You just started as an SDR. The default ramp plan is six weeks of slide decks, two weeks of shadowing, and a hopeful “you’ll figure it out.” That’s how the average rep takes 3.2 months to reach full productivity, and how roughly a third of new SDRs miss their first quota.
This SDR ramp plan flips the ratio. You’ll spend less time consuming and more time doing, with a stumble log that turns every awkward moment into next week’s practice queue. By day 10 you’re on real dials. By day 30 you’re booking meetings at a pace the average rep doesn’t hit until month four.
TL;DR, the 30-day plan in 5 bullets
- Days 1 to 5. Learn the product cold. Run three short pitch reps per day. Goal: explain what you sell in 30 seconds, no filler.
- Days 6 to 10. Drill the top five objections your team hears. Two reps each, every weekday. By day 10, you take your first live dials.
- Days 11 to 20. Daily 15-minute practice blocks alternating cold opens and discovery. Shadow two real calls per day and re-run them as practice.
- Days 21 to 30. Live calls become primary. Practice shifts to your specific recurring stumbles, the moments your manager flagged in coaching.
- Throughout. Keep a one-page “stumble log.” Anything you choke on goes in. That list is your practice queue.
Why an SDR ramp plan matters more than most companies realize
Every day you’re not booking meetings is a day someone else on your team is. SDR onboarding stretches an average of 3.2 months (Bridge Group, 2024), and reps who don’t hit pace by month four churn at nearly double the rate of those who do (RepVue 2024 SDR Compensation Report). Faster ramp isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s what keeps you on the team.
Here’s the thing your onboarding lead won’t say out loud: most ramp programs are info-heavy and skill-light. You’ll get product training, ICP decks, and a CRM walkthrough. None of that teaches you to handle “we already use a competitor” at 9:14 on a Tuesday. Skills come from reps. Reps come from practice. The cheapest practice you can do is the kind nobody watches.
Reps get better by reps. The fastest-ramping SDRs aren’t smarter. They just do more reps before their real reps cost them anything.
The deliberate practice framework (and why most ramp programs ignore it)
Anders Ericsson’s research on expert performance, summarized in his 2008 paper “The Influence of Experience and Deliberate Practice on the Development of Superior Expert Performance,” gave us the term “deliberate practice.” It has three properties most sales onboarding misses entirely:
- Specific, just-out-of-reach targets. Not “get better at cold calls.” Something like “open with a value statement under 12 seconds, ending in a question.”
- Immediate feedback. You see what worked and what didn’t inside the practice loop, not in next week’s QBR.
- High repetition. Same skill, ten times, before moving on. Not one rep per skill across a week of shadowing.
The reason your ramp probably won’t include this by default is that it’s expensive in human time. A manager who runs deliberate practice with three reps for one hour each, every day, has burned a day. That’s why most managers don’t. It’s also why an SDR ramp plan that runs daily deliberate practice without needing manager time produces faster ramps than the standard one.
What is AI role-play and why use it in your first 30 days?
AI role-play is a practice format where you talk to an AI character playing a prospect, by voice, in real time, and get structured feedback on what you said, how you said it, and what to try next. You pick a scenario (cold call, discovery, objection handling) and run it on your own schedule. You can fail in private. You can flub the pitch 12 times before lunch with no one watching. You can drill the same objection until it sounds natural. None of that burns pipeline or your manager’s patience.
The data backs the format. In a 2024 Salesforce State of Sales report, 67% of high-performing sales teams cited structured practice and coaching as a top driver of rep performance. Manager-led role-play hits the calendar maybe once a week. Daily practice hits it every day.
How to structure your first week (days 1 to 5)
Spend week one of your SDR ramp plan getting fluent on the product and the pitch. Run three short reps per day, all focused on one thing: explaining what you sell in under 30 seconds, no filler, no jargon, no “essentially.”
Daily actions, days 1 to 5:
- Morning (10 min). Read one customer case study or product page. Take notes on the problem, not the features.
- Mid-morning (15 min). Practice the 30-second pitch. Run it three times. Each run, change one thing: shorten by 5 seconds, swap a feature for a benefit, drop a filler word.
- Afternoon (15 min). Run a “what do you guys do?” scenario with a skeptical, busy buyer. Goal: hold their attention for 60 seconds.
- End of day (5 min). Update your stumble log. What words got stuck? What questions tripped you?
By Friday of week one, you should be able to walk into your manager’s office and pitch the product cold. That alone puts you ahead of most new hires by week three.
What should you drill in week two (days 6 to 10)?
Week two of your SDR ramp plan is objections. Get the top five from your manager. Every team has them, and they’re the same objections every prospect raises. Drill them until your response is reflexive.
Daily actions, days 6 to 10:
- Morning. Pick one objection. Write your two-sentence response on paper before you practice.
- Mid-morning (20 min). Practice that objection in a cold-call scenario. Two reps. Have the partner (AI or a colleague) push back harder on the second.
- Afternoon. Live dials. Yes, by day 10. You’ll be bad. That’s the point. You can’t practice your way out of going live forever.
- End of day. Stumble log. The objections that still trip you go in tomorrow’s queue.
Common objections to start with: “we already have a vendor,” “send me an email,” “no budget right now,” “not the right time,” and “I’m not the decision-maker.” If you can handle those five clean, you’ll handle most of what comes at you in month two.
How to balance practice and live calls in weeks three and four
Flip the ratio. Your SDR ramp plan in weeks three and four shifts toward live calls. Live dials are your primary skill-builder and structured practice becomes your remediation tool. You use it to fix specific stumbles from real calls, not to learn from scratch.
Daily actions, days 11 to 30:
| Block | Duration | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-shift | 15 min | One practice rep targeting yesterday’s worst moment |
| Morning dial block | 90 min | Live calls |
| Midday review | 15 min | Listen to one of your own calls; add to stumble log |
| Afternoon dial block | 90 min | Live calls |
| End of day | 10 min | Stumble log review, queue tomorrow’s practice |
Shadowing matters too. Sit on two senior-rep calls per day, then re-run those scenarios solo. You’ll see the gap between how your top rep handles “what’s pricing?” and how you would. That gap is your homework.
The stumble log: the cheapest skill-building tool you’ll use
A stumble log is one page (paper or Notes app). Every time you choke, freeze, ramble, or get caught off-guard, you write down two things:
- The moment. “Day 6, cold call with a manufacturing buyer. I said ‘we work with companies like yours’ and she said ‘we’re not like other companies.’ I had nothing.”
- The fix. “Next time, ask what makes them different before claiming we work with companies like them.”
That log becomes your practice queue. Every week, you pick the top three recurring stumbles and run them five times each. By week four, the most common ones disappear. New ones replace them. That’s progress.
Most new SDRs skip this. They go home, decompress, and arrive Monday having forgotten exactly what tripped them up. The stumble log makes practice targeted instead of generic.
Common mistakes new SDRs make in ramp
- Treating practice as optional. It’s the work, not prep for the work.
- Practicing the easy stuff. Drill what scares you, not what’s already smooth.
- Skipping the stumble log. If you don’t track what’s breaking, you’ll re-break it next week.
- Waiting too long for live dials. Day 10, latest. Practice has diminishing returns when divorced from real conversations.
- Trying to memorize a script. Practice the response patterns, not the exact words. Real prospects never say the same thing twice, so your responses can’t either.
How TrackPoint fits
TrackPoint is built for exactly the kind of daily practice this ramp plan calls for. The scenario library includes cold opens, discovery calls, objection handling, and gatekeeper conversations. You talk to the AI by voice, and after each rep you get feedback on what you said, your pace, your filler words, and what to try differently. Custom scenarios let you load your own ICP details and product context so the buyer sounds like the buyers you’ll actually call.
For a new SDR, the value isn’t in any single rep. It’s in being able to run 15 minutes of structured practice every morning without booking time on anyone’s calendar.
Request a demo or start for free at TrackPoint.ai to see how AI-powered practice can shorten ramp time and lift your team’s performance.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it actually take to ramp as a new SDR?
The Bridge Group reports an average of 3.2 months to full productivity in 2024. Reps who practice daily and get on live calls within the first two weeks tend to compress that to 6 to 10 weeks.
Is practice with an AI a replacement for shadowing real calls?
No. Shadowing teaches you what good looks like. Practice gives you the reps to get there. Use both.
What’s the right amount of daily practice for a new SDR?
15 to 20 minutes a day, every weekday. More than that and returns diminish, because practice without going live is theory.
Can you use AI role-play if your company doesn’t pay for a tool?
Yes. Most platforms, including TrackPoint, have individual plans. The cost is dramatically less than the cost of a bad first quarter.
What if your manager doesn’t run role-plays with you?
Most coaching dies on the calendar. AI role-play exists because manager-led practice is unreliable. Run it yourself.
Author: TrackPoint Team. This guide draws on published industry benchmarks from The Bridge Group, RepVue, and Salesforce, plus the deliberate-practice research from Anders Ericsson at Florida State University.
