SDR Onboarding Insights for Crushing Quota

Building a great sales development team drives more leads and appointments for sales, helping exceed quota and drive predictable revenue growth. However, making that team a reality requires an effective onboarding process.

An organized onboarding process is an important part of successfully growing your team of sales development reps (SDR) and quickly maximizing the value they produce for sales. These tips will help turn new SDRs into an experienced talent that know your market, your product, and your sales development process.

Organize an Onboarding Curriculum

Sales development professionals come on board with varying degrees of experience in sales. In fact, 72.5% of high-growth companies add SDRs with less than one year of experience. A comprehensive training curriculum needs to be created to get them in the mindset of sales, fill any gaps in their knowledge, and sharpen their ability to perform.

A training curriculum helps hammer in the core values and skills that are required for an SDR to succeed. Your training should focus on familiarizing SDRs with their role and preparing them for effectively adding qualified opportunities to the sales pipeline.

Provide Enough Resources for Success

Help support SDRs as they work and develop by providing resources and guides. Creating standard operating procedures (SOP) for responsibilities, sales playbooks, and access to information equips SDRs with the tools they need to improve.

Be Hands-On

Committing time to develop their skills will give them an opportunity to absorb knowledge from you directly. It will also help keep them motivated and on the right track.

A great hands-on onboarding tactic is to schedule mentoring times and have 1-on-1 conversations with your SDRs. These opportunities allow you to mold each rep into valuable assets, and help guide their development into bigger roles.

Establish the Culture

Make the sales and work culture of your company clear. Whether it be an environment of productivity, relationship-building, or something different, establishing a mindset early on will help align the new SDR with the rest of the team.

Create a Daily Workflow

Creating a workflow for how SDRs spend their time on daily tasks helps give them structure and maintain productivity. This helps keep them accountable on their daily tasks and sets the expectation on how they should accomplish their core responsibilities. Especially while they are still developing skills, SDRs may need a guiding hand to maintain productivity.

Professional Development

Provide a clear career path for your SDRs that highlights how they can progress into other roles at the company. This career roadmap highlights the skills and experience required to level up, and a set of goals and milestones to lay out how they can get there.

A career path helps keep talent at your company by clearly laying out the steps required to evolve into roles like Account Executive, Account Manager, and Customer Success. Motivate SDRs to seek the mastery of core skills needed to succeed.

Cultivate Valuable Habits

Habits are powerful and can improve or dampen the performance of SDRs. Help reps generate habits that set them up for success and aid them in their mastery of the role. Promoting good habits like proper time management, task focus, and communication skills help prevent bad habits from forming.

Reward Small Wins

It can be a long road to completing mastery over core skills, so celebrating small wins can help build confidence and maintain momentum in SDRs. This means focusing less on big milestones and instead looking at different day-to-day milestones like a certain number of daily touches.

Creating a structure that rewards small progress and momentum helps increase productivity and keep SDRs encouraged. By rewarding small wins along with big ones, SDRs will be better equipped to tackle the long-term challenge of complete mastery.

Never Stop Coaching

Whether they are fresh hires or experienced professionals, coaching your SDRs after onboarding produces more value for both the sales development team and your company. Continuous skill development helps to prevent bad habits, reinforce learning, and shortens the time spent onboarding new SDRs.

Conclusion

In order to get on a track to success, SDRs need to quickly develop the skills necessary to begin generating qualified leads and appointments for sales. Investing time in an onboarding process helps them become functional and able to hit quota as efficiently as possible. By using these tips to make the most of their learning, you will create a more efficient sales development team and save time and money on onboarding.