SDR training program: a 30-day plan for new SDRs

From the outside, an SDR's job looks simple: call people who aren't expecting you and book meetings. In practice it's a stack of small skills, each one easy to describe and hard to do under pressure. A good SDR training program teaches those skills one at a time and has reps practice each one out loud before they use it on a real prospect. This is a 30-day outline for SDR managers: the outcomes to aim for, a daily rhythm, what to teach each week, the certification calls and what you check along the way.

Here, 30 days means a calendar month: four working weeks and a review at the end. It covers the skills side of the first month. For setup, owners and logistics, pair it with the sales onboarding checklist.

What an SDR should be able to do by day 30

Start from the end. By the close of month one, a new sales development representative should be able to:

• Research an account and a contact quickly, and find a specific reason to call
• Open a cold call in a way that earns a question rather than a hang-up
• Handle the handful of brush-offs they will hear every day without arguing
• Ask enough discovery questions to qualify the prospect and brief the account executive
• Book a meeting with a specific time and agenda, then confirm it in writing
• Write a short prospecting email and a voicemail that match the call
• Keep the CRM accurate enough that you and the account executive can trust it

Notice what isn't on the list: hitting a full quota. Month one builds the skills that make quota possible. If you're still deciding how the role is split on your team, SDR vs BDR vs AE covers the differences.

Five principles behind the program

• Practice before performance. Every new skill is said out loud, in practice, before it's used on a prospect. Real leads are too valuable to be the first rehearsal.
• One layer at a time. Each week adds one skill on top of the last: the opener, then objections, then booking, then running the whole day.
• Short and daily beats long and weekly. Twenty focused minutes every morning does more than a two-hour workshop on Friday.
• Gates, not dates. Reps move on when they pass a scored call, not when the calendar turns.
• Quality before volume. In month one, judge the conversations as well as the dial count. Activity targets matter, but a rep making lots of poor calls is building the wrong habit.

The daily rhythm

The same shape every day makes the program easy to run and easy to follow. What fills each block changes from week to week.

Week 1: market, message and the opener

No live calls yet. The goal is for the rep to know who they are calling and why, and to have said the opener out loud so many times that it stops sounding like a script.

The objection library has wording and practice notes for the brush-offs new SDRs hear first, and the cold call scripts show the opener structure by industry.

Week 2: first live calls and objections

Live calls start, with a safety net. Practice moves to the start of the day as a warm-up, and objection handling goes from the first line to a short back-and-forth.

Week 3: booking meetings and the sequence

The calls are getting further, so now the rep needs to finish them well and connect them to email and voicemail in a sequence that makes sense to the buyer.

How calls and emails share the work is a decision for the whole team, not just the new hire. The comparison of cold email vs cold call covers when each channel leads and how to sequence them.

Week 4: ownership and consistency

The rep runs full days on their own list. Practice shrinks to a short daily warm-up aimed at the weakest criterion on their recent scorecards.

The certification calls

Four checkpoints, each scored the same way by whoever runs it. Share the pass criteria on day one so nobody is surprised, and let reps retake a call as many times as they need. A failed certification is coaching information, not a verdict.

The hard part is giving every rep enough repetitions before each gate without spending every afternoon playing the buyer yourself. In Vonvo, SDRs run cold call drills against AI prospects, including gatekeepers and voicemail, and every practice call is scored on an NEPQ-based scorecard. From the Starter plan up you can build scenarios with your own personas, objections and goals, so the certification calls sound like your market. For your SDRs to run them, they join your workspace, and inviting reps starts on Growth. That plan also includes the team library, where reps share calls and you read the transcript and scorecard before the debrief. Cold call training with Vonvo has the details.

What you check each week

• Week 1. Listen to a few of the rep's practice recordings. Are they saying the opener in their own words yet, or reciting it?
• Week 2. Listen to live calls and debrief the same day. Look for whether the rep asks a question after a brush-off or gives up.
• Week 3. Read their emails and handoff notes, and ask the account executives what they think.
• Week 4. Look at activity and scorecard trends together, and agree one focus skill for month two.

For numbers, track activity (calls and emails), conversations, meetings booked and meetings that account executives accept. Compare new reps with your own earlier hires at the same point rather than with benchmarks from other companies, which rarely share your list quality, market or definitions. If daily targets are a debate on your team, see how many cold calls per day.

Common mistakes in SDR training

• A week of product before any practice. SDRs need enough product knowledge to have a reason to call. The rest can come later.
• Scripts read word for word. Buyers hear it within seconds. Teach the structure and practice it until it sounds natural.
• Full dial targets in week one. Volume before skill builds habits you'll spend months undoing.
• No loop with account executives. If nobody asks whether the meetings were any good, the SDR optimizes for the wrong thing.
• Practice that stops on day 30. The daily warm-up is the part of the program worth keeping forever.

Frequently asked questions