90% hit quota. The data-driven onboarding system behind it

I want to walk you through how we built a sales onboarding program at Rhombus that took our ramp time from six months down to three, with over 90% of our ramping reps now hitting quota.

And here's the kicker: we did it without an LMS, without a big budget, and honestly, with a gift card and a shoelace.

Want to go even further? At Sales Enablement Summit, Atlanta, we're dedicating an entire session to the next evolution of onboarding, fusing design thinking, AI, and data to cut ramp time even faster.

Fancy getting the insights? Michele O'Brien will be leading the session, June 3rd.

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I'll be transparent upfront. I'm still early in my career, and I'm approaching this from my own experience rather than expertise.

I'm in no way claiming to be the authority on this. But what we did at Rhombus worked, and I think the framework is simple enough that you can take pieces of it and run with them next week.

A quick bit of context on me

My journey into sales enablement is a little unusual. I didn't start in tech. My background is in sports. I played college soccer, then professional soccer, and after that I went into the commercial insurance industry. I got a master's in insurance and worked as a commercial insurance consultant. Then in 2019, I joined Rhombus very early on.

For context, Rhombus is a cloud-based physical security platform. Two things make our sale a little more complex than your average SaaS deal. First, there's a hardware component, which adds layers of complexity. Second, we're a channel organization, so we sell through our channel partners. There's an extra dynamic when it comes to selling.

I started as the third AE at Rhombus, sub-25 employees. My onboarding consisted of, "Here's your laptop, go sell." I asked what our ICP was. We didn't know yet. I asked about my territory.

I didn't have one. So I had to figure it out by building systems for myself. How should I structure my day? My week? My calls? I think a lot of that came from my sports background, where training and planning are everything.

Fast forward a few years. The org had grown, we had managers, and it was customary for the top rep at the start of a quarter to give a QBR on the previous quarter.

I was giving mine, talking about how I approached sales and consistently hit my number. We'd just hired a new VP of sales. He pulled me aside afterward and said, "I'm putting you in sales enablement."

My response was, "What is sales enablement?"

He explained it, and his very first ask was clear: fix onboarding. Get reps selling more, faster.

Why onboarding is the productivity lever

Rep productivity is the name of the game. Faster ramp time and impact lead to greater selling capacity. Can we get reps in seat sooner, start selling more quickly, and have an impact on the business? The best way to do that is having a really productive onboarding program.

When I think about why onboarding matters for productivity, it comes down to three things: clarity, capability, and capacity.

Clarity: What do we want reps to be able to do?
Capability: Do they have the skills to actually do it?
Capacity: Who's helping them get there, and can they start contributing earlier?

So if we put it in equation form, sales productivity equals speed to impact, with quality output, and minimal manager time per rep.

There's a moment in Alice in Wonderland I always come back to. Alice meets the Cheshire Cat at a fork in the road and asks which path she should take. The cat says, "It depends on where you want to go." Alice says she doesn't know. The cat replies, "Then it doesn't matter what path you take."

That's the whole challenge with onboarding. Everybody wants more enablement. Everybody wants reps producing better. But what does that actually mean? Without clear direction, you're just wandering.

The baseline problems we found

When I took over enablement, I did a qualitative analysis with our managers. I wanted to know what was actually breaking before I tried to fix anything.

What we found was a mess. When we hired someone, we'd ask when they could start, and they'd start whenever. Reps were starting at different times with no real cohort structure.

Managers were responsible for the majority of onboarding, which meant reps were subject to whether their manager was free that day. Could they shadow? Were they shadowing the right reps, or were they shadowing the wrong ones?

There was no clarity on when reps would be in seat. Capacity wasn't there. Capability wasn't there either, because we didn't really know if a rep could do the job at the end of onboarding.

Managers would complain that a rep didn't know how to quote, and we'd realize they'd just missed that section or shadowed the wrong person at the wrong time.

The biggest issue was manager dependency. Managers were getting pulled into demos, quoting, and helping reps with everything in between. We want our managers working with reps to close deals. We want our best reps closing deals, not running onboarding sessions on the side.

Lack of clarity, capacity, and capability means a productivity loss. That's where the onboarding operating system came in.

The six-part onboarding operating system

Here's the framework I built. Six parts, simple enough to start implementing tomorrow.

Clear metrics. What do we want reps to do at the end of onboarding?
Skills needed to achieve those metrics.
Sessions designed to build proficiency in those skills.
Evaluations and exit criteria to measure progress.
Feedback loops to keep improving.
Constant iteration.

Let me walk you through each part.

If you want to see these principles taken further with AI and design thinking, why not join us in Atlanta this June?

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Step 1: Define the destination

You have to know what you're aiming at. For us, the metrics for onboarding looked like this:

Remove manager dependency. Managers shouldn't be wasting time onboarding reps.
Demo-ready within 30 days, meaning we can put a rep on a call with a prospect and a partner within 30 days without manager technical support.
Reps should be able to run a full sales process start to finish, including demos, trials, and everything in between.
Reps should be able to effectively engage with partners.
Enablement has to protect the company.

That last one matters. I'm a big sports fan, and one thing Kurt Cignetti (part of the Nick Saban tree) always talks about is getting the wrong people off the bus. In onboarding, that's one of our top responsibilities. Can we identify people who won't be a good fit and exit them quickly?

Step 2: Identify the skills needed

Once you know the destination, you can figure out the skills required to get there. For us, that meant product knowledge, ICP understanding, persona targeting, sales process, tech stack including Salesforce, and so on.

Then you separate those skills by role. AEs need certain skills. SDRs need different ones. CAMs and AMs have their own. An AM needs to do X. An SDR needs to do Y. Map the skills to the role so you're not training everyone on everything they don't need.

Step 3: Build sessions that drive proficiency

This is where it gets hands-on. The trick is to start with the end in mind and reverse engineer it.

Take product training. The end goal is that a rep can position the product, run discovery, and run a demo with the right value proposition. So how do you reverse engineer that?

Stage one: Objective information. This is a camera. It has two megapixels. Here's the storage, the warranty, the environmental rating. Period.
Stage two: What problem does this product solve? If a customer needs facial recognition, are we recommending two megapixels or eight? Eight, because more pixels mean more accurate AI reading.
Stage three: How do you run discovery around this? What questions do you ask? Where's the camera going? Outside? Then a bullet form factor is better because the ledge keeps water and dust off the lens.

You can apply this approach to anything. Take Salesforce. We want reps to have foundational training before they get to their manager, so the manager can ask them to run a report on their territory without getting "I don't know how to do that" as a response.

Reverse engineer it. Session one is a Salesforce overview. This is a lead. This is an opportunity.

Here's how things look. Next session, how do you convert a lead to an opportunity? Then we get into building quotes in sandbox. Then spot checks and reporting. By the end, reps can do what their manager will actually ask them to do.

Step 4: How to do this on a lean budget

Here's the million-dollar question. When I went into sales enablement, my VP of sales told me we weren't buying an LMS. The only budget I had was for flying new hires to HQ for their first week. That was it.

So here's what we did:

Worked with subject matter experts. One of our differentiators at Rhombus is integrations with best-in-class solutions. Instead of new hires bombarding the ecosystems team with questions, I asked that team for 30 minutes every two weeks or every month to run a session. Better training for reps, less reactive work for the SME.
Built physical start packets. I literally built documents in Microsoft Word breaking down our cameras, our overview, what reps need to know. Marketing made them look nicer. I bought a binding machine with my own money, printed and bound them, and put them on every new hire's desk on day one. Checklists, scavenger hunts to meet specific people, Slack channels to join, all included.
Pulled real demo notes for role plays. I didn't want fake scenarios. I used actual SDR and BDR notes from opportunities I knew well, including ones with unexpected obstacles. Reps had to demo against real situations.
Daily quizzes. Couldn't buy software. Kahoot is great, but I went and found a free trivia-night-style tool, made an account, and used it for every quiz. Expectation was 80% or better on every quiz.
Took vicious notes after every session. If a session landed well, I wrote down what I did and how I approached it so I could repeat it. If it flopped, I noted what went wrong so I could adjust next cohort.
Started broad, got specific. Always.

Step 5: Measure with evaluations and exit criteria

Once you've built the sessions, you have to test against them.

We did daily quizzes at the start of each day, covering the previous day's material. After every SME session, we did an audible quiz, going around the room one rep at a time. Great, what's Dave's title? What was the example he gave? It kept everyone tracking and following along.

At the end of week one, we did what I called the barbecue pitch. Most people are familiar with the elevator pitch. You're in an elevator with an executive, you've got 30 seconds to pitch the product. The barbecue pitch is similar but more grounded. Imagine you're at a barbecue at the end of your first week. Someone walks up and says, "Hey, I heard you started a new job at Rhombus. What do they do?"

Is your rep going to say, "Oh, we sell cameras and stuff"? Or are they going to say, "We're a cloud-based physical security platform. Our ICP is organizations with physical locations, high exposure, and assets that need protecting. Here are our target industries"?

I built a matrix. Each question carried up to five points. You had to hit 80% or better. If you didn't, you weren't exiting week one.

For demos, we got really prescriptive. A demo has roughly four parts: intro and discovery, company overview, console portion, and next steps. We'd test each piece individually. Run discovery based on these notes. Now, based on the problems we uncovered, how would you position Rhombus? What would you show in the console? How would you lock down next steps?

To complete onboarding, reps had to pass two final pieces:

A final demo. We sent BDR/SDR notes ahead of time. They role-played with me, and their hiring manager observed. Pass or fail.
A 50-question multiple-choice exam, proctored through Microsoft Forms. 80% or better to pass.

That was the bar. Could we put this rep on a call with an end user and trust them to handle it? If yes, they were live.

Step 6: Build the feedback loop

You build all this, and then you need to know if it's working.

We used two surveys, both built in Microsoft Forms. The first went out as soon as a rep finished onboarding. What sessions did you find most beneficial? What feedback do you have? Are there sessions you think could be improved? We implemented changes every single cohort.

One example: a couple of reps told us it'd be more helpful to start with ICP, understanding who we sell to, and then learn the product. That way they could think about who'd actually buy it as they were learning. We didn't change the sessions themselves, just the order. Small adjustment, big impact. That's the kind of micro-feedback that compounds over time.

The second survey went out at the three-month mark. Now that you've been in seat for a quarter, is there anything you wish you'd gotten more training on? Anything you wanted to rehearse more?

That second survey gave us our most valuable feedback. Reps would say things like, "Outbounding is such a focus right now. I would've loved another session on it." Great. What part? And we'd add it.

What the results actually look like

Over four years of running this and iterating every cohort, here's where we landed:

100% of go-to-market hires in the last year said they felt prepared when they went live.
We compressed onboarding from three and a half weeks to two weeks (an ask from the C-suite). At the three-month mark, 97% of reps said two weeks was adequate.
Asked to rate onboarding 1-4, with four being best in class and one being awful, 100% of go-to-market hires gave it a four for two years running.

The real kicker, though, the data I bring to my COO when I want to show value: we cut ramp time from six months to three months, and over 90% of our ramping reps are hitting their quota.

That's the number that matters.

How you can get started this week

If you want to start building something like this, here's the simple action plan:

Set clear metrics. For each role in your org, write down three things every rep needs to be able to do at the end of onboarding. One sentence each. Example: All AEs need to demo, quote in Salesforce, and outbound by the end of onboarding.
List the skills required. If outbounding is a metric, what skills do they need? Tools, persona conversations, a 10-second pitch, whatever it is. Define them.
Create three sessions per skill. Start broad, get more specific. Reverse engineer from the end goal.
Add one readiness certification per skill. A demo, a quiz, a role play, anything that lets you evaluate whether the rep can actually do the thing.
Build a feedback loop. Easy way to start: reach out to your managers today and ask one question. "What's one thing you wish your reps were doing more of when they get into seat?" Microsoft Forms is cheap, easy, and works.

That's it. That's the whole system.

We're a little over 250 employees now, and this is still working. Reps are getting in seat quicker. Productivity is up. And we built it all without a fancy LMS, on a budget that was, generously, a gift card and a shoelace.

If you want change in how your reps ramp, this is how you start. Keep it simple, reverse engineer from the destination, measure ruthlessly, and build feedback loops that actually get used. The rest follows.

Ready to take your onboarding strategy to the next level?

Join us at Sales Enablement Summit, Atlanta, where we'll be exploring how to combine frameworks like this one with AI tools and design thinking to build onboarding programs that scale.