You will produce an onboarding plan for your next hire with milestones and weekly check-ins.
Your next hire signs their offer letter on a Friday. Their start date is a month away, which sounds like plenty of time to plan, until the month fills with forecasts, client escalations and a pipeline review that runs long. The new hire walks in on day one and you are still deciding what they should do that afternoon.
This project gives you a plan that is ready before that happens. You will build a 90-day onboarding plan for your next hire, using the pieces from this module, and finish with a document you could hand to them, their buddy and your own manager.
Write a 90-day onboarding plan for the next person who joins your team. If you have no hire planned, write it for an imaginary hire into your current team, using your real process, buyers and history. The plan should let anyone reading it answer four questions: what the new hire does each fortnight, how you will know they are on track, who helps them, and what quota they carry each month.
Wei Ming wrote his plan for Hui Min, whom we have followed through this module. We will use it as the worked example.
Take the four milestones you set in lesson 3.1, Ramp is a plan, not a waiting period, and place them on a 90-day timeline. They are the backbone of the plan. Everything else exists to get the new hire to each milestone on time.
Wei Ming's milestones, set from his team's own history, were first solo call by week 3, first discovery meeting by week 5, first proposal by week 8 and first closed deal by week 12. Ninety days is just under thirteen weeks, so all four fall inside the plan, with the first closed deal at the very end.
If your sales cycle is longer and your fourth milestone falls after day 90, keep it in the plan anyway and note that the plan runs on past day 90 until that milestone is reached.
Split the 90 days into six fortnights and a short final week. For each fortnight, write what the new hire learns, who they shadow, and what live selling they do. Use the order from lesson 3.2, The first 30 days: product, process, people. Process and buyer come first, product follows, and real work starts in the first fortnight.
Here is how Wei Ming filled the first three fortnights. In weeks 1 and 2, Hui Min learns the sales process and studies four past deals, shadows Aisha on six calls with a watch list for each, and books meetings from inbound enquiries for the team. In weeks 3 and 4, she learns the product through the problems it solves for three types of buyer, shadows two demos, and makes her own first calls to warm leads with Aisha listening. In weeks 5 and 6, she runs her first discovery meetings, with Wei Ming joining one as an observer as lesson 6.3 will describe, and starts her own prospecting block each morning.
The later fortnights shift towards live selling and away from shadowing. By weeks 11 and 12, Hui Min's plan had almost no learning sessions left, just her own pipeline, a weekly call review with Wei Ming and one shadowing session a week with Daniel on larger deals.
Notice how each fortnight's activities line up with the next milestone. If the first discovery meeting is due by week 5, the fortnight before it should include the practice and the warm leads that make that meeting possible.
Choose a peer buddy and write down what you are asking of them. A buddy without a brief either does too little because they are busy or too much because they want to help, and neither suits the new hire.
Wei Ming's buddy brief for Aisha was five lines long. She would let Hui Min shadow six calls in the first fortnight and three a week after that, spend ten minutes after each shadowed call answering questions, listen to Hui Min's first five warm calls and give one piece of feedback on each, check Hui Min's first two follow-up emails before they went out, and have a fifteen-minute chat once a week for the first month. Wei Ming also agreed with Aisha how the time would be recognised. Module 9 comes back to this, because coaching a new hire is one of the growth steps a senior rep can take.
Last, add the reduced quota and the dates it steps up. Use whatever steps you agreed with HR or finance, and write the amount for each month as well as the percentage, so there is no room for misreading.
Wei Ming's team uses an example monthly quota of S$16,000. Hui Min's steps were no quota in months one and two, S$4,000 in month three, then S$8,000 in month four, S$12,000 in month five and the full S$16,000 from month six. Months four to six fall after the 90-day plan ends, but he included them so Hui Min could see the whole path.
A finished plan fits on two pages. The first page shows the 90-day timeline with the four milestones and the quota steps. The second page shows the six fortnights, each with its learning, shadowing and live selling, and the buddy brief at the bottom. Add the weekly check-in from lesson 3.2 as a fixed slot on the timeline.
Test the plan by giving it to someone who did not write it, such as your buddy or another rep. Ask them to tell you, from the plan alone, what the new hire should be doing in week 6 and what quota they carry in month four. If they cannot, the plan needs more detail.
The activity below asks you to write the full plan. Start with the milestones and the quota steps, since those are the parts you will need to agree with others before the hire starts.
Write a 90-day onboarding plan with fortnightly goals, ramp milestones, a buddy brief and the ramp quota steps.
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