SDR interview roleplay: a five-minute mock cold call, scored
How to run an SDR interview roleplay that predicts ramp: the one-page brief, the prospect to play, a six-skill score sheet and the three tells.
The best predictor of how fast an SDR will ramp is a five-minute mock cold call, run the same way for every candidate and scored on the same six skills you coach to afterwards. Not the CV, not the "tell me about a time" questions, and not how confident they sound describing their last role. Hand over a one-page brief, play a prospect with two objections you have decided on in advance, and score what happens. Candidates who do well on three specific moments ramp in weeks. Candidates who do not take a quarter, however good the interview was.
Most SDR interviews already include a roleplay. Most of them are improvised: the interviewer invents a prospect on the spot, the objections depend on their mood, and the verdict is a feeling. Two interviewers running the same candidate on the same day can disagree completely, and nobody can say afterwards what the candidate actually did.
Why the improvised version does not predict anything
An improvised roleplay measures the interviewer as much as the candidate. A friendly interviewer who plays a prospect that says "sure, go on" produces a candidate who looks fluent. A tough one who hangs up at hello produces a candidate who looks lost. Neither result transfers to the floor.
The second problem is the brief. Candidates who are told "sell me this pen" or "pitch our product, you've seen the website" spend the five minutes guessing what the product does. A candidate who has sold before but has never heard of your category looks worse than a candidate who read your homepage carefully, which is not the skill you are hiring for.
The third is the score. "Strong communicator, a bit scripted" is not a score. It cannot be compared with last week's candidate and it tells the hiring manager nothing about which skill to work on if the hire goes ahead.
Fix all three and the roleplay becomes the most useful fifteen minutes of the process.
The brief
Hand the candidate one page, ten minutes before the call, and leave the room. The page has exactly what a rep would have on day one, nothing more.
The product in one line. "We help property managers catch lease renewals before they roll over." The candidate does not need the deck.
Three proof points, each one sentence. One about the problem, one about what the product does, one result from a customer like the prospect.
The prospect. Name, title, company, size and one line of context. "Karen Oduya, Head of Operations, 300-unit residential portfolio, took on 40 units last quarter."
The ask. "A 15-minute call later this week." The candidate should not have to invent the close.
That is the whole brief. It is also what a new rep's first week looks like, which is the point. If the candidate can turn one page into a reason for the call in ten minutes, they can do it with your real battlecard in a month. The one we use for the free call on our site is the Karen brief, and it is a fair model.
The prospect to play
Decide before the interview, and play the same prospect for every candidate in the round.
Answer with your surname only. Give the candidate about fifteen seconds of patience, then interrupt with the first objection if they have not stated a reason for the call. Use two objections, the same two every time, taken from the ones your team actually hears. "We've got something for that already" and "just send me an email" are good because they test different things: the first tests whether the candidate argues, the second whether they can turn an exit into a question.
If the candidate asks a real question, answer it honestly with a short, slightly reluctant line, the way a prospect would. If they pitch, give them a long non-committal silence. If they ask for a specific time, agree. If they ask whether it would make sense to chat sometime, say "maybe, send me something" and see what they do with it.
Five minutes, then stop, whatever is happening. Longer calls flatter candidates who talk.
The score sheet
Score the same six skills you will coach to once they are hired, from 0 to 10, and weight them the way the call actually gets booked. The anchors below are the ones from our cold call scorecard template, shortened for an interviewer who has five minutes to write.
| Skill | Weight | A 3 looks like | An 8 looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opener | 15% | Rushed name, "is this a bad time?" | Name and company slowly, then straight to why |
| Reason for call | 20% | About the product: "we help companies with" | About the prospect: "you took on 40 units last quarter" |
| Discovery | 15% | No question, or "what keeps you up at night?" | One question that follows from what the prospect just said |
| Objection handling | 20% | Argues, or caves at the first "no" | Acknowledges, asks one question, decides whether to continue |
| Value proposition | 10% | Thirty seconds, four features | One line, under fifteen seconds, tied to what the prospect said |
| Close | 20% | "Would it make sense to chat sometime?" | A specific slot, held through the first soft no |
Two interviewers score separately and compare afterwards. If they are more than two points apart on any skill, the anchors need tightening before the next candidate, not the candidate re-scoring. After a few rounds the sheet also tells you something about your own interviewers.
The three moments that predict ramp
In our observation, three moments in the five minutes separate the candidates who ramp in weeks from those who take a quarter. None of them is about polish.
The reason for the call. Within the first twenty seconds, is the reason about the prospect or about the product? A candidate who reads the brief and says "the reason I'm calling is you took on forty units last quarter" has understood what a cold call is. A candidate who says "we're a platform that" has not, and that habit is the one that takes longest to coach out.
The two seconds after the first objection. Does the candidate argue, cave or ask? Arguing ("actually ours is different") and caving ("OK, sorry to bother you") are both coachable but slow. Asking ("what do you use it for?") is the instinct you are hiring for. Candidates who do it once in the interview do it on the floor.
The close. Does the candidate ask for a time? Not "would it be worth a chat", a time. Candidates who ask for Thursday at ten in an interview, when they know the prospect is fake, will ask for it on a real call. Candidates who go vague under no pressure at all will go vaguer under real pressure.
Score the full sheet, but if you only remember three things from the call, remember those.
Standardising it
Once the brief, the prospect and the sheet are fixed, the roleplay is the same test for everyone, and the scores start to mean something across candidates and across months. Three practical points.
Record the calls, with the candidate's consent, so the second interviewer can score without being in the room, and so a hire's interview score can be compared with their first-month scores on the floor. Over a year that comparison tells you which skills the interview actually predicts for your team.
Do not warm the prospect up for candidates you like. The temptation is real and it destroys the comparison.
Consider letting the candidate run the call against an AI prospect instead of an interviewer, with the same brief and the same two objections for everyone, and the same scorer. It removes the interviewer from the measurement entirely, which is the hardest part to standardise, and it gives the candidate a transcript and a score to talk through in the next round. Our page for managers hiring and ramping SDRs covers how teams run that, and the same scored call becomes the baseline for the rep's first week if the hire goes ahead.
Questions people ask
- How do you run a roleplay in an SDR interview?
- Give the candidate a one-page brief ten minutes before the call: the product in one line, three proof points, the prospect's name and role, and the ask. Then play the prospect for five minutes, raise two objections you have decided on in advance, and score the call on the same six skills you coach to. Every candidate gets the same brief, the same prospect and the same objections.
- What should you look for in a mock cold call interview?
- Whether the reason for the call is about the prospect rather than the product, what the candidate does in the two seconds after an objection, and whether they ask for a specific time at the end. Those three moments predict ramp better than polish, confidence or how well the candidate pitched, in our observation.
- How do you score an SDR interview roleplay?
- Score six skills from 0 to 10: opener, reason for call, discovery, objection handling, value proposition and close. Weight the reason for call, objection handling and the close at 20 percent each, because they are what books the meeting and take longest to coach. Two interviewers score separately and compare, and a gap of more than two points on any skill means the anchors need tightening.