You will produce an onboarding plan for your next hire with milestones and weekly check-ins.
Open your calendar to the month before your next sales hire starts and count the hours you have free to prepare for them. A new hire signs the offer letter on a Friday with a start date a month away. The month fills with forecasts, client escalations and a long pipeline review, and when the new hire walks in, the manager is still deciding what they will do on their first afternoon. The plan you write here is ready before that happens.
The finished plan is two pages long and goes to three people: the new hire, their buddy and your own manager. Anyone reading it should be able to 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. If you have no hire planned, write it for an imaginary hire joining your current team, using your real sales process, your real buyers and your team's history.
The examples follow Wei Ming, a sales manager, as he writes the plan for Hui Min, the new hire you have followed through this module.
The four ramp milestones from Lesson 3.1, "Ramp is a plan, not a waiting period", are the backbone of the plan: first solo call, first discovery meeting, first proposal and first closed deal. Everything else in the plan exists to get the new hire to each milestone on time. Set the milestones from your own team's history.
Wei Ming uses his team's history to set these for Hui Min (invented figures): 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, the fourth milestone may fall after day 90. Keep it in the plan anyway, and add a note that the plan runs on past day 90 until that milestone is reached.
Split the 90 days into six fortnights (two-week blocks) plus a short final week. For each fortnight, write three things: what the new hire learns, who they shadow, and what live selling they do.
The order comes from Lesson 3.2, "The first 30 days: product, process, people". Process and buyer come first, product comes after, and real work starts in the first fortnight. Product is learned through the problems it solves for different buyer types. Across the later fortnights, the balance moves away from shadowing and towards live selling. Each fortnight's activities should line up with the next milestone, so the fortnight before a milestone includes the practice and warm leads that make it possible.
In weeks 1 and 2, Hui Min learns the sales process and studies four past deals. She shadows Aisha, her buddy, on six calls, with a watch list for each one, 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 and shadows two demos. She also makes her own first calls to warm leads, with Aisha listening.
In weeks 5 and 6, she runs her first discovery meetings, and Wei Ming joins one as an observer. Lesson 6.3 describes how a manager does this. She also starts her own morning prospecting block.
By weeks 11 and 12, she has almost no learning sessions left. She works her own pipeline, has a weekly call review with Wei Ming, and has one shadowing session a week with Daniel, who works larger deals.
Choose a peer buddy and write a buddy brief, a written statement of 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. Make each ask specific, with a quantity or a time limit.
Wei Ming's brief for Aisha is five lines long (invented figures):
Let Hui Min shadow six calls in the first fortnight and three a week after that. Spend ten minutes after each shadowed call answering her questions. Listen to her first five warm calls and give one piece of feedback on each. Check her first two follow-up emails before they go out. Have a fifteen-minute chat with her once a week for the first month.
Agree with the buddy how their time will be recognised. Wei Ming agrees this with Aisha directly. Coaching a new hire is one of the growth steps a senior rep can take, and Module 9 returns to it.
Add the ramp quota, the reduced quota the new hire carries, and the dates it steps up to full quota. Use whatever steps you agreed with HR or finance. Write each month's quota as an amount as well as a percentage, so there is no room for misreading.
Hui Min's full monthly quota is S$16,000. She has no quota in months one and two, S$4,000 (25%) in month three, S$8,000 (50%) in month four, S$12,000 (75%) in month five, and the full S$16,000 (100%) from month six. Months four to six fall after the 90-day plan ends. Wei Ming includes them anyway so Hui Min can see the whole path, and you can do the same with any quota step that falls after day 90.
Page one is the 90-day timeline, with the four milestones and the quota steps marked on it. Add the weekly check-in from Lesson 3.2 to the timeline as a fixed slot. Page two holds the six fortnights, each with its learning, shadowing and live selling, with the buddy brief at the bottom.
Test the plan by giving it to someone who did not write it, such as the buddy or another rep. Ask them, from the plan alone, what the new hire should do in week 6 and what quota they carry in month four. If they cannot answer, 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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