The problem with "shadow somebody for two weeks"

Most dealership sales onboarding is a schedule, not a plan. You put the new hire on the floor Monday, tell them to follow Marcus around, hand them a product binder, and check in on Friday to ask how it's going. They say "good." Three weeks later you find out they've never written a deal sheet, they don't know how to log a phone up, and they've been standing at the front door for six hours a day watching Marcus work.

A work plan is different. A work plan assigns specific work, every day, with a name on it and a place to write down whether it happened. It looks boring on paper. That's the point.

Here's the structure I'd use for the first 30 days. Four buckets, every day:

  1. Practice — 20 minutes of rehearsal on one thing, out loud, with a person.
  2. Customer exposure — a defined number of live interactions, with a defined role.
  3. CRM — specific records they have to create or update, checked by you.
  4. Manager debrief — 10 minutes at the end of the day, on one interaction.

Twenty minutes, some floor time, some typing, ten minutes with you. That's under an hour of structured commitment per day and it's more than 90% of new hires get.

Week 1: language and mechanics, not selling

Nobody sells anything in week one. In week one they learn to talk about the store and move information into the right place.

Practice (daily, 20 min, with you or a designated senior rep):

  • Day 1–2: the greeting and the first three questions. Out loud, ten reps each.
  • Day 3: trade question. "Are you planning to trade something in, or is this an add to the driveway?"
  • Day 4: payment question without flinching. "What are you looking to keep the monthly around, so I don't show you something that doesn't work?"
  • Day 5: the appointment set. Two specific times, not "when works for you."

Make it a real rehearsal. You play the customer and you be a little difficult. If the rehearsal is easy, they'll fold the first time a real customer says "I'm just looking."

Customer exposure: shadow only, but with an assignment. Not "watch Marcus." Instead: "Sit in on three customer conversations today. For each one, write down the first question the rep asked, and what the customer said their timeline was." Then they have something to talk about at debrief. Shadowing without an assignment is just standing.

CRM: by Friday of week one they should be able to, unassisted, create a new customer record, log a phone up with notes a stranger could read, set a task with a due date, and find a record from last month. Test it. Give them a name and say "pull up their notes and tell me what happened."

Debrief: 10 minutes, one question. "What did you hear a customer say today that you didn't know how to respond to?" Write the answer on a list. That list becomes next week's practice.

Week 2: they talk, you're standing there

Day 8 is when they start opening their mouth in front of real buyers. Not closing. Opening.

Practice: move from scripts to objections. Use the list you built in week one. The realistic ones for a car salesperson ramp:

  • "What's your best price?" on the walkaround
  • "I need to talk to my wife"
  • "I'm just getting numbers today"
  • "Can you send me the out-the-door on this?"

Rehearse each one until the response is under 15 seconds and doesn't sound defensive. Example target:

Customer: What's your best price on this one? Rep: Fair question, and I'll get you there. Two things change the number — whether you're trading and whether you're financing with us. Give me those two and I'll put a real figure in front of you instead of a guess.

Customer exposure: they take the greeting and the first four questions on every up you assign them, then hand off to the senior rep. Target five greetings a day. Count them. If they got two, that's a coverage problem on your end, not a motivation problem on theirs.

Add phone: two outbound calls a day on aged internet leads, live, with you sitting next to them. Aged leads are the right training ground because the downside is low and the objections are real.

CRM: every interaction they touch gets logged by them, same day, before they leave. Not "the senior rep logs it." You spot-check three records nightly. If the note says "cust came in, will call back," you send it back and make them rewrite it.

Debrief: listen to or sit in on one of their calls and pick one behavior. One. Give it to them as a sentence they can use tomorrow.

Week 3: full interactions with a net

Now they work an up start to finish with a manager available but not hovering.

Practice: numbers. Payment math, gross basics, how a trade allowance interacts with negative equity, what your F&I products actually do. Have them present a deal sheet to you as if you're the customer, three times, until it doesn't sound apologetic.

Also: the write-up transition.

Rep: You liked the drive, the truck fits, and the payment range you gave me is doable. Let's go inside, I'll get you exact numbers with your trade, and if it works we can be done in an hour.

Customer exposure: two full ups a day if traffic allows, plus 10 outbound calls. First delivery this week if the deal lands. Have them do the delivery even if a senior rep sold it — the walk-through, the plate, the "here's my cell, text me a photo of it in your driveway."

CRM: now they own follow-up. Every open opportunity they touched has a next step with a date and a specific reason. "Follow up" is not a next step. "Calling Thursday 5pm — bank needs proof of income, he said he'd have paystubs by then" is a next step.

Debrief: shift the question. Instead of "how'd it go," ask "where in that conversation did you lose control of it?" Most reps can point at the exact moment. That's the coaching.

Week 4: the same job as everyone else, watched more closely

Week four is a rehearsal for month two. Full up rotation, full phone duty, full CRM hygiene, plus a written 30-day review with numbers.

Bring these to the review:

  • Greetings taken, appointments set, appointments shown, deals written
  • Outbound call count and how many produced a next step with a date
  • Percentage of their records with a dated next step (pull it from the CRM, don't estimate)
  • Practice sessions completed out of practice sessions scheduled
  • Debriefs completed out of debriefs scheduled

That last pair is the honest one. If you scheduled 20 practice sessions and ran 9, that's your number, not theirs. Sales manager accountability in a new hire training plan means the plan gets audited in both directions.

Make it a document, not a vibe

Write the 30 days out on one page. Days down the left, four columns across: practice topic, exposure target, CRM task, debrief question. Print it. Put a checkbox next to every cell. Tape it inside the desk drawer or pin it in whatever the new hire actually looks at.

Two rules that keep it alive:

  • The plan gets initialed daily by both of you. Thirty seconds. It's the only reason it survives week two.
  • Something gets cut when the store gets busy. Decide now what it is. My vote: cut exposure targets, never cut the debrief. A rep who talked to two customers and got coached learns more than a rep who talked to nine and went home.

If you record your phone-ups, the debrief gets a lot easier — you're reviewing what was actually said instead of what the rep remembers saying. That's the part of ramping a new rep where most of the time gets wasted, and it's the part tools like MoreSignal are built to shortcut.

Thirty days from now you'll either have a rep who knows what good looks like, or you'll know by day 12 that this isn't going to work. Both of those are wins compared to finding out in month four.