The onboarding curriculum.

TL;DR

• Onboarding is a curriculum, not an orientation: pre-work, classes, collateral readiness, drilling, certification, ride-alongs — in that order, with gates between stages.
• Pre-work is built from your own call recordings, organized as an "Example Call Garden" — individual calls and whole strung-together deals, indexed by call type, segment, and persona, with each one marked "listened" as the rep works through it.
• Before a rep can ramp, the collateral and process readiness checklist has to be complete — ICP spec, prospecting motion, inbound motion, pre-call planning checklist, discovery questions, pitch deck and script, demo and demo script, stages, meeting types, pricing, contracting, implementation process. Ask "what are you missing?" before you ask why the rep isn't ramping.
• Certification runs on self-paced recorded scenarios — a rep pitches and demos against a defined buyer persona and submits the recordings, including a favorite. Kazanjy's line: "Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can't get it wrong."
• Discovery practice is simulation, run against real upcoming calls, not just hypothetical scenarios.
• Ride-alongs are a four-stage ladder that hands control from you to the rep one stage at a time, with coaching after each rep: passive-watch, active-watch, active-run, passive-run.

Why onboarding is a curriculum, not an orientation

The distinction Kazanjy draws is a distinction of intent. An orientation transmits information — here is the product, here is the CRM, here is the org chart. A curriculum produces a capability, and a capability has to be built in a sequence, checked at each stage, and certified before the person carrying it is put in front of a paying prospect. The failure mode of the orientation model is familiar to anyone who has hired a rep before the company had a real onboarding program: the rep is technically briefed by day three and is on live calls by day five, and by week six the founder is quietly re-running every deal the rep touched because the pitch was close enough to right that nobody caught it going wrong until the deal stalled.

A curriculum has stages because each stage produces a distinct, checkable capability, and skipping a stage doesn't save time — it just moves the cost downstream, from the classroom to a live prospect call, where it is far more expensive. The arc in Kazanjy's curriculum runs pre-work, into classes on subject matter (the personas the rep will sell to and the product they're selling), into collateral and process readiness, into drilling, into certification, and only then into ride-alongs with an actual live prospect in the room. The ordering matters: nothing in this arc puts an unready rep in front of a real buyer before the company has verified — not assumed, verified — that the rep can run the motion.

The operator failure to name early: treating the arc as a menu instead of a sequence. Founders under hiring pressure routinely collapse pre-work and classes into a single onboarding week, skip the readiness checklist because "the deck is basically done," and go straight to ride-alongs because ride-alongs feel like the real onboarding. Every stage that gets compressed reappears later as a live-call mistake, and live-call mistakes are the most expensive place in the whole system to catch them.

Pre-work: building the Example Call Garden

Pre-work in Kazanjy's curriculum is built almost entirely from your own call recordings — not vendor training content, not generic sales theory, but the actual calls your own reps and founders have run with your actual prospects. The rep's job in pre-work is to listen, and the organizing structure Kazanjy names for the recording library is the "Example Call Garden" — a curated, browsable collection indexed by call type (discovery, demo, negotiation, renewal), by segment (SMB, mid-market, enterprise), and by persona (the different buyer roles the rep will encounter). A garden, not a dump: the distinction is deliberate curation versus an unsorted folder of recordings nobody can navigate.

Two units live inside the garden. Individual calls — a single discovery call, a single demo — teach a rep what one stage of the motion sounds like in isolation. Whole deals — a full deal's worth of calls strung together from first touch to close — teach the rep something individual calls can't: how a deal actually moves, what carries over from the discovery call into the demo, where the buyer's objections in call three trace back to something under-addressed in call one. A rep who has only heard isolated calls has vocabulary. A rep who has heard a whole deal end to end has a mental model of how a deal breathes.

The mechanism Kazanjy specifies for tracking pre-work is simple and worth keeping simple: the rep marks each recording "listened" as they go. This is not a sophisticated LMS requirement — it's a checklist, and the value is entirely in the visibility it gives the manager. A rep who has marked nothing listened by day four of pre-work is a rep who is behind, and the earliest possible point to catch that is exactly this — before classes, before certification, before a live call.

The operator failure here is the garden that never gets built, or gets built once and never weeded. Call libraries rot fast — the pitch changes, the ICP shifts, the competitive landscape moves, and a garden indexed against last year's positioning teaches a new rep to sell against a market that no longer exists. The garden needs an owner and a refresh cadence, or it becomes a liability disguised as an asset.

The collateral and process readiness checklist

The stage most companies skip, or half-do, is the one Kazanjy is most explicit about: before a rep can be expected to ramp, a defined set of collateral and process artifacts has to actually exist. Not exist in someone's head, not exist as a half-finished draft in a shared drive — exist in a state a new rep can pick up and use without a Slack round-trip to the founder. The checklist:

• ICP specification
• Prospecting motion
• Inbound motion
• Pre-call planning checklist
• Discovery questions
• Pitch deck
• Pitch deck script
• Demo, with demo accounts
• Demo script
• Stages
• Meeting types
• Pricing
• Contracting
• Implementation process

The diagnostic question Kazanjy poses is deceptively simple: "What are you missing?" Run the checklist against what actually exists in the company today, not what the founder believes exists because it was true for the founder's own head-based version of the motion. Missing collateral is a hidden ramp tax — it doesn't show up as a line item anywhere, it shows up as a rep improvising a demo script that isn't written down, a rep pricing a deal off a number they half-remember from a Slack thread three months ago, an implementation conversation the rep has never seen modeled because nobody wrote down what happens after the contract is signed.

The operator failure is diagnosing a slow ramp as a rep problem when it is actually a checklist problem. A founder who has been running the motion personally for eighteen months has internalized the ICP, the pricing logic, the objection handling, and the implementation handoff so completely that none of it feels like "collateral" — it feels like common sense. It is not common sense to the new hire. Every item on this list that lives only in the founder's head is an item the new rep cannot use, cannot be checked against, and will eventually improvise incorrectly in front of a prospect.

Drilling and certification

Certification in Kazanjy's curriculum is not a quiz. It is self-paced recorded practice against defined scenarios: the company presents a buyer context — Kazanjy's example is a pitch and demo aimed at "a CRO at a 50-person sales org" — and the rep records themselves running the pitch and the demo against that specific persona and context. The rep isn't graded on a single take. The expectation in Kazanjy's model is a small batch — on the order of five recordings — from which the rep also submits their own favorite, the one they'd put in front of a manager as their best work.

The five-recording structure does two things a single graded attempt can't. It forces repetition before the rep ever gets in front of a real buyer, and it forces the rep to develop their own judgment about what a good pitch sounds like — the act of picking a favorite out of five attempts is itself a skill, and it's a skill the rep needs on every future call, because nobody will be there afterward telling them which of their live-call answers was the strong one.

The line Kazanjy uses to frame the standard is worth keeping intact: "Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can't get it wrong." The distance between those two bars is the entire point of drilling. Getting it right once, on a good day, with no pressure, is not the same capability as being unable to get it wrong on a bad day, with a skeptical buyer, on a call that matters. Certification exists to close that gap before a real prospect is the one who discovers it's still open.

The operator failure is treating certification as a formality to clear rather than a gate that can fail someone. If every rep passes certification on the first pass, the scenarios aren't hard enough, or the reviewer isn't actually holding the "can't get it wrong" bar. Certification that never fails anyone isn't certification — it's a rubber stamp with a Loom attached.

Discovery practice

Discovery gets its own practice layer distinct from pitch-and-demo certification, and Kazanjy's version of it is simulation — running the rep through a mock discovery call, but also, critically, running pre-call simulation against the rep's actual upcoming calls. The distinction matters: a generic discovery role-play teaches the rep the shape of good discovery questions in the abstract. A pre-call simulation run against tomorrow's actual prospect forces the rep to apply that shape to a specific account, with a specific context, before the stakes are real.

The operator failure is running discovery practice only once, early in onboarding, and treating it as complete. Pre-call simulation is a standing practice, not a one-time onboarding checkbox — the highest-leverage version of it is run repeatedly, against whatever call is actually coming up next, for as long as a rep is still building judgment about a given segment or persona.

The four-stage ride-along ladder

Ride-alongs are the last stage of the curriculum, and Kazanjy structures them as a ladder — four stages, each one handing more control to the rep than the last, with coaching after every single rep of the ladder, not just at the end.

• Stage one — rep rides along passively while you sell. The rep observes a live call end to end and does not participate. The purpose is pure exposure: the rep watches a real deal happen in real time, with a real buyer, after having only heard recordings up to this point.
• Stage two — rep rides along actively participating while you sell.The rep is still watching you run the call, but now contributes — a discovery question, a point in the demo, a piece of the pitch — while you remain the one steering the deal. The rep gets a first taste of speaking on a live call inside a call you're still controlling.
• Stage three — you ride along actively while the rep sells.Control flips. The rep is now running the call, and you are present and participating — stepping in on a question the rep can't yet answer, redirecting if the call goes off track, backing up a point that needs more authority than the rep currently carries.
• Stage four — you ride along passively while the rep sells. The rep runs the entire call. You observe without participating, the same posture the rep held back at stage one, except the roles have fully inverted. This is the last checkpoint before the rep runs calls with nobody else in the room.

The ladder is a progressive handoff of control, not a binary switch from "shadowing" to "independent." Each stage isolates a different capability — watching, contributing, leading with a safety net, leading without one — and coaching happens after each rep of each stage, not just once at the end of the ladder. A rep who is weak at stage two contribution shouldn't be advanced to stage three leadership on a fixed calendar date; the ladder gates on demonstrated readiness, the same discipline that governs every earlier stage in the curriculum.

The operator failure is compressing the ladder — going straight from stage one observation to stage four independence because the calendar says the rep has been onboarding for three weeks and it's time. The middle two stages exist because leading a call with a founder in the room to catch mistakes is a fundamentally different skill from leading a call with a founder purely observing, and both are different again from leading a call alone. Skip the middle rungs and the first time the rep discovers they can't recover from a hard question is in front of a prospect with nobody there to help.

Common operator failures

• Orientation dressed up as a curriculum. A Slack invite, a deck, a week of shadowing, and a live quota starting week two — no pre-work, no readiness checklist, no certification gate.
• No Example Call Garden, or a rotted one. Either no recorded call library exists at all, or one was built once and never refreshed against the current pitch, ICP, or competitive position.
• Ramp diagnosed as a rep problem when it's a checklist problem.Missing collateral — an unwritten demo script, pricing logic that lives only in the founder's head — gets blamed on the rep's aptitude instead of the readiness gap it actually is.
• Certification that never fails anyone.Every rep clears it on the first pass, which means the scenarios are too easy or the bar isn't actually being held.
• Discovery practice run once and shelved. Pre-call simulation treated as a week-one exercise instead of a standing practice run against real upcoming calls.
• Ride-along ladder compressed to two rungs. Straight from passive observation to full independence on a calendar deadline, skipping the active-participation and coached-leadership stages where the real skill transfer happens.

Related chapters

• The ramp-economics parable — the economic case this curriculum exists to answer.
• Five habits of great sales leaders — what the manager running this curriculum does day to day once reps are certified.
• The sales playbook — the documented motion this curriculum trains a new rep to run.
• Founder-led sales — the pre-hire motion this curriculum eventually transfers out of the founder's hands.

Source and credit

The curriculum arc, the Example Call Garden, the collateral and process readiness checklist, the certification scenarios, the "can't get it wrong" standard, and the four-stage ride-along ladder are Pete Kazanjy's constructs, drawn from his Founder-Led Sales course at Founding Sales(foundingsales.com). This chapter is Allston Labs' distillation of that material for operators building their own onboarding program — the frameworks are Kazanjy's; the elaboration on mechanism and failure modes above is ours.