SDR onboarding plan: a 30-60-90 day template that gets to booked meetings

Most SDR onboarding plans are a reading list with a start date. Product docs in week one, shadowing in week two, a login to the dialler in week three, and then the new rep is "ramping", which means they are making real cold calls to real accounts while learning the job on them. The plan below is built around one idea: the rep should have made a hundred bad cold calls before anyone in your pipeline hears one.

The mistake to design around

The expensive way to onboard an SDR is to let them learn on the live pipeline. It feels efficient. They are dialling from day ten, the activity numbers look right, the manager can point at a dashboard. But every account a new rep burns in month one is an account someone else could have booked in month four, and the rep learns almost nothing from those calls because nobody hears them. They get a hang-up, they do not know why, they move to the next name.

Ramping on the pipeline also teaches the wrong lesson early: that the point is volume. A rep who learns to dial fast before they learn to hold a conversation will keep dialling fast for the rest of their tenure.

So the plan separates practice from production. Days one to thirty are mostly practice. Days thirty-one to sixty are production with tight feedback. Days sixty-one to ninety are production with targets.

Days 1 to 30: learn the conversation

Week 1. Who we sell to and why they buy. Not the product. The buyer. The rep should be able to describe three target personas, what each one is measured on, and what goes wrong in their week that your product fixes. Have them write a one-paragraph reason for calling for each persona and say it out loud to you. If it contains the word "solution", send it back.

Have them listen to ten recorded calls, five that booked and five that did not, and write down in one line what happened in each. This is the fastest way to build a picture of what a good call sounds like.

Week 2. The opener and the reason for the call. Practise nothing but the first thirty seconds. Name, company, an honest acknowledgment that this is a cold call, and one specific reason for calling. Twenty runs a day against a friendly prospect, then twenty against one who is irritated. The rep does not need to close anything yet. They need to get through the first thirty seconds without apologising, rambling or asking "is now a bad time?". Our post on cold call openers covers why that last one matters.

Week 3. Objections and discovery. Take the five objections your team hears most (most lists start with "not interested", "send me an email" and "we already have something") and drill each one until the rep can acknowledge, isolate and redirect it without looking at notes. Then add two discovery questions the rep can ask once the prospect has engaged. Two, not eight. A cold call is not a discovery call.

Week 4. Full calls, graded. Now put it together. The rep runs full cold calls against a resistant prospect, gets a transcript and a score on each, and reviews the lowest-scoring dimension with you once a day for fifteen minutes. By the end of the week they should be getting a next step from a resistant prospect roughly one call in five. That is not a real conversion rate; it is a sign they can hold the shape of a call under pressure.

What to measure in month one: calls practised (aim for over a hundred), the score on each of the six dimensions (opener, reason for call, discovery, objection handling, value, close) and, most usefully, the trend. A rep whose objection-handling score is climbing is ready. A rep whose scores are flat after eighty calls needs a different kind of help, and it is far better to find that out now than in month four.

Days 31 to 60: real dials, tight loop

The rep goes live on a small, low-stakes segment of the list. Not your top accounts. A territory that is fine to warm up on, or re-engagement calls to closed-lost from two years ago.

Set the activity target low and the review cadence high. Forty dials a day is plenty when every call is being listened to. The rep records everything, and the manager reviews three calls a day: one that went well, one that went badly, and one the rep picks. Fifteen minutes, one dimension, one thing to change tomorrow.

Keep practice running alongside. When a real call goes wrong on a specific objection, the rep runs that objection five times in practice the same afternoon, then reads the transcripts. This is the point where practice pays off most, because the rep now has a real failure to attach it to.

What to measure in month two: connect rate (so you can separate list problems from rep problems), conversations over two minutes as a share of connects, meetings booked, and the objection-handling score on practice calls. The meetings number will be small and noisy. Conversations over two minutes is the one that tells you whether the first thirty seconds are working.

Days 61 to 90: production, with a number

Move the rep onto the real list and give them a meetings target that is a fraction of a tenured rep's, rising each week. Reviews drop to two or three a week. Practice continues, but the rep chooses what to drill based on what their transcripts are telling them.

This is also where the rep should take over their own coaching. Have them pick their weakest dimension each Monday, name the change they are making, and show you a transcript on Friday where it worked. If they can do that, they are through onboarding whatever the calendar says.

What to measure in month three: meetings booked, meetings held (a rep who books meetings that do not happen has a close problem, not a pipeline problem), and the one dimension score they said they were working on.

The manager's part

The plan above asks a manager for about fifteen minutes a day in months one and two. Most managers do not have fifteen minutes a day, which is why onboarding drifts into "listen to some calls and we'll catch up Friday".

Two things make it fit. First, a fixed rubric. If every call is scored on the same six things, a review is a conversation about one number that moved, not a re-listen from the top. Second, let the rep do the volume without you. A hundred practice calls in month one is not a hundred calls you have to hear. You need the transcripts of the three that matter. The coaching view in 100 Dials exists for exactly that: skills by rep, the objections the team mishandles, and the calls underneath.

A one-page version

Weeks 1 to 4: personas, first thirty seconds, top five objections, full graded calls. Target: a hundred practice calls, scores trending up.

Weeks 5 to 8: live on a low-stakes list, forty dials a day, three reviews a day, practise the thing that went wrong. Target: conversations over two minutes rising.

Weeks 9 to 13: real list, rising meetings target, rep-led coaching. Target: meetings held.