Sales onboarding: from early learning to first customer contact

14th July 2026 |   Dr Beth Rogers

Sales leader and commercial change practitioner Dr Jeremy Noad has teamed up with sales education specialist Dr Beth Rogers to produce a practical book series for people entering professional selling. In this article, Beth explores how the challenges of onboarding new hires shaped their thinking.

Recruiting salespeople is difficult, costly and timeconsuming. That makes the first months in role too important to leave to informal shadowing, inconsistent support or training content that lacks immediate relevance to the reality of working at the customer interface. Effective onboarding should build confidence, judgement and readiness for first customer contact. However, many sales directors have reservations about the effectiveness of their onboarding programmes and most would welcome some improvement.

Dr Beth Rogers

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Dr Beth Rogers has recently retired as Head of the Marketing and Sales Subject Group at Portsmouth Business School, She is also the author of Rethinking Sales Management. Before taking on an academic role, she had a career in sales and marketing in the information technology and professional services sectors. She is known as a pioneer of sales education from her work on key account management at Cranfield School of Management in the 1990s. Beth was elected chair of the UK National Sales Board from 2005-2009, which launched National Occupational Standards for the sales profession. She has taught account management and sales management in a variety of companies and countries, and has also contributed to the academic literature, trade magazines and The Times on sales topics.