You want to grow now, not next year. You know you need the right staff to do this. You also know that not everyone will make it, so you hire more than you need because you will have to cut loose the worst performers, or those who just “don’t get it”. This is just part of scaling a company. However, this has the potential to blow up your culture if not done right.
While this can apply to any area of an organization such as operations, accounting, HR or other areas, I’m going to focus on Sales for the sake of this article. Also, hiring salespeople in bulk and keeping the best performers is more typical than other areas of a company.
Let’s assume you hire a wave of salespeople at once. Done right, that move can compress time and compound growth. Done wrong, it creates chaos: mixed messages to your customers, internal confusion because they don’t yet know YOUR WAY, and a culture hit you will spend a year cleaning up.
The difference is not luck. It is a disciplined, culture-first onboarding approach that aligns new salespeople to your values, your playbooks, your numbers, and your purpose before you ever hand them a territory or a phone. You will see exactly how in a moment.
The Big Idea
You can onboard multiple sales staff at the same time smoothly by treating onboarding as a “Sales Academy” built on the Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations which are: Great People, an Inspiring Purpose, Optimized Playbooks, a Culture of Performance, and Growing Profits and Cash Flow. When you structure onboarding around those principles, you scale fast and you stay healthy. I’ll break down each one next.
1) Great People: Hire for Alignment, Define Success, Then Train Skills
Most teams try to fix people problems with process. That never works. Process only amplifies the people you have. Start by ensuring each new salesperson is a Core Values fit first and foremost and THEN give them clarity on their role that removes guesswork.
Use the Next Level Accountability Chart with MMOs™ (Mission, Most Critical Outcome, and Obsessions™) that you know will drive outcomes for their particular role. It is simple, it is precise, and it sets expectations you can coach them on.
Spell out the salesperson’s Mission in one sentence, then define their Most Critical Outcome® as a single measurable that proves you are getting a return on your fully burdened investment in that person. For a typical salesperson, that may be “Revenue Dollars to Goal”, while a Sales Manager’s might be “My Team’s Revenue Dollars to Goal”.
In the first case, the individual salesperson owns their own number and are compensated against what they bring in (eat what you kill). In the second, the manager is responsible for the total for his/her team and is compensated for the performance of the entire team. If one salesperson is dragging down the team, they know quickly who to correct. Then the manager can coach them up, or coach them out if they aren’t coming around. This outcomes-first clarity is the foundation of culture and performance.
During onboarding, say the quiet part out loud: accountability is love. Define success in one measurable outcome per role, name the obsessions that drive it, and repeat them until there is no ambiguity. Ambiguity kills cultures. Clarity builds them.
Tip: Interview and start sales staff in pods. Cultural standards are easier to protect when peers are trained together under the same expectations and language. Plus they typically bond as a team that went through “academy” together.
2) An Inspiring Purpose: Lead With Why, Guard the Tribe
Great sales teams do not just memorize features. They carry your company’s mission into the market and make decisions based on the values they see. I recommend kicking off their first day with a founder or CEO welcome that connects YOUR story to customer impact, then show how values are used in real conversations with customers. This can also be a pre-recorded video if that makes more sense. Remember, Leadership must always model values the preach, because teams will not rise above the example they see.
Use values language in feedback: “If you were providing incredible customer service, what do you think the answer would be?” This anchors behavior without micromanaging and allows the employee to live out the core value in their own unique way. This autonomy accelerates cultural assimilation for an entire group.
Also, your approach should be customized to your organization. One-size-fits-all systems put the system first. Elite organizations put the user and the outcomes first, and then tailor the tools to achieve the goal. Your strategic edge is a principled, individualized, outcomes-based framework, not a rigid template.
3) Optimized Playbooks: Build a strong 4-week “Sales Academy,” not a Process binder that sits on the shelf.
Documenting workflows matters, but optimized playbooks come alive through shared learning, practice, and certification. An idea I like is to set up a four-week Sales Academy that every new sales staff moves through together as a group. In other words, if you were growing and hiring very fast, you could run the Academy every month so you can train people up quickly. Here is a sample high-level agenda for this:
Week 1: Culture, Customers, and Core Language
Morning: Company story, values-in-action, market positioning, and your Strategic Niche.
Afternoon: The role’s Mission (overall objective of the job), Most Critical Outcome® (the #1 metric they have to hit to prove they are successful) and the few obsessions that drive success in that job. Introduce the playbooks and how to navigate them.
Week 2: Prospecting and Sales Philosophy as a “Win-Win”
Teach sellers to narrow their focus to a single target market or customer profile at a time and to use direct response to create pre-motivated conversations. The job is not to “spray and pray,” to any and all people, but to educate and motivate ideal prospects. There are customers who need what you have, so find the ones who REALLY WANT what you have to offer. Create sales scripts that ethically lead the right buyers to the next step.
Week 3: Deliver Excellent Service in the Sales Process itself.
Present your unique service in a way that makes it easy to get started. Design low-friction offers, demos, or audits that shift the burden from the buyer to you. Practice objection handling with role-playing scenarios. Give them the opportunity to make some mistakes and find their confidence while training, before there is the pressure of live customers.
Week 4: The Real Thing, but With Guardrails
Let them watch you in action with live customers. Then when they are ready, give them the reigns and shadow them while they handle the customer. End each day with debriefs and corrections. Let them know even if they did a good job, you always correct or improve what you see because you are trying to make them GREAT, not just good. People are silently begging to be led and appreciate being coached. They can feel when you want them to win. Spend time up front giving them the best chance for success and then let them run.
Onboarding cadence: Weekly wrap-up meeting with the whole sales team throughout the Sales Academy. Make these fun and engaging and shout out people for improving. Give snacks or treats to celebrate their work and allow them time to share wins they’ve had or mistakes they learned from. Tell them about mistakes you made when you were learning so they can relate to you. This rhythm improves engagement and catches issues early. Be open, direct and authentic from the beginning.
4) A Culture of Performance: Practice Like Pros, Continue to Meet Weekly, Measure What Matters
Amateurs “wing it.” Pros practice constantly to become better. The best athletes review game film, track patters, and train relentlessly so that execution is automatic under pressure. Treat onboarding like Training Camp and then keep practicing consistently honing the team’s skills like you want to go to the Super Bowl.
Run a weekly tactical meeting for the sales team and their leader that does three things:
- First, it keeps the team connected and aligned.
- Second, it keeps the numbers transparent for all, and on track.
- Third, address and solve the real issues that exist fast.
Don’t let people fall through the cracks. Check in, review action items, scan the scorecard, prioritize the top issue and address it, assign owners to tasks and keep the rest of the team informed as to the results. Meetings should be the same day and time each week. Get the team in the habit of “game day” when you review the score of the week.
Keep a visible scoreboard for the entire team so the players know the score while they are on the field. People perform differently when they can see their performance and healthy competition makes for a stronger team overall. Make sure there is an overall goal where all salespeople get rewarded if it is hit, to keep people on the same team even if it is obvious that there are all-stars and support players forming.
As competency grows, increase autonomy. Use a four-level delegation model for the team members and as their manager, clarify with them:
- What situations do they NEED to bring to you in order to collaborate on a solution?
Example: A customer over a certain dollar amount, that is critical to the business. - What actions do you want them to provide solutions to, but then you must approve?
Example: You think a customer deserves a credit to help save the relationship. - What actions do you trust that they can do on their own, but keeping you in the loop?
Example: Deciding when to upsell a customer who they think will buy more. - What things do you 100% trust for them to do on their own, without having to tell you?
Example: When to call customers. You can tell them “You can decide your own calling schedule and routine, as long as they all get done each week.”
This POWERFUL model gives sales managers a clean path to grant freedom to the sales staff as their skill and judgment rise. Many things will start in items #1 and #2 above, and over time, more trust is built and you can let go of the reigns as you know they understand the role like you want. Over time, you are mentoring them from YOU owning their job and helping them perform, to THEM owning their job and demonstrating their performance.
5) Growing Profits and Cash Flow: Train the Team to Sell Healthy, Not Just Big
You may have heard “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is king”. I would argue that managing Profits and Cash Flow are what separates a real business owner from a good salesperson. Teach your salespeople and managers to think like an owner and they will be that much more valuable to you.
Teach every salesperson “The $100 Lesson” on day one so they grasp how little of each dollar is left as real profit and how their actions affect cash. If you don’t know this exercise, essentially you print out a large copy of a $100 bill. Let them know that this $100 is the revenue that was brought into the company.
Then start cutting it to symbolize high level categories of expenses.
- Cut off 35% (or whatever it actually is) and call that “payroll”.
- Then cut off 15% and call that “rent and utilities”.
- Then cut off 5% and call that “liability insurance”.
- Then cut off 5% and call that “refunds”, another 5% for “unexpected emergencies”.
- Then 5% for “software licenses”, etc.
Keep doing this until you’ve cut away the major expenses.
You’re usually left with about 5%-10% of the $100 bill left depending on your profitability. Ask the team what would happen in the event that there was a bad month and the $100 was not enough to cover all the expenses. The correct answer is either “take out debt” which will then eat out at future $100 bills or “the owner puts in money”.
This simple exercise demonstrates that it’s not just about revenue, but what the company keeps. Also explain to them that if there is a lot of the $100 left each month, those can go to BONUS the hardworking staff that brings in the revenue, but that can only be done if expenses have not eaten it all up first. Hopefully the light bulb will go off in their heads that when the company runs lean and efficiently, it is better for EVERYONE, not just the owner.
Salespeople (in fact all employees) who understand these economics make better choices on discounting, deal quality, and collections. Compensate your sales team to reinforce strategy. If your model includes subscriptions, contracts, or retainers, pay them for recurring revenue, retention, and lifetime value, not just upfront signatures. Train sellers to sell the future, not just the now. Track metrics like customer retention, churn and the percentage of their revenue that is recurring.
Consistently look to tighten reigns that protect margins and cash. Put collections conversations with the relationship owner, where appropriate, to accelerate cash. Use specific due dates on invoices and apply simple changes to reduce days sales are outstanding.
Train your sales manager to look at their overall team, and then the individual members. Aim your analysis at the economic engine of their team and measure key metrics to determine who should be coached up; or possibly coached out. “Profit per fully burdened payroll dollar” is a powerful lens for improving return on your investment in people.
Your 10-Step, Sales Academy Framework
- Clarify the seat: Mission, Most Critical Outcome, and Obsessions™ for the salesperson role. Publish it. Coach to it.
- Hire for core values: Do a core values interview and reference-check against behaviors, not adjectives.
- Start in pods: Launch sellers together for peer momentum and consistent messaging. Let them feel part of a team all learning together.
- Day 1 purpose: Executive welcome, story, values-in-action, then playbook navigation and job training.
- Teach demand creation: Develop strategies with them that educate and motivate ideal prospects, and why that works compared to “spray and pray”.
- Certification gates: No live calls until success in simulation. Role-play with them until you feel confident they can do the job, then certify them.
- Weekly Tactical meetings: Short, disciplined meetings for the team to solve issues together and keep numbers on track. (It’s Game Day, how did we do?)
- Scorecards/Scoreboards: Track the drivers of each salesperson. Make performance visible to all. This breeds accountability and shows what to correct.
- Financial literacy: Run the $100 exercise to align behavior to profit and cash.
- Delegate up: Progressively grant autonomy through the four levels as the sales team members demonstrate excellent skill and judgment.
Recap
- Alignment before activity: Great People are placed with clarity, not wishful thinking.
- Purpose-powered selling: Values guide behavior in the wild.
- Playbooks that live: Engaging training, simulation, and certification turn hopes and goals into performance.
- Consistent culture of Performance: Weekly Tactical rhythm, scorecards, and visible scoreboards. The chemistry will build as you are creating a winning team.
- Profits matter: Salespeople who understand revenue, profits and margin sell healthier deals, protect renewals, and speed cash in.
This is how you onboard multiple salespeople without blowing up your culture. It is how you scale with precision and outcomes, not slogans.
Where Do You Go From Here?
This article referenced a sales team. However, this same strategy can be applied to ANY part of the organization. Whether you need to beef up Operations, Finance, HR, IT or other departments, the above techniques work the same. Just adjust it to fit your goals.
- Would it be a bad idea to grab a copy of Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations on Amazon or Audible and equip your team with the tools to scale with discipline.
- Are you against taking the Elite Organizations Assessment at NextLevelGrowth.com/Assessment and getting a 20-page report filled with customized recommendations and free resources designed to help you get immediate value?
- Learn more about Next Level Growth and meet our Partners and Business Guides at NextLevelGrowth.com to learn if and how we can help you go from Good, to Great, to ELITE!
Final note: We are a principles-based framework. We customize the path to YOUR Summit so that the solution fits you, not the other way around. That is how elite organizations scale fast without losing themselves.
