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.