You can hire SDRs quickly. The hard part is building an SDR team quickly and still having it working three months later. Speed comes from deciding a few things before you post the first job, not from interviewing more people.
Decide what the team will do
Write down who the SDRs will contact, what they’ll say and what counts as a qualified meeting. If you can’t, your first SDRs will spend months working it out, and most will leave before they do. A founder or an account executive should have booked meetings with the message before you hire anyone to repeat it.
Hire a small group, not one at a time
Hiring two or three SDRs at once is often faster than hiring one. They ramp together, you train once, and you can compare results to see whether a problem is the person or the playbook.
What makes a good SDR?
- They’ve done a high-volume, target-driven job before, in sales, recruiting or customer service.
- They take coaching and change what they do the same week.
- They’re curious about the customer’s business.
- They can hear no fifty times a day and still make the next call.
Past results matter more than a polished interview. Ask how many calls and emails they made in a day, and how many turned into meetings.
Give them a manager from day one
New SDRs need daily coaching in their first months. One manager can usually handle six to eight SDRs. Without one, your account executives end up coaching instead of selling.
Set a ramp plan
Agree what good looks like after 30, 60 and 90 days: activity first, then meetings booked, then meetings that turn into pipeline. Most SDRs take one to three months to reach full productivity.
Where a recruiter helps
The slowest part is usually finding enough strong candidates at the same time. We recruit SDRs and BDRs one at a time or as a team, each placed within our 45-day guarantee, with volume pricing when you’re hiring several. Tell us how many seats you need and by when.
