Onboarding - The First Steps

Before launching your onboarding program, follow these steps to set it up for success.

Set the stage

Your onboarding program shapes new employees' first impression of your culture, standards, and expectations. Getting it right requires clarity on three things before the first day arrives.

Articulate your team's culture and values explicitly — do not assume new hires will absorb them by proximity. Document your principles and weave them throughout the onboarding period. Activities like humor, games, and hands-on exercises help people connect in ways that slides cannot.

Outline specific goals for new hires across their first days, weeks, and months. Define the skills and performance metrics you will use to measure progress so expectations are clear from the start.

Provide a program overview that covers each session's agenda, format, presenter, and prerequisites. New hires who understand why each activity exists will engage with it differently than those working through a schedule with no context.

Plan the logistics

Thorough planning prevents avoidable disruptions. Before launching, confirm:

Culture and objectives are documented and shared with everyone running sessions
Presenters are scheduled and venues or video links are booked in advance
Calendar invites and program details have been sent to all participants
Sessions are recorded for anyone who cannot attend live
Technical setups — video conferencing, tool access, logins — are tested before day one

Make new hires feel at home

Prepare their workspace before they arrive. Coordinate with facilities so equipment and access are ready on day one. Small additions — company swag, a handwritten note from the team — leave a stronger impression than a polished welcome deck.

Build a call library

A curated call library accelerates learning by giving new hires access to real conversations that demonstrate best practices. Organize calls by stage, topic, or skill, and update the library regularly with current examples. A library built on calls from two years ago will teach reps to sell the way your team used to sell.

Encourage team members to annotate calls when they add them. A brief note explaining what made a particular exchange effective — or what was missed — makes the review more useful than listening alone.

Run early roleplay sessions

After new hires have reviewed enough calls to understand what good looks like, put them in the seat. Run them through discovery, objection handling, and demo scenarios against AI roleplay agents before they talk to a real buyer. Reps who have practiced specific situations are less likely to freeze or default to filler when they encounter them live.

Use a call blitz to get repetitions in early — short, back-to-back roleplay sessions compress a week's worth of variation into a couple of hours. Review the scorecard data as a team afterward to identify common gaps.

Simulate post-call workflows

Before new hires touch live deal data, walk them through your CRM update and call dispositioning process using workflow simulations. Simulations let reps practice every field and click against a replica of the real system — errors stay contained, and the correct path becomes familiar before it matters. Requiring a passing simulation score before new hires handle their first live deal significantly reduces the CRM data quality issues common in the first 30 days.

Highlight best-in-class deals

Showcase your most successful deals to illustrate how strategy and consistent execution combine over the course of a real sale. Walk new hires through the deal timeline in Outdoo — the calls, the scorecard trends, the decision points — so they can see how good habits accumulate into a closed deal rather than treating each conversation in isolation.

If you need help, contact us at support@outdoo.ai.