SDR Onboarding: Useful Action Plan To Get To 100% Quota

A predictable and scalable SDR onboarding process can make a big difference when your sales development reps achieve success.

As an SDR Manager, are you consistently hiring and onboarding new talent?

You’re likely using the same sales playbooks to get your SDRs ramped up to full productivity as quickly as possible. With the right process and onboarding plan, your sales development team can book meetings faster and get a head start on building pipeline.

Don’t know where to start?

Read below for a walkthrough of a proven SDR onboarding process. You’ll learn why onboarding is important, what metrics to track, and a proven 30-60-90 plan.

Why is SDR onboarding so important?

SDR onboarding sets the tone and pace for your new hires. When an SDR is fully trained and ramped up, they are more likely to shorten their onboarding cycle, outperform their peers, and overachieve their quota.

According to Bridge Group reports from 2022, the time it takes your new sales development rep to ramp up is 3.1 months. However, the average tenure at a company is just 1.8 years.

That means if you’re spending a lot of time ramping up, you’ll have, at best, 12-15 months of full productivity. With growing sales quotas and goals, that’s simply not enough time to enable your SDR team to drive high performance.

So, the clock is ticking when you bring on a new SDR.

An effective onboarding program improves ROI and allows your SDRs to build careers. It’s a great opportunity for them to learn, grow, and refine their sales skills.

Read below for best practices to ensure a smooth and effective SDR onboarding process.

What to prepare for in an SDR onboarding plan

So you’ve just hired an SDR. To help them get up to speed, here is a suggested action plan for reaching your quota.

Follow these best practices to enable your new hires to become quota crushers quickly.

1. Outline the training, resources, people, and technology onboarding activities that will help your new SDR ramp up quickly

The first step in your SDR onboarding plan is to give them an overview of your company’s mission, goals, values, and culture.

This can be done through presentations and discussions with department leaders across your organization.

Your new SDRs should get a strong sense of how the company functions and feel motivated by your company mission.

2. Set expectations for performance and establish a timeline for review

It’s important to set expectations for performance and establish a timeline for onboarding. This will help ensure everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goal.

I recommended reviewing the job description they applied for so that everyone can agree on certain expectations and align on what success looks like.

Write down the top 5-10 skills your most successful SDR has. Remember, onboarding aims to build a repeatable and predictable process. So, it would help if you shared with your new SDRs exactly what skills they need to build to achieve their goal.

It’s also helpful to set expectations about their goals and the next 90 days during the onboarding process.

By providing visibility, you’re giving them the comfort and assurance that there’s a plan to follow.

3. Be receptive to feedback – create a continuous loop of development and coaching

Getting feedback from your SDRs is crucial for their development.

Be open to their feedback about how they’re progressing so that it’s easier to iterate the process. The set cadence of consistent check-in periods, such as daily, weekly, or bi-weekly, to gauge their performance.

Avoid using negative feedback or pointing out mistakes. It’s a new job for them, typically their first full-time job. Instead, coach them on areas of improvement and support them through their development.

Get familiar with customers and their pain points – put them in the shoes of your customers

Ensure your SDRs gain a deep understanding of their customers.

During the SDR onboarding process, they should review your ideal customer profile and buyer personas.

They should know your customer’s pain points and why they chose your product or services.

In The Sales Acceleration Formula, Mark Roberge shares what the onboarding process was like during HubSpot’s early days. When a new sales rep was hired, they would have to write a blog post as part of their onboarding. Why? HubSpot sold marketing software.

SDRs need to know what messaging works with your buyer personas, where they spend their time and their motivations. They can learn this by listening to sales calls, reviewing case studies, or speaking with customers. But nothing beats cold calling your prospects and hearing yourself on what they care most about.

4. Celebrate successes along the way – don’t wait until the end of the onboarding period to give feedback or recognition

The SDR onboarding process can be a daunting time for any new hires.

There’s so much to learn and remember, and it can be easy to feel like you need to measure up.

That’s why it’s important to celebrate successes along the way – it helps to keep morale high and gives employees a sense of accomplishment. Regardless of how small or large the successes are.

For example, a small success can be completing their product training early, and a large success can be booking their first meeting with a prospect.

Recognizing accomplishments doesn’t have to be formal—a simple ‘well done’ or ‘great job’ goes a long way.

In addition to verbal recognition, have them share their accomplishment with the sales team. Taking the time to celebrate successes during the onboarding period will help ensure that your employees are engaged and productive from day one.

What should be included in your SDR onboarding plan

When onboarding a new SDR, it’s important to set them up for success.

A solid onboarding plan will cover all the essential information they need to know about your product, sales process, and target market. It should also include basic training on using your CRM and sales prospecting tools.

Furthermore, your onboarding plan should clearly explain to your new SDR their daily tasks and how their performance will be measured.

Creating a comprehensive onboarding plan ensures your new SDR hits the ground running and quickly becomes a top performer.

The first 30-60-90 days of SDR onboarding

The first week of an SDR onboarding process is key to setting new hires up for success.

From day one, they should be immersed in the company culture and given a thorough overview of your ideal customer profile, products, and services they sell.

The sales team should also take the time to show them how to use sales prospecting tools such as CRM and other tools they’ll need to succeed.

In addition, they should be given realistic expectations of their daily tasks and quotas. By the end of the week, the goal is for SDRs to completely understand their role within the company and what’s expected of them. By following these onboarding best practices, you can ensure your new SDRs hit the ground running and quickly become top performers.

The first month of new SDR onboarding

Month 1: Understand our company, mission and customers

The first month of their SDR onboarding plan should be about getting started on the right foot.

The SDR’s goals for booking meetings and building pipelines should follow a ramp-up period based on benchmarks. It’s not important to drive outcomes during the first 30 days.

Instead, your SDRs should be getting used to the process and acquiring knowledge.

Your SDRs should emerge from this month with strong knowledge about our customers and their pain points.

Secondly, they should know the product, pricing, competition, and existing collateral. The goal is to get in the field during the month’s latter half to optimize and improve during prospect conversations.

The first week as a new SDR

Day 1

What you need to cover: Give them a warm welcome with an overview of your company’s mission, values, and goals. Your new SDRs should learn how your company operates and who they should speak with.

Company overview and culture
Company onboarding process
Setup computer, technology, and company basics
Lunch with team

Day 2

What you need to cover: Explain the team structure to them, have them meet with team members they’ll work closely with, and set expectations about what their onboarding will look like.

Setup sales tools
Review team structure and reporting
Meet with team
Set onboarding expectations

Day 3

What you need to cover: understand who your ideal customer profile is. Walk through what a successful customer looks like and one that isn’t. One of the core responsibilities of an SDR is to qualify, so they have to determine what makes a good customer.

Review the ideal customer profile
Review sales calls, resources, and material
Walk through the target market

Day 4

What you need to cover: get on sales calls to hear what potential customers say. Learn about their pain points and motivations through sales calls.

Attend prospect calls with AE
Review the value proposition for each ICP
Review and learn how to use CRM

Day 5

What you need to cover: review the first week and see if your new SDR has completed their tasks. Set up the next week as well.

First-week recap with manager
Setup sales tools
Catch up and walkthrough week 2

Week 1: By the end of the first week, your SDR should understand their goal’s expectations and your ideal customer profile. As they ramp up into weeks 2-4, your SDRs onboarding should go more in-depth about prospecting skills, strategy, and execution, including cold calling skills, voicemail scripts, personalized emails, video prospecting, list segmentation, etc. If they are ramping up quickly, consider having them prospect in weeks 3-4.

Month 2: Connecting with prospects

The next month of their SDR onboarding should be about getting in the field consistently and having daily conversations with prospects from both inbound and outbound leads.

During this onboarding phase, they’ll focus on getting into the market, getting to know our customer profile, meeting with prospects, and working with the team to understand your ideal customers.

Here’s what they should spend their time on:

Evaluate leads against the buyer persona.
Research and collect information about potential prospects.
Make 50-75% of total touchpoints per day.
Create a cold calling script.
Create a list of questions for lead qualification.
Prepare for discovery calls.
Create a strategy for sales follow-up.
Create sales follow-up templates.

Month 2: By the end of the second month, your new SDRs should be close to full productivity. They should be prospecting full steam and have a good grasp on your prospecting strategy. As they ramp up, the number of activities and prospects they should target increases.

Month 3: Improve sales productivity and source pipeline

The last month should be about improving your sales productivity and getting into more conversations with prospects.

New SDRs should be able to fully handle inbound leads, start having outbound conversations with prospects and build pipeline. During this phase, they’ll be able to run a solo discovery and demo call and guide customers throughout the sales process.

Here’s what they should spend their time on:

Block time for nurturing activities.
Create strategies to handle objections.
Create strategies for booking meetings.
Block time to coordinate with prospects who are in the closing stage.
Tweak the strategies for improving the conversion rate.
Make at least 100% of total touchpoints per day.

Month 3: By the end of their 90-day onboarding plan, your new SDRs should reach full productivity. They should be consistently hitting activity metrics and ramping up to book more meetings, improving response rates, and seeing their pipeline increase.

How to measure the success of your SDR onboarding plan

Measuring the success of your SDR onboarding plan is essential to ensure that your new hires are productive and contributing to your company’s overall success.

There are a few key metrics that you can use to gauge the effectiveness of your onboarding program.

Ramp up time

First, look at the time it takes new hires to reach full productivity. If they take longer than average to ramp up, that could indicate that your onboarding process needs improvement.

The first month shouldn’t focus on hitting the full quota. Instead, it should be used to learn, grow, and absorb knowledge. As they progress, they should follow a ramp-up quota for the first 3-4 months.

Leads generated and conversion

During your SDR onboarding, track the number of sales MQLs and SQLs SDRs generate during their first few months on the job.

Note that it’s not as important if they hit their quota in the first month. They should ramp up both their leading and lagging indicators.

Leading indicators:

Cold calls
Emails sent
Voicemails sent
Calls listened to
Leads worked
Positive response rate

Lagging indicators:

Meetings booked
MQLs and SQLs
Opportunities generated
Pipeline generated

This will give you a good idea of whether they are successfully completing the tasks they were hired to do.

Skill development and effort

Finally, measure speed to productivity. If SDRs aren’t ramping up quickly, it’s either a lack of effort or skill. Have a one-on-one meeting to understand what the roadblocks are.

If they consistently hit their activity metrics, it’s likely not an effort roadblock. Instead, they could just need more coaching and skill development.

As we previously mentioned, have a list of the top 5-10 skills a successful SDR in your company has.

Have a one-on-one discussion to gauge from 1 to 10 how well they’re doing in each skill. Measure their skill level the first week and then after each month to see how they’re progressing. Of course, you want to ensure that their skill development continues to grow.

You can adjust your onboarding program as needed by tracking these key metrics to ensure that new hires are set up for success.

Final thoughts – SDR onboarding should be predictable and repeatable

I firmly believe that a highly effective SDR team can be a big differentiator for your company. They are often the first impression a prospect has with your company. And they can be a massive pipeline generator for your sales team.

With a predictable and repeatable SDR onboarding plan, you should be able to ramp your new hires to full productivity. The right expectations, process, technology, and resources should be in place to successfully enable your SDRs. This should also be a great learning opportunity for them to jumpstart their sales careers.

The last tip is always to review your SDR onboarding plan to ensure you’re following best practices. By following a plan, you’ll be on your way to successfully preparing your new SDRs.

Recommended Posts: