This is Scale & Strategy, the ‘daily vitamin tablet’ of business newsletters – we boil everything down into one, easy to swallow pill!
Here’s what we got for you today:
You’re Bleeding Hundreds of Thousands in Revenue Because Your Sales Onboarding Sucks
Peter Kazanjy, TalentBin Co-founder, on how startups can build their own bootcamps to get sales teams firing fast.
You’re Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars Because of Poor Sales Onboarding
this chapter dives into what founders and first-time sales staff actually need to know to win early customers, build killer sales teams, and scale them without burning cash or patience.
“The lack of rigor around sales onboarding at so many orgs astounds me,” Kazanjy says. And it’s wild — considering how much effort goes into finding the right salespeople in the first place.
Here’s the brutal truth: you hire someone you like, and if you don’t onboard them fast and properly, all that hiring effort is wasted. Time is money, and the stakes? High.
At the start, your biggest cost isn’t salary. It’s missed revenue. Every un-hired rep could be costing you $50K–$200K a month in lost deals. In this context, dragging onboarding is like burning money with a blowtorch.
Kazanjy realized early at TalentBin that every unhappy or missed customer is lost future value. Happy users recur, refer others, and proliferate. Each win multiplies, every loss compounds. Now stack that against the industry average where 30–50% of new reps flame out — you’re hemorrhaging.
Solution? An ironclad onboarding program. One that immerses reps in your culture, tools, product, and processes so they hit the ground running and actually close deals.
Organizing Your Own Sales Bootcamp
I don’t care how “experienced” your new hire is — everyone needs to go through training. No shortcuts. A week? Two? Maybe more depending on product complexity.
Think of onboarding as a boot camp:
Quick immersion in company culture.
Deep dive into your product, market, and business.
Crash course in tools and processes.
Lexicon drills for your language, phrasing, and scripts.
Alignment on a unified vision and approach.
Hire right, then enable right. Position your team to win.
Pick Teams
Run onboarding in cohorts. Four reps? Same effort as one. Classes create identity, purpose, and healthy competition. Call them whatever — “Gryffindor,” “The Three Amigos” — it doesn’t matter. Sparring partners form naturally, teammates fill gaps for each other. Hire in classes, onboard in classes.
Don’t Stress Curriculum
Your sales strategy will evolve. Training should evolve too. Dump everything into a big Google Doc. Highlight sections as you cover them. Track progress in spreadsheets. Keep it scrappy. Start somewhere — stop overthinking.
Key: cover a holistic set of topics for every cohort, iterate, refine, and remove anything that doesn’t land.
Pre-Work
Onboarding starts before Day 1. Use their early enthusiasm. Assign reading, presentations, call recordings — “awesome” and “terrible” ones, ideally segmented by customer type.
At TalentBin, we used recordings by:
Enterprise
Mid-market
SMB
Add any relevant books (I love The Goal) and video tutorials from support portals. Make it mandatory. Track completion — highlight Google Docs as they finish.
Keep it high-quality: 10 hours over two weeks. Too much? They’ll resent it. Too little? They’re underprepared. Pre-work also prevents cold feet and counteroffers.
Pro tip: prep for them too. Tech setup, SWAG, desk ready like you’ve been waiting for them with bated breath.
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Culture isn’t a slide deck — it’s what you celebrate, what you don’t, and how work actually gets done. At TalentBin, we started with three pillars:
You don’t have to be an engineer to have an engineering mindset.
Everyone is a product manager in sales.
Intellectual honesty is non-negotiable.
Explain why it matters, tie it to company history, failures, pivots. Frame it like: “This is where we started, this is how we got here, this is how we win.” Cultural alignment helps identify hires who actually fit your values.
Business and Market Onboarding
Reps need to talk like experts, not vendors. Three buckets:
Market Understanding:
What field are we in?
How has it evolved?
Key vendors? Tangential players?
Real example: TalentBin taught history of talent acquisition, job boards, ATS, recruiting agencies.
Business Drivers:
How do clients make money? Cost/revenue levers?
Metrics that matter? e.g., inbound candidates, candidate quality, cost per hire, time to hire.
Teaching tip: use a former recruiter turned AE to lead sessions.
Technical Understanding:
Reps don’t need deep coding skills but must grasp core terms.
Focus on tech lexicon they’ll encounter and sound authoritative.
Test retention with short quizzes. Enough to have a baseline sales conversation, build from there. Teach the problem before the solution — otherwise persuasion fails.
Product and Presentation Onboarding
Pillars of product education:
Walkthrough: all product details, tie features to business impact.
Sales Presentation: break presentation into chapters, explain intention behind each.
Customer Demo: mock demos, clearly connect features to pain points.
Objection Handling: fold common objections into training; have a FAQ for later.
Competition Review: teach only after foundation is set.
Tools and Process Onboarding
Reps must be tech-savvy. Cover every tool, step by step.
Provision and configure: desks, laptops, monitors, keyboards, headsets, SWAG. Pre-configure email, CRM, productivity tools. Don’t let them fumble — it sets the tone.
Pair Programming: shadow full sales cycles, participate actively.
Bluebird Opportunities: easy wins to build confidence. Don’t train on throwaways; teach reps early wins matter.
Ambient Review: record calls, label good/bad, share for learning. Walk the floor, catch issues early, drop quick feedback.
Training Wheels Off: as reps ramp, reduce monitoring, track KPIs: demo hold rates, win/loss, activity, funnel hygiene. Bi-weekly check-ins keep progress in line.
Final Take
Opportunity cost kills startups. Slow, sloppy onboarding is expensive. But done right? You get faster revenue, happier reps, better retention, and a team that actually delivers.
Yes, it’s a ton of work. But considering each hire could be a $100K–$200K/month revenue contributor — it’s worth every second.
That’s it for today and as always It would mean the world to us if you help us grow and share this newsletter with other operators.
Our mission is to help as many business operators as possible, and we would love for you to help us with that mission!
This newsletter is a publication of Vector Research Partners (v4rp.com), a data and insights firm powering diligence and growth strategies for top operators and investors.
