The job
A 30-60-90 sales onboarding plan sets out what a new rep does in each of their first three months and how the manager will know each month worked. The sales manager builds it, with enablement supplying the knowledge pieces, and the first version takes about half a day. After that it is reused and adjusted per cohort.
- Learn in month one
- Practice in month two
- Perform in month three
- Co-own a live deal from week one
- Knowledge arrives beside the deal
- Each phase ends in a gate read from own deals
Many published plans follow the same arc: learn in month one, practice in month two, perform in month three. The arc is tidy and it delays the work a rep learns from on the job: a real deal, worked with a coach. The procedure below builds the plan the other way round. The rep co-owns a live deal from week one, knowledge arrives beside the deal, and each phase ends with a gate read from the rep's own deals. It is the planning step behind our sales onboarding guide; the copyable result is the 30-60-90 sales onboarding template.
The procedure
1. Write the finish line in deal evidence
Decide what a ramped rep's deals look like at day 90. Write it as evidence: buyer-stated facts captured at each stage, a dated next step on every open deal, the coached behaviors present on sampled calls, and stages the manager agrees with in the forecast call.
What good looks like: two managers reading a rep's deals would agree whether the finish line is met. Quota does not appear, because it lags the behaviors by a sales cycle. Our glossary entry on ramp time explains the difference.
2. Baseline on the last cohort
Pull the last cohort's dates: first buyer conversation, first solo conversation, time to first deal, and the date their deals first met the finish line, if they did. If nobody recorded those, record them this time.
What good looks like: a written "before" the new plan has to beat, measured on new hires against new hires.
3. Set three gates, one per phase
Write the evidence each phase must show by its last day.
| Gate | Evidence on the rep's own deals |
|---|---|
| Day 30 | The rep states each co-owned deal in the buyer's words and names what is missing; at least one buyer-confirmed piece of evidence per deal |
| Day 60 | The rep runs buyer conversations solo; coached behaviors present on two sampled calls; every open deal has a dated next step the buyer agreed to |
| Day 90 | The finish line from step 1 |
Write the marking standard for "present" next to the gates, one sentence per behavior with a yes and a no example. In our call-scoring research, trained experts marking the same calls disagreed on 18% of scores, so a gate marked from memory drifts.
What good looks like: each gate is checkable in under an hour per rep.
4. Choose the live deals for week one
From the current pipeline, pick two deals the new rep will co-own from day two: one early stage, one further along, each with a buyer conversation in the next two weeks. Name the tenured rep who runs those conversations.
What good looks like: the deals are named in the plan before the start date. The research supports starting here: across 117 studies, skills held or grew when training used people's own scenarios and their managers were trained on the same thing (Taylor, Russ-Eft & Chan 2005, summarized in our Game Winning Kickoffs field study), and a co-owned deal is the rep's own scenario with the tenured rep carrying the risk.
5. Put the coached calls on the calendar
The coached call is the unit of the plan: a 15-minute brief before a buyer conversation, or a 15-minute debrief after it. Schedule about two a week in month one, one a week in month two (on the deal with the least evidence), and every two weeks in month three plus a brief before any late-stage conversation.
What the coach says in a brief: "Tell me this deal in the buyer's words, without the CRM. What does our method say we need here, and what do we have? What is the one question for this call?" In a debrief: "What did the buyer say? What do we know now that we did not on Monday? What is still missing, and which conversation gets it?"
What good looks like: the calls are in the calendar with the deal named in each invite. Spacing them weekly follows the research: across 63 studies, spaced practice beat massed practice, d 0.46 (Donovan & Radosevich 1999, summarized in our Game Winning Kickoffs field study).
6. Place the knowledge beside the deal
List what the rep has to know (product, ideal customer, pricing, competitors, the paper process, objection patterns) and attach each item to the week a deal will need it. Deliver each as a pre-read that ends in questions, because testing beats re-reading: people tested on material kept 56% a week later against 42% for re-readers (Roediger & Karpicke 2006). Then test it again on the next coached call.
What good looks like: no knowledge item sits more than a week before the deal conversation that uses it. The one-week rule is our practice, set so the rep uses what they learned while it is fresh. Over longer stretches, skills fade without use (Arthur et al. 1998). Both findings are summarized in our Game Winning Kickoffs field study.
7. Check the manager's capacity
Count the coached calls the plan needs: roughly eight in month one, four in month two and three in month three per new rep, plus two sampled calls at each gate. Multiply by the cohort size and lay it against the manager's calendar.
What good looks like: the calls fit, or the plan names who else runs them (a trained senior rep, an enablement lead or an AI coach). Across 1,246 pharma reps, managers' coaching skill predicted goal attainment and frequent coaching from less skilled managers was linked to worse results (Dahling et al. 2016), so whoever runs the calls needs the brief and debrief format.
8. Write the hand-off
At day 90 the rep moves to the team's normal coaching rhythm. Write down what that rhythm is, so the plan ends in something the rep already knows.
What good looks like: the last line of the plan is a recurring calendar invite. What happens back at work is more strongly tied to whether training gets used than what happens in the room (Saks & Belcourt 2006; Blume et al. 2010, via our kickoff field study).
A worked example (illustrative)
This example is illustrative. A team of eight AEs selling compliance software to mid-size banks is hiring two AEs. It runs the ValueSelling Framework®.
Steps 1 and 2. The finish line: each deal has the business issue and its value stated by the buyer, the person with Power identified, and a buyer-owned plan with dates. The last cohort's first solo conversation came in week seven; nobody recorded when their deals met the standard.
Step 3. Day 30: each rep states both co-owned deals in the buyer's words and has one buyer-stated value. Day 60: solo conversations, behaviors present on two sampled calls, dated next steps. Day 90: the finish line.
Step 4. Each new AE co-owns two deals, one in discovery and one with a pilot proposed.
Steps 5 and 6. Fifteen coached calls per rep across 90 days. Product and regulation pre-reads in week one, pricing in week three (when the pilot deal reaches it), the bank procurement process in week five.
Step 7. Two reps need about 30 coached calls across the quarter on top of a full team. The manager takes the gate reads and the late-stage briefs; the rest go to a coach.
Step 8. From day 91, a weekly deal review call on each rep's thinnest deal.
Where 30-60-90 plans go wrong
Learn, practice, perform. A month of learning before any use puts all the practice in one block, which the spacing research argues against. Fix: step 4, deals from day two.
Activity gates. "Completed product training" passes a rep who cannot use it. Fix: gates in deal evidence (step 3).
A plan nobody has time to run. The coached calls are the first thing cut. Fix: step 7, before the start date.
One plan for every role. An SDR's live work is a sequence and a cold call. Fix: same structure, different evidence; see how to coach SDRs and for SDRs.
Running the plan for every new hire
A plan with fifteen coached calls per rep fits one hire. With a cohort it rarely does. Our AI sales experts run the coached calls for every new rep in the team's own method. On the bank-compliance team above that is Val, built with ValueSelling Associates; on a team with its own playbook it is Caty.
The rep starts a call with the expert in one click on day one, talks the deal through, and the expert names what is confirmed, what is missing and the next move, writes the brief for the next conversation and remembers the deal for the debrief. The manager gets Bryce's read of each new rep's calls and deals before each gate; Bryce coaches the managers. Day one shows the first session, and sales onboarding and ramp time covers the first 30 days in detail.
If your next cohort starts before the manager has room for fifteen coached calls per hire, see how it runs for teams, or talk to us.
FAQ
How do you build a 30-60-90 day plan for a sales rep? Write the finish line in deal evidence, baseline on your last cohort, and set one evidence gate per 30-day phase. Then pick two live deals for the rep to co-own from week one, schedule coached calls around them, attach each knowledge item to the week a deal needs it, check the manager has time, and write the hand-off.
What goes in a 30-60-90 sales onboarding plan? For each phase: the rep's deal work, the coached calls (briefs and debriefs), the knowledge delivered as tested pre-reads, and the gate the phase must pass. The gates are read from the rep's own deals: buyer evidence captured, dated next steps, coached behaviors on sampled calls and stages that hold in the forecast.
What are good milestones for a new sales rep? At day 30, the rep can state each co-owned deal in the buyer's words with one buyer-confirmed piece of evidence. At day 60, they run conversations solo with the coached behaviors present on sampled calls. At day 90, their deals meet the team's standard and their stages hold in the forecast. Quota confirms it later.
Should new reps practice before talking to real buyers? They should prepare before each real conversation, and they can start in week one. Co-owning a deal lets a new rep prepare and debrief real buyer conversations while a tenured rep runs them. Roleplay can add practice on a specific moment, but it is one input, and the deal is where the method gets used.
How long does it take to build a 30-60-90 onboarding plan? About half a day for the first version, most of it spent on the finish line, the gates and choosing the deals. After that, each cohort needs an hour to pick new deals and check the manager's calendar.