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Since the role of an SDR is usually considered an entry-level position in sales, many organizations choose to hire people with minimum experience and coach them in-house. But SDRs are often the first person a prospect interacts with - meaning they can often make, or break, your sales prospecting efforts.
Yet, with an average SDR tenure of just 1.8 years, offering a lengthy SDR onboarding plan might seem to be a waste of time. As a result, most newbies would get thrown in the deep end, forced to cold call prospects after only a week of company and sales training.
If you want your new SDRs to be successful, unlock their full potential, and start performing their best as soon as possible, you need to build an effective sales onboarding.
Not sure where to begin? Here are some aspects to take into account as well as a proven SDR onboarding plan you can easily adopt.
Essential elements of an effective SDR ramp-up process
Coming up with an effective and scalable SDR onboarding plan is always a matter of trial and error. You can’t get everything right the first time.
Sometimes you might even need to change your plan on the go, depending on new product launches, their previous experience, or even personal traits.
This is what happened to me a couple of months ago as I was onboarding our three new SDRs. One week into my seemingly perfect plan, I realized that we had to adjust and improvise now and then to get the results we desired from these new team members.
That was a valuable lesson that helped me understand the key elements of a successful SDR ramp-up process, be it a one-week onboarding or a full-on professional sales training process.
So - what are the key elements of successful SDR onboarding?
1. Consistency and structure
Having a clear onboarding plan along with specific milestones and objectives is a must. This makes the process transparent and consistent, allowing you (as well as your new sales reps) to keep track of the progress and stay on the same page.
2. Mentorship
As a manager, be prepared to stay in touch with the newbies daily for the next 4-6 weeks. You can also get other team members involved at different stages. For example, we have one experienced SDR lead the training on cold calls, another one on video prospecting, and the third one on hyper-personalization.
3. Communication
Some things that seem obvious to you might not be as clear to less experienced team members. That’s why we have weekly recap and Q&A sessions to address all the questions or concerns as soon as they arise. Make sure to ask for (and give) feedback regularly during the SDR onboarding process.
Even after their initial ramp-up process, you want to make sure that they feel they can continue asking questions!
4. Enablement
Sales enablement includes information, tools and sales collateral aimed to help the new hires, i.e. ready-to-use templates, scripts, sales playbooks, checklists, etc...
In some industries or roles, professional jargon might pose additional challenges for the new hires. In this case, having some sort of an internal glossary might be helpful as well.
If you're just getting started on building an SDR onboarding program, ask existing team members what would have helped them most in the early days!
5. Hands-on training
Let your trainees start applying what they have learned as soon as possible.
It’s best to come up with practical tasks to be completed every day, starting from the 2nd week. This might be list cleaning, cold call training, template writing, or direct outreach, depending on the current stage of training and overall sales experience.
Nowadays, we're seeing a lot of teams using cold call transcripts recorded by the AI sales tools they're using as a way to get hands-on training by understanding what cold call objections they might face when they're out in the real world!
6. Self-education
It’s vital that your new hires don’t stop learning and improving once they become full members of your team.
That’s why you should build a culture of continuous learning within the team (and organization in general) and encourage your SDRs to get creative, experiment, and develop the necessary skills of a great sales rep.
This might include having an education budget for SDRs, bringing someone in to teach the whole team, or having a quarterly book club where everyone reads a certain book on selling techniques, tactics, and tools.
7. Track and measure
This SDR ramp-up element doesn’t mean you need to set a quota for your new hires from day one. But having some KPIs to track the progress throughout their onboarding as a new sales rep is necessary.
Easier said than done, right? Well, not if you have a battle-tested, step-by-step SDR onboarding plan you can follow!
SDR onboarding plan template with examples (6 weeks to success)
For me, effective onboarding means giving the new team members just enough time, information, and support to figure out the basics and let them learn by doing.
Even if they lose a couple of leads along the way, the experience and knowledge they acquire in this time can be more valuable than a dozen workshops or playbooks.
That is why I’ve tried to find the happy medium in my sales rep ramp-up plan, offering the right amount of theory and practice for both first-time sales reps and more seasoned professionals to easily get the ball rolling.
So, here’s a high-level plan for our 6-week SDR onboarding process.
Week 1: Introduction
The first week of our SDR onboarding process is fully dedicated to helping the newly hired SDRs get to know our company and team. We also want to provide them with the tools, resources, and knowledge they can rely on down the road.
As a result, the typical intro week agenda for our SDR ramp-up plan looks like this:
- Company intro: values, mission, and beliefs introduction
- Tech setup: Walk through the company-wide & role-specific tools
- Knowledge base: Overview of the key SDR playbooks and other sales-related materials
- The basics of the role: Team structure overview, roles, and responsibilities, the standard SDR process
- Customer info: buyer personas, stakeholders in the sales process, company ICPs (industries, locations, titles)
- Product/brand introduction: Demo, key competitors, pricing
By the end of week one, the new SDR should have a clear understanding of what your company does, why they operate the way they do, and be fully onboarded to all of the tools in your sales tech stack.
Week 2: Touch points deep dive
Next, the new hires dive into the basics of sales engagement and the types of sales techniques used in your sales prospecting efforts. Each day, we explore a different outreach channel, including its specifics, possible use cases, best practices, workflows, etc.
- Email: Types, examples and use cases, key elements of an effective email
- LinkedIn: Types of LinkedIn touchpoints and best practices, social selling basics
- Cold calls: Use cases and best practices, proven scripts, calling workflow, and overcoming common cold call objections
- Video prospecting: Use cases and best practices (playbook and samples), and how to use the tools
- Other sales channels overview: SMS, WhatsApp, direct outreach - use cases, best practices, examples.
At this stage, our new hires should be ready to dip their toes into the outreach process by writing email templates, recording videos, shadowing the calls, etc...
Week 3: Inbound sales process basics
Once the SDRs are aware of the available channels and how they work, we can niche down to focus on specific use cases for their specific role. And what could be a better starting point for a new SDR than working with inbound, warm leads?
During this week of training, we cover the basics of the inbound sales process, including:
- lead qualification
- existing sequences
- response handling
- meeting booking
It’s also at this stage of the SDR onboarding process that our trainees start actively applying the acquired knowledge in practice and should get their first responses. The SDR should be researching the incoming leads, adding them to the existing sequences, and engaging with them using various channels.
Make sure you're keeping a close eye on them during this time - as you can tend to figure out pretty quickly if they have absorbed the knowledge and are going to be a great addition to your team.
Week 4: Outbound sales process basics
At this stage, our SDRs get familiar with the cold outreach process:
- use cases, best practices, toolset
- list building, cleaning, data enrichment
- sequence structure and multichannel approach
Similar to the previous week, newbie SDRs should be able to actively participate in the outbound sales process, from researching prospects and finding their contact info to coming up with email templates, and actually doing the outreach.
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Weeks 5 - 6: Advanced outreach tactics and tools
We usually spend the last couple of weeks of SDR onboarding working on the regular activities they'll be doing. At LeadIQ, there’s already some quota they have to achieve within the second month of their SDR ramp-up process (usually less than 50% of the regular quota).
On top of that, we dive a little deeper into the advanced sales and sales engagement strategies. Some of the topics I’d recommend covering are:
- Creative outreach strategies and hyper-personalization at scale
- AI in sales development: Use cases and tools
- Sales automation: Low-code and no-code tools
- Personal productivity: Recommended hacks/tools/resources
The sales rep onboarding process ends with a wrap-up call — a 1-on-1 meeting with the mentor/SDR leader where we discuss the feedback, introduce the quota for the next month (usually up to 80% of the regular quota), and prospective career opportunities.
From there, you want to make sure they feel confident to jump in and be successful. You also want to make sure they realize that learning at your organization is always ongoing and if they have questions, feedback, or new ideas that they can always come to you.
Know how to onboard a new SDR to unlock success
Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to SDR onboarding. The process might differ from team to team, or even from person to person within the same organization. Some of your new hires might require more hands-on exercises while other more experienced SDRS might want to focus on product differentiators and ICPs instead.
The key to creating an effective SDR onboarding process is to never stop optimizing it. It’s very unlikely to find the perfect approach at the first attempt. After all, every person you hire comes with their unique experience, skillset, and personality. So, make sure to review and adjust your onboarding process often tailoring it to your needs and objectives!
