Your New Sales Rep's First 90 Days

Four things have to exist before the rep starts: a lead list, a script, a working calendar link and a CRM with four fields. If any of them is missing, the first week becomes preparation work and the rep learns that your process is improvised.

The script should be written in your buyer's words, not yours. Pull the objections you hear on real calls and write the two or three lines a rep can use before the buyer says no. If you are starting from nothing, run your numbers in the Pipeline Calculator first, so the rep has a target instead of a guess.

Have a start date and a first-week schedule on paper. A rep arriving to a laptop and a password is a rep who spends the week waiting for you.

Half of every day is learning and half is on the phones, and the phones start on day three rather than day fifteen. Nobody learns to sell by reading about selling, and the earlier the first real conversation happens, the sooner you can coach something real.

Morning: the offer, the buyer, the script, and live practice where you play the owner. Afternoon: dials, with you nearby for the first three days. By day ten, the rep should have meetings on the calendar.

Listen to every call in these two weeks. Not to score them, to spot the two or three habits that will set the rep's baseline for a year.

Activity is posted daily in one place, so nobody has to ask. Four numbers: dials, conversations, meetings booked, meetings held. A rep who posts these without prompting is telling you they will be coachable.

Weekly call review, twenty minutes, three calls. One thing to change this week, one thing to keep. Choose the change from the numbers rather than the mood: low conversations means the opener, low meetings means the ask, low held means qualification.

By day 60 the rep should be holding meetings without you in the room. SalesFuel found that companies spend about 5.5 months getting a rep to full productivity after a nearly 3 month search, and most of that gap is unstructured time. A weekly loop compresses it.

Full pace, and the numbers decide what happens next. Compare the last four weeks against the targets you set on day one instead of against how the rep makes you feel.

If the numbers are there, add a second number to work on rather than changing everything. If they are close, extend coaching for 30 days with one specific fix. If the activity is still missing after weeks of coaching, the honest answer is usually the hire, not the plan, which is why testing before day one matters so much.

Rep Room is where we keep the coaching rhythm going after week 12, with the call reviews and scorecards run by someone other than you. See how Rep Room works.

One page, sent every Friday at the same time, whether the week was good or bad. Dials, conversations, meetings booked, meetings held, one win, one problem.

The win and the problem are the part that gets skipped and the part that matters. The numbers tell you what happened. The problem tells you what the rep needs from you next week, and asking for it out loud is the difference between a rep who hides a bad month and one who brings it to you early.

Fifteen minutes to read, every week, for 90 days. Then keep going, because the weeks after day 90 are where the compounding happens.

Coach when activity is where it should be and the results are not. That is a script, qualification or closing problem, and it responds to a weekly review.

Worry when activity is not there after four weeks of coaching and clear expectations. Nobody is hiding 60 dials a day. The Bridge Group's 2025 report puts SDR tenure at 1.9 years, so the cost of carrying the wrong person to month nine is another full search on top.

Put the decision date on the calendar now, at day 90, and tell the rep it exists. A date makes the conversation about the numbers instead of about loyalty.