Stop worrying about your tech stack. Worry about your people stack.
EB
By Eric Barron
Co-Founder and CEO · July 2026
Hiring SDRs is easy. Hiring SDRs who ramp fast and stick is the hard part, and it is where most teams lose money. This is a practical guide to screening for the traits that predict success and onboarding so new reps get productive in weeks, not quarters.
The short version
The best SDRs are coachable, resilient, and genuinely curious. Those traits predict ramp speed better than a polished resume.
Most teams over-index on past sales titles and under-index on work ethic, listening, and how a candidate handles being told no.
Screen with a real exercise: a mock call or a written outreach, not just a conversation.
Ramp is a function of onboarding, not luck. Clear targets, real call coaching, and fast feedback get reps producing sooner.
Turnover in SDR seats is high across the board, so hiring for retention, not just the next quarter, is what protects the investment.
What makes a great SDR
An SDR's job is rejection with a smile, all day. The reps who win are not the smoothest talkers; they are the ones who stay steady after the tenth no, listen for the actual objection, and apply feedback the same afternoon. Curiosity matters more than charisma: a rep who is genuinely interested in the prospect's problem outperforms one who just runs a script. And coachability is the multiplier. A coachable rep with average raw skill will pass a talented rep who cannot take direction within a quarter.
Where teams go wrong
Hiring for the resume. A big logo in a candidate's history says little about whether they will dial sixty times tomorrow.
Interviewing only on personality. Charm in a room does not equal performance on the phones.
No real exercise. If you never see them do the actual work before hiring, you are guessing.
No ramp plan. A rep with no targets, no scripts, and no coaching will flounder no matter how good they are.
How to hire for ramp speed
Run a process that mirrors the job. Start with a short screen for motivation and resilience. Then give a practical exercise: a mock cold call against a real objection, or a written sequence to a sample prospect. Watch less for the perfect answer and more for whether they prepared, listened, and adjusted when you pushed back. Reference-check for work ethic and coachability specifically. Then, the part most teams skip, build the first thirty days before the rep starts: targets, scripts, a call library, and a coaching cadence. Reps ramp on the strength of that plan.
Hiring for the next quarter is how you end up rehiring every quarter. We screen and place SDRs for ramp and retention, and coaching is included so they keep getting better after they start.
Frequently asked questions
What should I look for in an SDR interview?
Resilience, curiosity, and coachability. Ask about a time they were told no repeatedly and what they did, then watch how they take feedback inside the interview itself.
How long should an SDR take to ramp?
With a real onboarding plan, many SDRs are productive within four to eight weeks. Without one, it can stretch to a quarter or more, if they last that long.
Should I hire experienced SDRs or train new ones?
Both work. Experienced reps ramp faster on process; new reps often bring more hunger and fewer bad habits. Coachability matters more than the label either way.
Every leadership team I meet can walk me through their tech stack in about ninety seconds. Almost none of them can tell me who owns whether their managers know how to interview.
The short version
Every leadership team can name its tech stack. Ask about the people stack and the room goes quiet.
The five layers are hiring, interviewing, onboarding, managing, and developing.
Interviewing is the least owned layer in most businesses, and the most expensive one to leave alone.
Turnover blamed on the market is usually a management problem nobody wanted to name.
The conversation I keep having
I sit in a lot of rooms where a leadership team walks me through their tools. The CRM, the ATS, the payroll platform, the comms stack. Everything has an owner and a renewal date, and everyone can tell me what they pay for it.
Then I ask a different question. Who owns whether your managers can run an interview? Who owns what happens to a new hire in their first thirty days? Who owns whether the person you cannot afford to lose has a reason to still be here in a year?
The room goes quiet, and then somebody says HR, and then somebody else says well, sort of. That gap is the most expensive thing in the building and it has no line item.
Your people stack has layers, same as the other one
Hiring is who you let in. Interviewing is how you decide. Onboarding is how they start. Managing is how they are led. Developing is how they grow and why they stay.
They stack in that order and each one leans on the one before it. Great sourcing feeds a broken interview and you hire the wrong person faster. A great hire lands in an onboarding vacuum and you have bought a resignation with a six-month delay.
Most companies have bought something for layer one and improvised everything above it. That is not a criticism of anyone, it is just what happens when a category has no owner.
Interviewing is where I would start
If I could fix one layer for every company I work with, it would be this one. Managers interview because they got promoted, not because anyone taught them how. They ask the questions they were asked. They hire people they enjoyed talking to. Nobody goes back a year later to check whose picks worked out.
The result is a hiring process that feels rigorous and is mostly a personality match. And because the failure shows up months later as turnover, it never gets traced back to the interview where the decision was actually made.
The turnover conversation nobody wants to have
When people leave, the reason recorded is almost always compensation or a better opportunity. It is polite and it is rarely the whole truth.
Look at where your departures cluster. In most companies they concentrate under specific managers, and everyone already knows which ones. That is not a market problem. It is a layer four problem, and it is fixable, but only once somebody is willing to name it.
This is the uncomfortable part of the argument. Investing in the people stack sometimes means telling a good individual performer that being promoted did not make them a manager, and then actually teaching them to be one.
Why I think this matters now
Every company I talk to is asking what AI does to their business. It is the right question and it makes this one more urgent, not less. When tools get cheap and available to everyone, the difference between two companies with the same stack is the people running it and how well they are led.
You cannot buy your way out of that. There is no platform that makes a manager good at a hard conversation, and no integration that makes a new hire feel like staying.
Frequently asked questions
What is the people stack?
The layers that decide how people enter, perform, and stay: hiring, interviewing, onboarding, managing, and developing. It borrows the language of technology on purpose, because companies fund and own a tech stack layer by layer and treat the people side as something that just happens.
Is this just another word for HR?
No. HR usually owns compliance, payroll, and policy, which matter and are different. This is about capability: whether managers can interview, whether new hires get productive, and whether good people have a reason to stay.
Where should a company start?
Interviewing, in most cases. It is the least owned layer, it is cheap to improve relative to the cost of a bad hire, and improving it makes every other layer easier.
How do you know which layer is broken?
Look at where people leave. Departures in the first ninety days point at hiring or onboarding. Departures at the one-year mark usually point at managing or developing.
Which layer is costing you the most?
Six questions that expose the gaps, and where we work at each layer.
