What this covers
- Why generic sales training under-prepares
- Week one: the pipeline, not the product
- Week two: shadowing with a specific brief
- Month one: measure ramp honestly
Why generic sales training under-prepares
A rep arriving from another industry knows how to run a discovery call. What they do not know is that media & advertising campaigns live or die at Brief, or why Brief is not the formality it appears to be.
Pitching is the cost of doing business. Win rate by brief type tells you which pitches to decline.
Teaching the stages is therefore not administrative onboarding. It is the core of the job.
Week one: the pipeline, not the product
Start with the pipeline — Lead → Brief → Pitch → Client Approval → Live — and what genuinely has to be true for a campaign to move between each. Product knowledge can be learned on the job; a wrong mental model of the pipeline produces a year of misforecast campaigns.
- What each stage means and what evidence advances it
- Which stage historically loses the most campaigns
- Who the contacts typically are, by function and seniority
- What a good brand looks like, and what a bad one looks like
Week two: shadowing with a specific brief
Shadowing without a brief is watching. Give the new rep one thing to observe per call — how the Brief objection is handled, how coverage is widened, how a stalled campaign is restarted — and debrief on that one thing.
Three focused observations beat twenty passive ones.
Month one: measure ramp honestly
The useful ramp metric is not activity. It is first campaign to reach Brief. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-brief across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.