Coaching SDRs from call recordings
If you turn recording on, calls made in Ubic are recorded, and the recording goes to the CRM with the rest of the activity.
In practice, almost nobody listens back. It’s not a matter of willpower: an SDR holding 6 to 25 conversations a day produces more material in a week than a manager can listen to, and a replayed call costs its full length, plus the debrief time that follows.
The teams that do use recordings listen to excerpts.
What people do with them by default
The reflex is to open a full call, often picked because it went badly, and listen to it from start to finish while taking notes.
By the end, you have six remarks: the opener, the pace, a badly worded question, an objection handled poorly, a silence, a vague close. You give all six. The SDR retains zero, and walks away feeling they’ve been put under the microscope on one call that, from their point of view, wasn’t representative. You just spent twenty minutes on one call out of dozens, and you don’t do it again the following week.
Coach on an excerpt, not a full call
On a cold call, three moments matter: the first seconds, the moment the prospect objects, and the moment you ask for a time slot. The rest is context: qualification, questions.
Listening to a complete call mixes those moments with everything else. Listening to the same moment across twenty different calls changes the nature of the exercise: you’re looking at a habit. The three routines below fit in a short block of time.
The first 15 seconds of 20 calls
Open twenty calls from the week. Listen to the first fifteen seconds of each, then move on to the next. Don’t finish any call.
In a few minutes, you hear the same opening twenty times. That’s exactly the point. The pace that speeds up at the introduction. An opener that has drifted since training, without anyone noticing.
What repeats across twenty calls is a reflex. Something that shows up only once, let it go, that’s a bad day.
It’s also the routine that checks whether a cold call script is still being applied. A script followed on training day warps quickly, and nobody flags it, because from the inside it doesn’t show.
After an objection
You listen only to what comes after an objection. Thirty seconds, starting from the moment the prospect says they don’t have time or they’d rather get an email.
You’re looking for one thing: did the SDR respond to what the prospect said, or to what they expected to hear? The difference is audible right away. A prepared answer arrives too fast and picks up none of the prospect’s words.
It’s the moment SDRs recall worst when you ask them. Ask them what they replied to the last serious objection of their day: they remember it going badly, rarely what they said. Objections come back on a loop and can be worked on.
After the meeting ask
You place yourself right after the moment the SDR proposes the meeting, and you listen to what follows.
You hear whether the time slot is put down firmly or arrives as an open question, something like “could that be of interest to you”, and whether the SDR fills the silence themselves instead of letting the prospect answer.
Finding the right passage without replaying the call
You still have to land on the right moment without scrubbing through the recording. That’s where the transcript helps: you read faster than you listen, you spot the place where the prospect objects, and you listen only there. The notes recap produced after the call gives the shape of the conversation and tells you where to look. The judgment on the call stays yours.
How recording, transcription and the recap work is documented in the help center.
Recordings used to grade people
One point where we have to be frank: from the moment a recording can end up in an evaluation, SDRs stop playing along.
They adapt fast, and not in the direction you want. The risk is well known: calling less when you know you’re being listened to, taking the easy contacts, hanging up earlier on a call that’s going wrong so it never exists.
You won’t see it in the numbers right away, and lost trust takes a long time to win back.
For this to hold over time, three things are needed: the SDR knows what gets listened to and why, the feedback reaches them first, and no excerpt gets played in a team meeting without their agreement.
The trade-off is real, might as well say it: it means a recording that highlights a genuine behavior problem can’t be used to prove it. You handle that subject another way, with the usual tools of management. The number of conversations already shows in the reports; the recording is there to understand how they went.
When a team goes further
The routines above are done by hand and require nothing more than a headset and a slot in the week. They’re enough for a long time.
Some teams go further with a Call Intelligence tool. Modjo and Gong are among the native integrations: recordings and transcripts flow out to them, and the listening happens in the tool the team already uses. It’s worth it when the listening habit exists. A team that never opens a recording won’t start because it bought one more tool.
Where to start
Next Monday, start with the first routine. Write down one thing only, the one that comes up most often, and give that feedback to the person concerned.
The week after, you run the same listening pass on twenty new calls to see whether anything has moved.
Frequently asked questions
How much time per week does it take?
Around thirty minutes per SDR is enough if you listen by excerpts. A manager following four SDRs spends about two hours on it, better spread over two moments in the week than bunched up on Friday evening.
Do you have to tell the prospect the call is recorded?
The person being recorded has to be informed, that’s a baseline GDPR requirement, and it applies to your own SDRs too. How you do it depends on your setup and the country you’re calling. For your specific case, go through a lawyer.
Does the recap generated after the call replace listening back?
No. It’s there to find the passage worth listening to. A hesitation or a sentence delivered too fast can’t be read in text.
Should every SDR be coached the same way?
No. With someone just starting, the first fifteen seconds easily fill the first month, while the opening stabilizes. With an experienced SDR who has plateaued, the useful moment is almost always what follows the meeting ask.
