A good SDR onboarding plan puts the new rep on the phone in week one, on low-risk calls, and reaches full quota by day 90. The plan below is built in three blocks of 30 days: learn by listening and calling dormant leads, build volume on live lists, then carry a ramped quota. It is written for European teams, where the trial period is short and the cost of a wrong hire is real.

Why the European context changes the plan

In France, a new hire's trial period runs two to four months depending on status, renewable once in many collective agreements. That window is your only cheap exit, for you and for the rep. An onboarding plan that keeps the SDR off the phone for a month burns a third of it before anyone has seen them sell.

Hiring is also slower and more expensive than in the US: notice periods of one to three months mean a replacement takes a quarter to arrive. So the plan has two goals at once. Get the rep productive fast, and get a clear signal on fit before the trial period ends.

In our experience, the signal is visible by day 30 if the rep has been on real calls since day three. It is invisible by day 60 if they have spent the month in product training.

Days 1 to 30: listen, call dormant leads, learn the scorecard

Days 1 to 2. Tooling, CRM, dialer seat, ICP in one page, three personas with their objections. Who signs in a French mid-market deal (often the finance director), who blocks (often IT or legal on data questions).

Days 2 to 5. Listen to 50 recorded calls, tagged by outcome. Not a highlight reel: 25 calls that booked, 25 that died in the first 20 seconds. The rep scores each on the team scorecard. By call 30 they can predict the outcome from the opener.

Day 3. First live calls, on dormant leads only. A known contact who once showed interest and went quiet is the safest first call there is. In the 1,000,000 French B2B cold calls we analysed with Quentin Despas (Katana), a call that opens with "How have you been?" to a known contact succeeds about 10% of the time, against roughly 1.5% for a standard cold open. The rep books early, and confidence compounds.

Days 5 to 30. Two calling blocks a day (10am and 4pm, the slots where connect rates hit 14% and 15.8% in our data), roleplay 20 minutes every morning, one 20-minute call review a week with the manager, listen-in by the manager on at least two calls a day. Quota: none. Target: 10 conversations a day by day 30.

Days 31 to 60: build volume on live lists

The rep moves from dormant leads to signal-based lists: website visitors, job changes, closed-lost accounts coming up on renewal. The opener changes from "How have you been?" to a trigger ("I saw you just took over sales at X"), which reaches a 7-10% meeting rate in our data versus 2-3% for a pitch.

Target: 20 conversations a day by day 60, which is our north-star number per SDR. On a parallel dialer that is a few hours of calling; by hand it is a full day. Quota: 50% of a tenured rep's meetings.

Coaching shifts from the opener to discovery. The number to watch is the share of questions starting with "how", which lifts conversion by 190%. The weekly call review focuses on one call where the prospect answered and nothing came out of it.

Days 61 to 90: full lists, ramped quota, the fit decision

Full territory, cold lists in the afternoon block, signal lists in the morning. Quota: 75% in month three, 100% from day 91. The manager's listen-in drops to one call a day; the weekly review stays.

This is also when the fit decision gets made, before the trial period runs out. Three questions. Did the rep hit 20 conversations a day? Did their conversation-to-meeting rate climb month over month? Did they bring one objection answer to the team that nobody had? Two out of three and you confirm.

The three mistakes that stretch ramp to six months

A month of theory before the first call. Product knowledge is learned faster from ten objections than from ten slides.

Starting on cold lists. A new rep dialing strangers from a purchased list at an 11.3% average connect rate hears "no" for a week and learns nothing except that the job is hard. Dormant leads first.

No scorecard. If "good" is not written down, each manager coaches their own version and the rep hears three.

How Sonik approaches SDR onboarding

New reps on Sonik start on the parallel dialer on day three, with the dormant-lead and closed-lost lists built by Signals from the CRM, so the first week is spent on calls that pick up. AI call prep writes the trigger and the first question before the call rings, which removes the blank-page problem for a rep who does not know the market yet.

Every call is recorded and summarised, so the 50-call listening library in week one is built from the team's own calls, tagged by outcome. Managers listen in and whisper live. Our own onboarding runs on this plan, and we wrote about what a single training day on the phones can do in 15 reps, 15 demos in one day.

Conclusion

Onboard on the phone, not in a classroom: dormant leads from day three, 10 conversations a day by day 30, 20 by day 60, full quota by day 90, and a fit decision inside the trial period. This week, if you have a rep starting soon, build their first list from contacts who went quiet in the last 12 months. It is the easiest week one they will ever have.