30/60/90 planReviewed by Adroit Staffing editorial reviewPractice guidance, no data claims6 min read
The short answer
Week one should get a new sales hire in front of real customer conversations, not through a folder of slides. Aim for systems working on day one, recorded calls on day two, live shadowing by day three, their own first low-risk conversation by day four, and an honest end-of-week conversation about what they understood and what they did not.
Key facts
- Day one
- Access working, people met, plan walked through
- Day two
- Recorded calls, including a loss
- Day three
- Live shadowing and CRM standards
- Day five
- Written reflection and manager conversation
Week one plan
Work through the days in order, ticking as you go, and hold the Friday conversation even in a busy week. Print the list or copy it into your own onboarding system before you close the tab.
Ticks stay in this tab. Copy, print or download the plan — nothing is uploaded.
Week one — onboarding plan
Adroit Staffing — adroitstaffing.co.uk
Checklists
Day one — arrival and orientation
Owner: Manager
0 of 6 ticked
Day two — the customer, from recordings
Owner: New hire
0 of 5 ticked
Day three — live exposure and systems
Owner: Manager and new hire
0 of 5 ticked
Day four — first attempt
Owner: New hire
0 of 5 ticked
Day five — review and reset
Owner: Manager
0 of 6 ticked
Common onboarding failure modes
- A week of slides
- Certification complete, and no idea what a customer sounds like. What to do: Put recordings on day two and live shadowing on day three, and keep formal training short.
- Manager unavailable in week one
- The hire self-serves, forms wrong assumptions, and unlearning them takes a month. What to do: Protect manager time before the start date and delegate explicitly where it is not possible.
- No end-of-week conversation
- The only honest audit of your onboarding is never collected. What to do: Hold the Friday conversation and write down what you will fix for the next hire.
- First calls on your best accounts
- An avoidable poor first impression in an account you cannot re-open for a year. What to do: Ring-fence a practice pool of low-priority accounts for week one.
On ramp times, and where hiring meets onboarding
We do not publish a ramp-time figure here. Credible ramp benchmarks depend on cycle length, deal size and market, and anything we cannot source and date does not go on the page. Use your own last three hires as the baseline instead. What we can say is that onboarding failure and hiring failure are usually the same failure: a role that was never defined in writing. The Adroit Five Stage Screening Process produces that definition before the search starts, which is why these checklists can be prepared before day one.
Customer exposure beats content in week one
A hire who has heard six real conversations understands the product better than one who has read the deck ten times, because they have heard what customers ask and what makes them hesitate. Front-load exposure, and keep the formal certification running in the background for weeks two and three.
The end-of-week conversation
- Ask what they now understand about the customer, in their own words.
- Ask what they still do not understand — and treat the answer as useful, not as a gap.
- Ask what was disorganised, because week one is your only honest audit of onboarding.
- Confirm what week two looks like, in writing.
Common questions
- Should a new hire speak to a customer in week one?
- Listening yes, in every case. Speaking depends on risk: low-priority inbound or practice accounts are fine and build confidence quickly. Keep the accounts you cannot afford to burn out of week one.
- Is a week of classroom training better?
- Rarely. Retention is poor without context, and a week without customer contact delays the only feedback that matters. Blend short sessions with real exposure from day two.
Sources and review
- Written by
- Adroit Staffing
- Reviewed by
- Adroit Staffing editorial review
- First published
- Last reviewed
This page is practice guidance from our own Sales and GTM recruitment work. It makes no claims about current market data, so it cites no external figures.