Your onboarding program was built for someone who already knows how to hold a job. This person doesn’t.
If you’ve hired a salesperson right out of school and they’re floundering, the problem usually isn’t the hire. It’s that your onboarding was built for somebody with a work history, and this person doesn’t have one. A just-out needs more time, more structure, and more access to a mentor than an experienced hire does. Build that, and they ramp faster than you’d expect. Skip it, and you’ll spend six months wondering why a smart kid can’t figure it out.
There’s a generational trend reshaping B2B sales hiring, and most companies aren’t prepared for it. You probably aren’t.
More organizations are hiring what I call “just-outs” – salespeople just out of college, in their first professional job. This isn’t a typical entry-level hire who worked through college or spent time in another industry. These are people who went from graduation to the sales floor with essentially no meaningful work experience. And if you treat them like traditional entry-level hires, you’re setting them up to fail. Things have changed, and our methods need to change with them.
The numbers say a lot of companies are doing exactly that. Intelligent.com surveyed nearly 1,000 U.S. business leaders involved in hiring and found that roughly six in ten had fired at least one recent college graduate they’d hired. More than half said recent grads were unprepared for the workplace. Most people read that as a story about the generation. I read it as a story about onboarding. Let’s be blunt – I’ve been doing what I do for twenty-two years, and entirely too many companies shortcut onboarding. Onboarding has always been critical, but Gen-Z makes it imperative rather than important. Onboarding used to make the difference in ramp-up time. Now it makes the difference between success and failure. That’s not bad news. It’s just news.
What does a 30/60/90 onboarding plan look like for a salesperson?
I have always recommended a 30/60/90 onboarding program. In this program, the first 30 days is for knowledge. Teach your new salesperson the ins and outs of your business, without activity expectations. What you don’t teach them now will be a mistake in a few months. The second 30 days is for activity. Ramp your new salesperson up to your desired weekly activity cadence without a pure selling expectation. Finally, the third 30 days should be for results. This can vary widely; if you have a short sales cycle, it’s fair to ask your just-out to make a sale in month three. Longer sales cycles might require a more pipeline-oriented number.
How is a just-out different from any other entry-level hire?
When you hire a just-out, you aren’t just teaching them how to sell a product or navigate a sales process. You’re teaching them how to be a professional salesperson. How to manage time. How to handle rejection. How to prioritize competing demands. How to conduct themselves in business conversations. And you’re teaching them how to work. In reality, Gen-Z is probably less prepared for this than past generations, but Gen-Z hires can be big wins, too.
Past entry-level salespeople might have been young and inexperienced, but they knew how to show up, manage a workload, and handle professional interactions. Just-outs don’t. They’re bright, enthusiastic, and eager – but they’re starting from zero.
This distinction matters enormously for onboarding, training, coaching, and ramp-up expectations. The onboarding process that works for someone with two years of experience will not work for someone whose previous job was organizing study groups.
What do just-outs actually do well?
If you’re hiring just-outs, you’re likely selecting well. These young professionals are intelligent, coachable, and genuinely enthusiastic about learning. They’re not jaded. They haven’t picked up bad habits from previous sales roles.
More importantly, just-outs crave structure, knowledge, and training. They want experienced mentors – probably to a greater degree than past generations. They’re not resisting accountability or metrics. They’re actively seeking them.
That’s an enormous asset, and the window to capitalize on it is narrow. You need to act before frustration sets in or bad habits develop.
Where do most companies go wrong?
Compressed onboarding. The biggest mistake is rushing just-outs into live prospect interactions. Some companies put young salespeople on the phone making cold calls within their first week or two. This might work with experienced hires. It’s disastrous with just-outs who lack the foundational knowledge and professional confidence to handle live conversations. The result is persistent insecurity rooted in not knowing what they don’t know.
Lack of structure and tools. Just-outs understand they need to hit activity metrics, and in fact they like the roadmap that comes with good activity metrics (which you have, right?). What they don’t have is the process knowledge and tools to consistently achieve those targets. They need documented processes, quick-reference guides, standard timelines and procedures, and a structured weekly routine. Without these, they’re constantly making decisions that experienced salespeople make instinctively. Just-outs don’t have those instincts yet.
The mentorship gap. Leadership has good intentions, but multiple responsibilities mean accessibility becomes an issue. Just-outs generate a high volume of questions about process, products, pricing, and professional norms. They need someone they can go to without worrying about interrupting something more important. Without that designated resource, they either hesitate to ask and make mistakes, or they interrupt leadership constantly and slow everyone down. The leadership doesn’t have to just say that they have an open-door policy; they have to genuinely have one. In my experience, those can be two different things.
What actually works?
Create quick-reference resources. Develop internal guides covering products, services, and common FAQs. Include product attributes, common objections and responses, pricing guidelines, and answers to questions that come up on most calls. It should cover 80% of what they’ll encounter in their first six months. Call them FAQ guides, call them cheat sheets, call them what you want – just have them available.
Document the sales process. Write down the steps and stages from initial outreach through close. Include standard timelines, clear definitions of each stage, and criteria for moving opportunities forward. A documented playbook becomes a training asset for every future hire.
Establish a structured prospecting cadence. Create a defined outreach cadence incorporating phone, LinkedIn, and email. Specify timing, sequencing, and messaging for each touchpoint. Just-outs struggle with “what should I do next?” A structured cadence removes that ambiguity.
Build a buddy system. Pair each just-out with an experienced salesperson who serves as their designated go-to for day-to-day questions. Formalize this with scheduled ride-alongs, call observations, and regular check-ins. The best learning happens when just-outs can shadow experienced salespeople and debrief what they observed.
Invest in real sales training. Role-playing exercises are useful, but they’re not a substitute for structured sales training. Just-outs need formal instruction in prospecting methodology, discovery questioning, objection handling, LinkedIn outreach, and full-cycle sales management.
Define a weekly routine. At this stage, just-outs need structure. Define what a productive week looks like: daily LinkedIn engagement, dedicated prospecting blocks, field time for in-person visits, networking events, and sufficient activity to generate meeting targets. Providing this structure isn’t micromanaging – it’s responsible development.
Give them real-world experience. If you sell trade show exhibits, send them to trade shows. If you sell manufacturing solutions, get them on factory floors. Just-outs can’t sell with conviction when they haven’t experienced the environment their prospects operate in. This experiential learning accelerates development more than any training manual.
The wins are there to be had
Just-outs require more investment upfront than traditional entry-level hires, but they bring enthusiasm, coachability, and fresh energy that experienced salespeople often lack.
The companies that figure out how to properly onboard, train, and develop just-outs will build loyal, high-performing sales teams. The companies that treat them like traditional hires will burn through talented young people who deserved better.
The difference isn’t the people being hired. It’s the infrastructure being built to support them. Get that infrastructure right, and eager college graduates become productive salespeople faster than expected. Get it wrong, and you’ll wonder why these smart young professionals can’t figure it out.
The choice – and the responsibility – belongs to leadership. That’s you.
Frequently Asked Questions About Ramping Up Just-Out Salespeople
What is a “just-out” salesperson?
It’s my term for a salesperson entering B2B sales directly out of college, with no meaningful professional work experience behind them. Not someone who worked their way through school in an adjacent role, and not someone who spent two years in another industry before pivoting into sales. Graduation to sales floor, with nothing in between. I use the term because the distinction changes how you onboard them, and most companies don’t make the distinction at all.
How long should it take a just-out to ramp up?
Longer than an experienced hire, and you should plan for that before you make the offer rather than discovering it in month three. The variable isn’t their intelligence, it’s how much professional groundwork you have to lay first. A company with documented processes, cheat sheets, a defined weekly routine, and an assigned buddy will ramp a just-out substantially faster than a company that has none of those and expects the new hire to pick it up by osmosis.
When should a just-out make their first cold call?
Not in week one. They need enough product knowledge and professional confidence to survive the conversation, because a bad early stretch on the phone creates insecurity that’s hard to undo. Get them listening to experienced reps first, get the quick-reference material in their hands, and let them make calls when they can handle what comes back. I prefer not to start just-outs on prospecting until the second month.
Should I hire a just-out at all, or hold out for experience?
Depends on what you’ve built. If you have onboarding infrastructure, just-outs are often the better hire — coachable, enthusiastic, no bad habits from a previous sales job. If you have no infrastructure and no time to build it, you’ll be happier with someone who already knows how to be a professional, and the just-out you hire will be happier somewhere else.
What should a just-out be doing in their first 30 days?
Learning, not selling. The first 30 days of a 30/60/90 program is for knowledge — the ins and outs of your business, with no activity expectations attached. It feels slow, and owners hate it, but what you don’t teach them in month one becomes a mistake in month five. Month two is for activity: ramp them to your weekly cadence without a pure selling expectation. Month three is for results, and what that means depends on your sales cycle. Short cycle, it’s fair to expect a sale. Long cycle, it’s a pipeline number.
Why do so many companies fire their recent-graduate hires?
Six in ten employers in the Intelligent.com survey reported firing at least one. The usual explanation is that the generation isn’t ready for work. My experience says most of those companies hired a person who needed a ramp and never built one, then judged the hire on results they had no way to produce.
If you’ve hired good people and they aren’t producing, that’s usually infrastructure rather than talent. The Navigator’s Sales Diagnostic will show you where the gaps are, and it’s free. Learn more and schedule yours here.
