Account Executive onboarding plan
An Account Executive is productive when they can qualify, run and forecast deals in your sales process on their own. Onboarding should get them from product story to their first owned opportunities without months of shadowing.
What good onboarding achieves
Run full sales cycles independently, with an accurate pipeline and forecast, using your company's qualification method and pricing rules.
Week one example
- Day 1: Meet the team, access CRM and call-recording tools, review the ideal customer profile.
- Day 2: Learn the product story and the top three customer problems it solves.
- Day 3: Listen to recorded discovery and demo calls; note how objections are handled.
- Day 4: Learn the sales stages and exit criteria used in your CRM.
- Day 5: Practise a discovery call with the manager; agree a first account list.
30/60/90 progression
- Day 30: Runs discovery calls with a peer present and qualifies opportunities using your method.
- Day 60: Owns early-stage deals and delivers demos without support.
- Day 90: Manages a full pipeline and submits a forecast the manager trusts.
People to meet (examples)
- Sales manager
- A senior AE to shadow
- Sales development reps who book meetings
- Solutions or presales contact
- Customer success lead for handovers
Systems to learn (examples)
- CRM (for example HubSpot or Salesforce)
- Call recording tool
- Proposal or quoting tool
- Sales playbook or enablement docs
Manager checkpoints
- End of week 1: can pitch the product story in five minutes
- Week 3: review two recorded discovery calls together
- Day 45: pipeline review against stage criteria
- Day 90: first forecast review
Common mistakes
- Putting the AE on quota before they know the qualification criteria
- Shadowing for weeks without ever leading a call
- Teaching every product feature instead of the problems customers buy for
- Skipping the handover process to customer success
Checklist
- CRM access and pipeline view set up
- ICP and personas reviewed
- Five recorded calls listened to
- Sales stages and exit criteria explained
- Mock discovery call completed
- First account list agreed
- Pricing and discount rules reviewed
- Handover process to customer success explained