Usman Kayani: “How a Structured 30-Day Plan May Support an Underperforming Hire”

Founders may conclude that a sales hire has not met expectations. Usman Kayani argues that onboarding almost always fails first and that a structured system may help, and its basic framework could be developed in an afternoon. You hired a salesperson. Three months in, they are not producing. You are now deciding whether to fire them. Before you do, consider the possibility that the hire was fine and your onboarding was not. Kayani, founder of sales leadership consultancy Guided Growth, says founders are often too quick to diagnose a hiring problem when the weakness may sit earlier in the process.

Usman knows what a bad first month looks like because he had one himself. He spent 16 years in sales and sales management, including six years at Virgin Active, where he started as a sales representative and later became a sales manager. He describes his early performance at Virgin as poor. What changed, he says, was the structure around him: training, clear expectations, management and a ramp designed to make new hires competent before judging them on results.

Guided Growth trains coaches, consultants and agency owners to build that infrastructure inside their own businesses and places qualified sales managers into client companies through a dedicated recruitment function. Usman Kayani has a direct commercial interest in the argument that follows. He has also been making it for sixteen years.

Here is what he says most founders get wrong, and what to do instead.

Do not let a new hire sell in week one

Usman says he did not touch a lead for weeks after joining. His first days were spent on company history, mission and values, followed by a test to confirm he had absorbed it. Classroom sales training came next, then further training on systems, process and sales psychology. He says he was not handed the sales script until his manager cleared him to have it.

“Most companies hire you and say, here’s a script, crack on,” Kayani says. “That isn’t training, that’s gambling and praying you’ve hired the right person”

The takeaway is that onboarding does not necessarily require weeks of modules. Giving new hires opportunities to build competence before increasing performance demands may help them settle into the role. Your new hire is usually on live calls within days, because you needed them yesterday. When the numbers disappoint, the rep gets blamed first.

Ramp on a schedule, not on hope

Usman recommends a structured four-to-six-week ramp, written down before the hire starts, with the week-by-week output specified in advance.

For an appointment setter, his guidance is roughly 50 dials a day in week one, 100 in week two, 150 in week three, building towards 200. He suggests that a fully ramped setter consistently below 150 dials a day is a signal worth investigating.

The value is not in those specific numbers, which will differ by business. It is that the new hire knows on day one what week three is supposed to look like, and so do you. Unclear expectations can make it harder for new hires to perform effectively.

Make onboarding quantitative

Kayani turns onboarding into a scorecard.

Break the new hire’s first month into discrete, completable tasks: systems and software setup, product training, sales training, and production milestones such as their first 500 calls, their first discovery call and their first close. Assign points to each. Give the hire a points target for month one and have them mark each item complete, with a date, as they go.

The purpose is diagnostic rather than motivational. If a hire is significantly behind on points at week two, that may provide an early indication that additional support or a review of expectations is needed, rather than waiting until the end of a quarter.

“Now you don’t have to wait three months and rely on a feeling,” Kayani says. “By week two, the numbers are already telling you whether someone is on track.”

Some founders may rely on impressions that develop over several months rather than on defined performance measures. By the time the feeling is strong enough to act on, they have spent three months and a salary discovering something the system could have told them in two weeks.

Front-load your follow-up

Kayani also applies the same principle of front-loading effort to lead follow-up. His guidance is to concentrate most attempts in the first few days, when the lead is freshest, rather than spreading them thinly across several weeks.

The logic is that a lead contacted hard in the first 48 hours does not need chasing on day nine, and contact rates on aged leads fall away. He acknowledges founders often resist this because it feels intrusive. His counter is that the alternative is simply reaching fewer people, and that most prospects are busy rather than offended.

Reserve ten minutes a day for stalled deals

One tactic here is specific enough to implement this week.

Identify every deal where an offer has been made and not accepted. Reserve ten minutes daily. Call those prospects yourself for roughly five minutes each, introduce yourself as the founder, and ask directly what is holding them back.

Two rules are attached. Pay the commission to the rep anyway. And do not tell your reps you are doing it, because a rep who knows the founder will rescue stalled deals stops working to prevent them from stalling.

Before You Blame the Hire

Kayani’s broader point is that founders can overestimate how much performance comes down to finding exceptional people. Hiring matters, but so do the ramp, training, coaching, tracking and management the salesperson walks into.

The business that believes it simply needs better people will keep concluding that the people it finds are not good enough. Establishing an onboarding plan, scoring criteria, performance tracking and regular accountability check-ins may help new hires develop and meet expectations. Kayani says his own career started to turn when a manager confronted his poor performance directly, then gave him the structure and coaching to improve it.

“He wasn’t trying to insult me,” Kayani says of that manager. “He challenged me. And it woke me up.” Before you decide the salesperson failed, make sure your onboarding gave them a fair chance to succeed.