- Week one is customer immersion, not tool tours.
- Ship real (supervised) outreach by week two — feedback needs live at-bats.
- Ramp quota: ~25% in month one, 50–60% month two, full by month three or four.
Most SDR onboarding is a week of tool logins and slide decks, followed by 'okay, go.' Then everyone acts surprised when ramp takes six months. A deliberate 30-60-90 cuts ramp time dramatically — and since SDR tenure averages barely a year and a half, every week of faster ramp is a meaningful slice of their productive life at your company.
Days 1–30: immersion and first at-bats
Week one belongs to the customer, not the software: the ICP and why it's the ICP, recorded discovery calls, win stories, loss stories, and the problem your product actually solves in the buyer's own words. Have them write a cold email on day three — not to send, but to reveal what they've absorbed. Weeks two through four: supervised live outreach on lower-stakes segments, every message reviewed before send for the first fortnight, daily 15-minute feedback loops. Real reps learn from real replies, and small early wins — a first response, a first booked meeting — do more for confidence than any training module.
Days 31–60: volume with coaching
Now scale toward half-quota with full sequences across channels. The manager's job shifts to pattern-level coaching: weekly reviews of actual threads (not just dashboards), objection-handling drills from real replies they've received, and shadowing the meetings they book so they hear what a good discovery call sounds like. Watch conversion ratios, not just activity — an SDR sending plenty with no replies has a message problem; replies without meetings is an ask problem. The diagnosis differs, so the coaching should too.
Days 61–90: full speed, full ownership
Full quota by month three (month four for complex markets is fine — set it explicitly either way). By now they should own their segment: building their own lists against the ICP, adjusting sequence copy within guardrails, and bringing their own funnel analysis to one-on-ones. The graduation test: could they explain the playbook to the next hire? Teaching-back is how you know it stuck — and conveniently produces your next onboarding improvement notes.
Keep the system light
Two structural notes. First, keep the tool footprint small during ramp — every additional login steals a training day; a consolidated platform like BixJet means the tech portion of onboarding is one afternoon, not one week. Second, write down everything that confused this hire and fix it in the doc before the next one. Onboarding compounds if you let it.