How should your SDR onboarding and enablement change as your team grows?
When your SDR team was composed of a couple members supporting the CEO or a flat org of SDRs supporting a handful of account executives, an onboarding process as simple as shadowing the founder (or top seller) and reviewing a handful of documents could produce effective results.
As the team grows into a larger organization with one or even two layers of SDR management, this kind of bespoke training process is no longer available.
Programs that don’t get serious about their onboarding and enablement, can come to rely on a “sink or swim” approach, resulting in too many SDRs “sinking,” resulting in high employee churn, reduced average SDR performance, and cultural issues.
A lack of a consistent and effective enablement program means that the performance floor isn’t raised for your SDR team and the performance ceiling isn’t lifted for your truly high potential reps.
So how do you tackle this problem?
1. Create a Pre-Onboarding Checklist
Do this thought experiment: "If I was the best front line manager in the world, what are all the things I'd have done before my new hire starts on their first day." Do those things, automate when possible.?
I cannot tell you how many times I've worked with hiring managers who are practically winging it the day their new SDR starts—don't do this. Make sure your SDR is set up to have the most productive first day, week, and possible.
2. Adopt an onboarding and continuous enablement program that’s right for your team
For smaller teams, stretching out the enablement and onboarding process presents a bigger opportunity cost for the the business than just getting them immersed as soon as possible. Shadowing the founder or that single seller really is the best course of action.
For larger organizations, not having a thorough enough initial program or having an effective continuous enablement plan in place means you're not raising your performance floor (or lifting the performance ceiling for your truly high potential hires.
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It's crucial that you adopt an onboarding program that's right for your company's stage.
3. Coordinate Your New Hire Start Dates
At New Relic, we had a strong enablement program, a great in person culture that empowered new hires to shadow great performers, and a product that our customers loved. But one variable was responsible for whether an SDR ramped quickly and successfully or not: being hired as a cohort.
Without fail, new hires who started together were more successful, required less support from their managers, and regularly provided important feedback for how we could improve our onboarding process (something we rarely heard from solo ramping reps).? Additionally, if you’re fortunate enough to have a company “boot camp” coordinating your SDR start dates 1-2 weeks beforehand can be especially useful for establishing context for the immersive training and keeping the enablement momentum going.
4. Mentor program
You can have the best enablement program and documentation in the world, but it still won’t capture all of the tacit knowledge and soft skills needed to really thrive as an SDR in your company.
Whether relatively informal or structured, make sure that you implement some kind of mentor program for new hires and be clear about which party owns the relationship.? Having a successful mentor program achieves three important things:
5. Embrace Documentation that Scales
Lastly, be “tactically lazy”—if you find that you or your leaders are walking new hires through the same process or the same training every time, can you or a top SDR make a recording or other artifact to use instead?
Videos and recordings are especially useful in capturing tacit knowledge or training on a process that doesn’t need feedback (think a Salesforce process, not role play exercise).? Take the time to create the artifact once instead of doing the process live over and over again.