AtlasThe problem wasn’t finding salespeople. It was how long a new one took to sell.
I’ve built this in several service B2B companies: complex project sales, salespeople paid on commission. Every time, the owner thought the company needed better hiring. The real bottleneck was the months between a new hire’s first day and their first steady sales.
Start with your goal →Updated October 15, 2026
Hiring took months, and most new people left.
- Up to six months to hire one personAnd a constant argument: hire someone technical who can’t talk to clients, or a talker who doesn’t understand the product. The rare person who was both didn’t scale.
- Most new hires left in the first yearEach one cost base pay, the owner’s time and a lot of frustration.
Time to a base level of sales.
On commission, a new salesperson who sees no results for three or four months loses heart and leaves. So the question wasn’t “how do we find the right person”. It was “how do we get a new person to steady sales before they give up”. That moved the work from recruiting to everything that happens after the offer.
Someone has to look after the new people every day.
Owners usually hand this to the head of sales. But a good head of sales is often a strong seller who earns from their own deals, today. A share of a newcomer’s commission arrives a year later, if the newcomer stays at all. So the daily work of looking after new people, checking calls, giving feedback, suggesting the next try, quietly doesn’t happen. On paper it pays off for everyone. In practice nobody’s pay depends on it this month.
One chain, from profile to base plan.
- 01
A realistic profile
Self-organization and a habit of getting results mattered more than the perfect mix of skills. Three short tests and a first interview did the filtering.
- 02
Hiring as a group
Instead of one person at a time, a team of three or four in one month, so they learned together and the owner trained once.
- 03
A training program
The product, call practice, the portfolio, and which types of clients a newcomer could take on first.
- 04
Different pay for the first months
Early on, reward activity and method. Results come later, and the pay plan follows them.
- 05
Salesperson and assistant, split
A client team took the routine, so salespeople spent their time on calls and meetings.
- 06
Playbooks and proposal tools
So a new person could put together a proposal that looked like the company’s best ones.
- 07
Short feedback every day
After calls, after meetings: what worked, what to try next. Small corrections every day keep a new person going until the first real results arrive.
- Profile
- Hiring
- Trainingmonths
- First-months paymonths
- Daily feedbackevery day
- Base plan
Half the time to a base plan, and people stayed.
- Time to a base level of salesAlmost halved.
- New salespeople who stayedSeveral times more than before.
- A repeatable way to grow salesThe company could open new branches, because adding a salesperson was no longer a gamble.
The company isn’t named, and the figures are approximate, as the founder remembers them.
Every hard problem has a simple solution that doesn’t work.
“Give the head of sales a percentage of the new people’s sales” sounds like it solves everything. It doesn’t, because the result depends on a dozen small mechanisms: who checks the calls, what the first months pay for, who the newcomer is allowed to sell to, who takes the routine off them, who notices that someone is about to quit. A small company has no budget for a person who does all of that, with the authority to make it stick. So the owner looks for a simple answer, and the simple answer doesn’t work.
Dozens of small steps over about a year.
None of the steps above is hard on its own. The hard part was keeping all of them moving: noticing the detail, chasing people, inventing the missing step, hiring, organizing, checking whether it made money. That’s the owner’s right hand. Atlas is built to do that work one change at a time. It can also do the daily part that nobody pays for: give new people their tasks, ask how the calls went, suggest the next thing to try. It works when the steps it asks for are the same ones the owner’s pay plan for the first months is built on. Atlas shows the owner which of the agreed steps happened, such as calls reviewed or practice done. It never scores a person and never compares people.