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.