Have new SDRs draft their own cold call script very early in onboarding. Although the script isn't final, the act of writing it makes them listen to subsequent live calls with a more focused, analytical mindset, accelerating their learning as they compare their draft to real conversations.

Related Insights

New SDRs get overwhelmed when forced to learn industry nuances first. A better approach is to prioritize mechanics (CRM, scripts), then knowledge (personas), and finally the 'art' of sales, which develops over time. This builds confidence and allows them to execute quickly while they learn.

Dedicate call blocks to connect with junior employees at a target account. The goal is not to book a meeting with them, but to gather intel on internal challenges and key players. Use this information to craft a hyper-personalized message for the actual decision-maker.

For cold outreach, hyper-personalizing every prospect is inefficient. Instead, identify patterns across similar roles or industries and develop 'targeted messaging' that speaks to these common challenges. This allows for scalable and relevant outreach without time-consuming individual research.

Instead of scrapping your entire sales script after a bad call, make one small tweak. Test that change over a significant number of conversations (e.g., 10) to validate its effectiveness with data before making further adjustments. This prevents overreacting to single failures.

Instead of just using AI for coaching low-performers, input transcripts from successful, meeting-booking cold calls into ChatGPT. Ask it to identify patterns and common themes, then use these AI-generated insights to create scalable enablement sessions for the entire team.

A new hire's first project was planning a major event happening in three months. This trial-by-fire approach is an effective onboarding method, forcing rapid learning of company systems, team dynamics, and external vendor management, which quickly and effectively integrates the new person into the team.

Newcomers to sales often fail when they fixate on immediate outcomes. The key is to embrace the learning process—making dials, fumbling through conversations, and learning from mistakes. Competence and results are byproducts of consistent effort over time.

Don't improvise your cold calls. Writing out a script allows you to stop worrying about *what* to say and focus your mental energy on *how* you say it—your tone, pacing, and confidence. This is the key to sounding natural and building rapport, even when you're anxious.

Junior reps can leverage their inexperience by approaching lower-level employees with a humble "Teach me" or "Help me understand" posture. This disarms prospects, turning a sales pitch into a collaborative learning session that builds rapport and extracts valuable internal intelligence for later use.

Traditional onboarding takes months to reveal a new hire's effectiveness. By requiring recruits to teach back core concepts from day one, managers can assess their competence, coachability, and work ethic in as little as three weeks, dramatically reducing the time and cost of a bad hire.