteria, in order to be compensated for a new opportunity, the Sales Development Rep must find opportunities which: