What Is an Account Development Representative (ADR)?

An account development representative, or ADR, works a named list of companies rather than a stream of individual leads. The job is to find the people at each company who could buy, get a conversation going, check that there's a real need, and pass a qualified meeting to the person who will run the deal. The unit of work is the account, not the lead.

That much is common to every version of the role. Where companies disagree is which accounts go on the list. If you're reading a job posting or setting up a team, that one detail tells you which job it really is.

Two jobs share the ADR title

The ADR title covers two different jobs: one that prospects into companies that haven't bought yet, and one that looks for more business inside existing customers. Many definitions online describe only one of them.

The new-business ADR

In this version the list is target companies that aren't customers yet. Aptean's ADR posting, for example, asks the rep to generate and qualify new business in defined target markets using cold calls, social media outreach and email, building pipeline for the sales team largely from scratch. The posting expects "dozens of calls per day" and says 90% of the rep's time goes to pipeline development.

The expansion ADR

In the other version the list is current customers. HubSpot's glossary defines the ADR this way: a rep who works with established clients to find upsell and cross-sell opportunities, relies on warm introductions more than cold calls, and coordinates with customer success and the account executive. A remote ADR job posting listed on Virtual Vocations matches it closely, asking the rep to watch account usage and contract terms for expansion openings and book qualified meetings for the account management team.

Clay's glossary goes further and describes the ADR as a "farmer" who builds long-term relationships with key clients, including moving deals to a close. That reads closer to an account manager than to most ADR postings, where closing belongs to someone else.

What an ADR does each week

Whichever accounts are on the list, the weekly rhythm looks similar. The ADR is building a picture of each company and turning it into meetings.

1. Research the account. What the company does, what's changed recently, which teams would use what you sell.
2. Map the people. Find the several people involved in a purchase, not just one contact. A 2026 role guide from Tomba.io, a contact-data company, puts it as multithreading across stakeholders inside a book of roughly 25 to 100 accounts.
3. Reach out. Phone, email and LinkedIn messages, written for that account rather than pulled from a generic sequence. Expansion ADRs often start from an introduction by the customer's existing contact.
4. Qualify. Confirm there's a problem, a person who can act on it and a reason to talk now, using whatever framework the sales team agrees on.
5. Hand off. Book the meeting for the account executive or account manager and write down what was learned, so the next person doesn't start over.
6. Keep the CRM accurate. Contacts, roles, conversations and next steps, logged where the rest of the team can see them.

How an ADR is measured

ADRs are usually measured on qualified meetings or opportunities created inside their accounts, not on raw activity. The Tomba.io guide lists qualified opportunities, account penetration and contacts engaged per account as the main scorecard, and treats calls and emails as leading indicators. HubSpot adds account penetration rate and the growth in deal size for expansion work.

Account penetration means how much of a company you've reached: how many of its departments, people or buying groups now know you. A new-business ADR might count it as engaged contacts; an expansion ADR might count it as teams using the product.

ADR, SDR, BDR and AE: the difference

These titles overlap, and companies use them loosely, so read the actual duties before assuming. The cleanest way to tell them apart is the unit of work and who closes.

The SDR and BDR split above follows Revenue Grid's guide, which describes SDRs as responsible for inbound lead qualification and BDRs for outbound prospecting, and notes that neither closes deals. Smaller companies often merge the two. An ADR differs from both mainly in having an assigned set of accounts it works deeply, rather than a queue of leads or an open territory.

Common mistakes with the ADR role

• Handing ADRs a list that's too long. Researching and multithreading takes time per account. Give a rep hundreds of accounts and the work turns back into volume prospecting under a different title.
• Measuring dials instead of meetings. If the scorecard rewards calls made, reps stop doing the research that makes account-based outreach work.
• A weak hand-off. A booked meeting with no notes means the account executive asks the buyer the same questions again.
• Expansion ADRs who skip customer success. Pitching an upgrade to a customer with an open support problem damages the relationship the account manager is trying to protect.
• Assuming the title means the same thing everywhere. Two companies can use "ADR" for opposite jobs. Read the account list and the quota, not the title.

Where the role leads

ADR is often an early-career sales job. The expansion posting above asks for one to three years of sales development or customer-facing B2B experience, and Clay describes moving up from an SDR or BDR role into ADR work, then on to senior account management or strategic account roles.

If your company is running account-based plays, the ADR is usually the person carrying out the sales side of them. Our page on ABM orchestration explains how those plays are timed across teams, and our page on sales acceleration covers what happens to a deal after the meeting is booked.