SDR Onboarding - What truly matters

Hiring your first SDR or expanding your team is awesome! If you are doing it right, it’s a sign that business is going well, and there is potential to scale your demand generation efforts, which is going to help you propel your business to the next growth phase. Exciting stuff!

Finding the right candidates is a challenge on it’s own, but let’s say you found the perfect candidate, and this person starts next week. You are finding yourself putting together the onboarding framework, and this is where you have to stop and really think what is going to help you enable this person to get up to speed asap.

Too many companies are making the mistake of trying to create product experts, and include at least 2 weeks of dedicated product training into the onboarding plan. Don’t get me wrong, product knowledge is important long term, but doesn’t add any value to what you want them to do, which is booking quality meetings that turn into opportunities, and eventually into revenue, right?

Instead, focus on the following pilar to shorten the onboarding period, increase the impact of any new SDR, and positively impact the payback period of your team:

1. ICP & Persona knowledge:
Where are we winning (region, segments) and who are we selling to (job titles). But don’t stop here, go deeper and focus on impact:

• Provide insights into the use cases per ICP segment.
• Provide insights into why customers are buying AND renewing. (Impact) - How does this tie into their strategic initiatives?
• Create a comprehensive buyer persona framework that outlines job titles, responsibilities, main challenges & pain points, and how your product/service is solving for this. Quantify the impact.

2. Strengths & Weakness + Objection handling
What is more powerful then knowing what your product can do? Right, knowing what is it that it cannot do. The more transparant your SDRs can be about the potential added value, or the lack of, the better they can qualify, which will increase lead quality.

Keep track of the most common objections and start training your SDRs on how to handle these from day 1. You’ll be amazed by the impact confident SDRs can deliver!

3. Competitive landscape
This one is a no-brainer. Leverage battlecards to provide insights into the competitive landscape. Include a SWOT analysis (focussed on added value, not on features) per competitor + talk tracks on how to handle different competitors. Direct and Indirect

Your goal is to make sure your SDRs have the knowledge and skills to make them successful in executing revenue generating activities. Their main activity is prospecting, so having SDRs that can deliver killer product demos after their onboarding is just wasting time and resources. Yes, these skills are very important on the long run, but should be developed as part of continuous training & development programs, rather than focussed on during onboarding.

4. Prospecting & Call Shadowing
Create a buddy system (preferably at least 2 buddies, best of both worlds idea) and let them shadow other SDRs and learn by doing instead of watching endless training videos or (even worse) reading onboarding documents. Shadowing should include the following:

• Building a campaign
• Prospecting (Multi-channel outreach & Tech stack walkthrough)
• SDR/AE Handover

Don’t forget to connect your new hires up with their AEs from day 1, and make sure they are invited to at least 2 Discovery calls and 2 Demos in their 2nd week of joining. When first training them on the theoretical aspect of the role, the pieces will fall into place when seeing it live in action.

5. Onboarding assessment
Wanna know if your SDRs are ready to hit the trenches? Create an onboarding assessment that covers all the above mentioned aspects. Leverage scorecards and provide detailed feedback. Coaching and mentoring for as a manager/leader also starts from day 1 ;)

If you want to make it even more interesting: At HubSpot, we had to pass all of our onboarding assessments before hitting the phones…

Final thoughts
Last but not least, SDRs pitch what they know. Too many SDRs have been trained on product knowledge, and what are they pitching? Right, features instead of added value. Time to turn this around.