A new sales manager's first 90 days with an SDR

You inherited an SDR, a list, and a reporting cadence you did not design. The bias toward action that got you the manager job is exactly the wrong instinct for month one. A new manager who rebuilds the outbound function in week two is not fixing it. They are resetting it, and a reset costs a quarter, because the message iteration, the list learning, and the rep's rhythm all start over whether you meant them to or not.

Days 1 to 30: watch the machine run

Before changing anything, learn what the function already knows. Pull the last twelve weeks of reports and read them in order, not as a stack of numbers but as a story: what moved, what was tried, what the narrative paragraph said each week. If the reports do not contain the five weekly numbers, that is your first real finding, and it still is not your first change.

Then listen to calls. Ten of them, spread across the quarter, before you offer a single opinion. The recordings hold more truth about the function than any dashboard, a point we made in the recordings post, and they tell you whether the problem you were hired to solve is the message, the list, or nothing at all. Ask the rep one question in week one: "If you ran this, what would you change first," and then write the answer down without acting on it. Reps have usually diagnosed the function correctly months before anyone asks.

One thing you keep no matter what: the reporting cadence. If the numbers arrived weekly before you, they arrive weekly under you, in the same format, from day one. Continuity of measurement is what makes every later change legible.

Days 31 to 60: change one thing

Pick the single most consequential fix your first month surfaced and change only that. One list segment, one opener, one qualification tweak. Not because ambition is bad, but because attribution dies when three variables move at once, the discipline we laid out in the experiments post. Give the change two to three weeks of clean data before judging it, and report it the same way everything else gets reported.

This is also the month you earn tape trust. A rep who hears their calls dissected in front of others, or graded on style points, will quietly stop flagging their hard calls for review. Feedback in private, praise for the attempt before the correction, and one skill at a time. The reward for getting this right is a rep who brings you their worst calls voluntarily, which is the only coaching relationship that compounds.

Days 61 to 90: set the standard in writing

By month three you have earned the right to codify. Write down the activity standards, the meeting definition, the reporting format, and the coaching rhythm, and review the document with the rep rather than issuing it. What you are building is a function that survives you, because manager transitions are exactly when outbound functions historically die: the new leader resets everything, the ramp restarts, and the quarter pays for it.

Part of why we built CommandVA the way we did is that this whole 90-day gamble, inheriting a rep and hoping the management transition does not break the machine, is the part clients least want to own. A CommandVA seat comes with the management layer attached: the coaching, the weekly reporting, and the standards travel with the rep, so a leadership change on your side does not reset the motion. If you just inherited an outbound function and want a second opinion on what to change first, book a strategy call and bring the last month of reports. We read them for a living.