Duty 1: Outbound Prospecting
Each weekday, identify 30 net-new prospects matching the ICP. Enrich with name, title, company, and one personalization angle. Add to CRM with status 'New'.
Hire AI Employees Tutorial: Set Up Your First SDR in 30 Minutes
Tutorial — — by Sistava
Step-by-step tutorial: hire and configure an AI Sales SDR end-to-end in 30 minutes. Screenshots, exact settings, sample SOPs, OAuth steps, and the first delegated tasks.
Before You Start: 5-Minute Prep
Get these three things on your desk before you begin. The tutorial assumes you have them ready. Skipping prep means you stall mid-tutorial and the SDR ships generic output.
- Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — one paragraph naming industry, company size, role, pain point, and trigger event. If you do not have one written, write it now in 5 minutes.
- Your pricing one-pager — what you sell, three packages, target ACV, and any objection-handling notes. PDF or Google Doc both work.
- Login access to Gmail (or your email provider) and your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive). You will OAuth them in step 4.
Step 1 (3 min): Sign Up and Pick the SDR Role
Go to sista.ai/signup and create an account with Google or email. The first AI employee is on us — no credit card required. Once inside the workspace, click "Hire an Employee" in the left sidebar.
Filter the marketplace by category "Sales" and pick the role labeled Sales SDR. Click "Hire." The platform clones the pre-trained role into your tenant. You now own a draft SDR ready to be configured. The marketplace pre-trains the SDR on outbound best practices, prospect research, and sequence writing — you only need to teach it about your specific business.
Step 2 (4 min): Identity and Schedule
Open the new SDR's profile. Set: name (be specific — "Marcus K." beats "Sales Bot"), role title (Senior SDR works for most B2B), timezone, and working hours. The working hours flag does not stop the AI from running 24/7 — it just shapes when the SDR sends emails so they land during prospect business hours.
Tone and personality: pick "Direct, data-driven, professional" for most B2B. Pick "Warm, consultative, conversational" for high-touch services or relationship-driven verticals. The persona shapes every email, voicemail, and follow-up the SDR writes.
Step 3 (8 min): Upload Knowledge
Click the Knowledge tab on the SDR's profile. Upload the three docs you prepared: ICP, pricing one-pager, and any case studies you have. Use the drag-and-drop area or paste Google Doc links. The platform parses each doc, indexes it, and confirms with a green check when the SDR has read it.
Add a fourth doc: write a 200-word "about the company" note in plain language. Cover: what you sell, who buys it, the three biggest objections, and the one differentiator you want the SDR to lead with. This single doc has more impact on output quality than any other input.
Step 4 (5 min): Connect Tools
Click the Tools tab. You will see a grid of 60+ apps with OAuth icons. For an SDR, connect: your email provider (Gmail or Outlook), your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive), and your calendar (Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar). Each OAuth takes 30-60 seconds.
Apply least privilege: scope the SDR's CRM access to its own pipeline view, not the whole org. Scope email access to outbound only — the SDR can send and reply, but does not need full mailbox read across the company. The platform's permission picker walks you through the right scopes.
Step 5 (5 min): Write the First Three Duties
Duties are the SDR's job description. They tell the AI what it owns. Click the Duties tab and add these three. Write them specific enough to measure, not vague.
Benefits
Duty 2: Personalized Outreach
For every prospect with status 'New', draft a 3-touch email sequence personalized to their role and company. Send touch 1; queue touches 2 and 3 at 4-day intervals.
Duty 3: Demo Booking
Reply to every positive response within 5 minutes. Offer 3 calendar slots in the next 5 business days. Confirm the booking and add the meeting to my calendar.
Step 6 (3 min): Set Guardrails
Click the Guardrails tab. Three settings to configure on day one. First: approval gate on outbound emails for the first week — every email queues for your review before sending. Second: spending cap — set the SDR's monthly token budget to $50 (well above expected usage but caps blast radius if anything misfires). Third: PII detection ON — the SDR will mask phone numbers and personal emails in any logs.
After the first week, lower the approval gate to "sample 10%" once you trust the output. Most users disable it entirely by week three.
Step 7 (2 min): Delegate the First Real Task
Open the SDR chat. Type the first task as you would write to a junior SDR on Slack.
The SDR replies within 30 seconds with a plan. It will surface anything ambiguous (e.g., "Do you want me to include adjacent SaaS verticals like fintech?"). Answer the question, and the SDR proceeds. Watch the activity timeline as it executes — you will see each tool call: search prospect, enrich data, write to CRM, draft email, queue send.
What to Watch in the First Week
- Email tone — is it on-brand? Adjust the persona setting if too formal or too casual
- Personalization quality — is the SDR using real prospect signals or generic compliments? More uploaded examples fix this fast
- Sequence pacing — adjust the wait days between touches based on your industry's response patterns
- CRM hygiene — confirm the SDR is filling all required fields. Add validation rules in CRM if not
- Approval queue — review the first 20 emails carefully. Approve, reject with feedback, or edit and approve. The SDR learns from every signal
If you have not started the first one yet, the rest of this is theory. Hire one tonight and you will know more by tomorrow than this guide can teach you.
After Week 1: Adding the Second AI Employee
Once the SDR is delivering 80%+ ship-ready output, hire a second AI employee. Best second hire for sales-led companies: an Email Marketer to handle the lifecycle nurture for prospects who say "not now." The SDR hands cold-to-warm leads to the Email Marketer; the Email Marketer warms them up over 3-6 months and hands them back when they reply. Total monthly cost: $158. Total combined value: $4,000-6,000.
Troubleshooting: When the SDR Goes Sideways
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Generic, off-brand emails | Knowledge base too thin or too generic | Upload the about-the-company note + 3 best past emails as examples |
| Wrong prospects targeted | ICP doc too vague | Rewrite ICP with explicit excludes ("NOT enterprise, NOT regulated industries") |
| Slow response to replies | Working-hours setting too narrow | Set the SDR to 24/7 monitoring; response window <5 min |
| Spending alerts firing daily | Outbound volume too high for cap | Raise the spending cap; usage rarely exceeds $20/mo per SDR at normal SMB volume |
| CRM data missing fields | Duty 1 description was vague | Rewrite duty 1 to list every required field by name |
Once the SDR is humming, here are the pre-built teams you can grow into next. Pick one and brief them today.
What Tomorrow Looks Like
By tomorrow morning your SDR will have queued tomorrow's prospect list, drafted tomorrow's sequences, and replied to anything that came in overnight. You walk in, review the activity timeline over coffee, approve or edit anything in the queue, and get back to work that only you can do. The 30 minutes you spent today buys back 10-15 hours every week from here forward.