How to Onboard a New Sales Rep: A 30/60/90 Plan
- No invented stats
- Written for UK readers
- 5 min read
- Published 31 October 2026
The first 90 days decide whether a sales hire works out, and a lot of what determines the outcome happens in the first two weeks. A rep who spends week one waiting for a laptop and reading old marketing decks learns that this is a company where things drift. Here is a plan you can copy, adapt to your product, and hand to the new starter on day one.
Before day one
Have all of this ready before they walk in. None of it is difficult; all of it is routinely late.
- Laptop, phone, email, CRM login, calendar access, call recording tool if you use one — all tested by logging in yourself
- A written 30/60/90 plan with the success measure for each stage stated in numbers
- Their first week's diary already populated, hour by hour
- Six recorded calls: two good discovery calls, two closes, two losses. Losses teach more than wins
- A named buddy who is not you — a peer they can ask stupid questions without it feeling like an assessment
- A starter list of accounts or leads, so there is real work in week two rather than more reading
Days 1–30: learn the buyer
The goal is not product knowledge. It is understanding the customer's problem well enough to have a credible conversation. Product knowledge without buyer understanding produces a rep who can recite features and cannot run a discovery call.
Week 1 — context
- Company, product and pricing walkthrough. Two hours, not two days.
- Listen to the six recorded calls and write, for each: what problem the buyer described, what the rep did well, what they would do differently.
- Sit in on two live customer calls as an observer.
- Read the last ten closed-won and ten closed-lost records in the CRM. Ask why each was won or lost.
- Learn the pipeline stage definitions and the CRM hygiene rules. Get this in early; retrofitting good CRM habits is painful.
Week 2 — the voice of the customer
- Three conversations with existing customers, positioned as research, not selling. Ask what problem they were trying to solve and what nearly stopped them buying.
- One session each with support, delivery and finance. Support knows why customers leave; finance knows which deals hurt.
- Write a one-page summary of the ideal customer profile in their own words and talk it through with you.
Weeks 3–4 — first live activity
- Begin outbound on the starter list, with a call framework rather than a word-for-word script.
- First solo discovery calls, with you listening. Debrief within an hour, while it is fresh.
- Shadow a proposal being written end to end.
Day 30 gate: they can explain what the product does, who it is for and who it is not for, in under two minutes without notes, and they have run at least three discovery calls. If they cannot pass this, the problem is almost always the onboarding, not the hire — check what you skipped.
Days 31–60: build pipeline
Month two is about volume of reps in the real thing. Expectations should now be measurable.
- Full outbound activity at the same cadence as the rest of the team
- Running their own discovery calls unaccompanied, with recordings reviewed weekly
- Building pipeline against a stated target — for example, around half of a ramped rep's expected creation rate by the end of month two; set your own figure, because this depends entirely on your cycle length
- Writing their first proposals with review before sending
- Weekly coaching one-to-one on a single skill at a time, not a list
The most valuable investment this month is call review. Pick one recording a week, listen to fifteen minutes of it together, and work on one thing. Spraying six pieces of feedback at someone produces no change at all — the mechanics of this are covered in feedback that changes behaviour.
Certification, not vibes
Before they present to a real prospect unsupervised, run one structured exercise:
- Discovery role-play — you play a realistic buyer, including a vague one. They must surface the problem, the process and the decision maker.
- Objection handling — three real objections from your last ten losses, not textbook ones.
- Pricing conversation — they explain the price and hold it without discounting.
Pass or repeat. A structured gate is kinder than letting someone learn by losing deals for three months.
Day 60 gate: self-sufficient on discovery, building pipeline at a stated rate, and has at least one deal that has reached proposal stage.
Days 61–90: close
- Full quota expectation begins, often at a reduced level — one way to structure it is a stepped ramp (for illustration, 25%, 50% and 75% of full quota across the first three months), though the right shape depends on your sales cycle. If your average cycle is 120 days, expecting closed revenue in month three is arithmetic nonsense and should be replaced by pipeline targets.
- Owning deals through negotiation and close with you coaching, not driving
- Running their own pipeline review preparation to the same standard as everyone else
- A 90-day review that covers activity, pipeline created, deals progressed, CRM quality and coachability
Ramp expectations by deal cycle
These are our suggested starting points, not industry data. Adjust them to your own sales cycle and history.
| Average sales cycle | Realistic first close | Month 3 measure |
|---|---|---|
| Under 30 days | Month 2 | Revenue |
| 30–90 days | Month 3 | Revenue and pipeline created |
| 90–180 days | Month 5–6 | Pipeline created and stage progression |
| Over 180 days | Month 7+ | Meetings, qualified opportunities, multi-threading |
Set the measure to match the cycle. Holding a rep with a six-month cycle to a revenue number in month three teaches them to chase anything with a pulse, which damages the pipeline you will inherit.
Onboarding when you are a two-person company
Most of the above assumes a team. If you are the founder and this is your first hire, the structure still applies but the sources change: you are the recorded calls, you are the buddy, and the customer research conversations matter more, not less, because there is no team folklore to absorb. Block two hours a day for the first fortnight and treat it as unmovable. The common failure is a founder who hires because they are too busy to sell, then is too busy to onboard, and concludes six months later that the hire was wrong.
Signals in the first 30 days
Good: asks about lost deals; takes notes and refers back to them; volunteers for call reviews; updates the CRM without being asked; can repeat a customer's problem in the customer's words.
Concerning: talks more than listens in role-plays; waits to be told what to do next; cannot explain why a deal was lost; treats feedback as criticism; is still "getting up to speed" in week four with nothing to show.
Concerning signals in month one are worth acting on immediately. They are almost never a sign to fire someone at 30 days; they are a sign to change what you are doing before month two, when the cost of drift gets much higher.
The document itself
Write the plan as a single page with three columns — learn, do, measured by — and one row per fortnight. Share it on day one, review it every Friday for twelve weeks, and update it after each new hire based on what turned out to be missing. The plan being written down matters more than the plan being perfect.
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