An SDR's first week, scripted

The most common onboarding plan for a new SDR is a login, a seating assignment, and the sentence "shadow Jake for a while." Ramp to full productivity takes four to six months in this role no matter what you do, but the slope of that ramp gets set in the first five days, and a scripted week beats an improvised one by a margin you can hear on the recordings a month later. Here is the script, day by day.

Monday: the business, not the tools

Day one is product and customer immersion, and deliberately not systems training. The rep hears what the product does in the customer's words, reads three win stories and two loss stories, and learns who buys, who blocks, and what was happening at the account when it bought. The CRM can wait until Wednesday; a rep who understands why customers buy can survive clumsy tooling, and the reverse is not true. End of day, the rep writes the pitch in their own words, one paragraph. It will be wrong. The point is to have a version to correct.

Tuesday: calls, heard before made

Day two is tape. Six to eight recorded calls, chosen on purpose: two great ones, two average, two that went sideways, listened to together with someone senior narrating the decisions inside each call. Then the objection map: the five things this market actually says, and the current best response to each. The rep drills the responses out loud, badly, which is the only way anyone drills anything on day two.

Wednesday: shadowing with a pen

Day three the rep sits on live calling for a full block, with an assignment rather than a spectator seat: log every objection heard, mark every close attempted, write one question per hour. Systems training happens this afternoon, now that the rep has watched the workflow the systems exist to serve. The activity standards get explained the same day, including the reasoning, because a standard whose logic a rep understands is a standard they will hold without supervision.

Thursday: role-plays until it is boring

Day four is the rep on the phones with no prospects attached: role-plays against a manager, run in the same loop we use in hiring, call, replay, one note, call again. The open, the objection responses, and the close each get their own reps. The bar for Thursday is not polish. It is that the rep can get through a full call shape without the script in front of them, because Friday has real humans in it.

Friday: live, supervised, small

Day five the rep dials, for real, with a coach listening and a deliberately forgiving list: a lower-stakes segment, not the tier-one accounts. Twenty or thirty dials, debriefed in the afternoon while the calls are still warm. Something always goes wrong, and that is the point of doing it on day five with help instead of day twenty alone. The rep ends week one having done the job, not having heard about it.

Teams hiring into the Q1 window right now will live with the results of week one until summer, so the script is worth writing before the start date. This structure is roughly what every CommandVA rep goes through on our side, at our expense, before a client ever pays for their time. If you would rather buy week one finished than run it, book a strategy call and we will show you what a rep looks like on the other side of it.