Publisher’s Note:
Jonathan Graviss (“JG”) is a regular OOH Today contributor whose Thursday columns offer practical advice for OOH operators. Graviss’s observations are based on real-world, extensive industry experience. No fluff or phoniness here. Many sales teams rely on his insights. Start your Year with more substantial revenues with today’s feature. Man! I wish I had his when I managed my OOH Markets back in the day!
“Man! I wish I had his when I managed my OOH Markets back in the day! “
What a Structured OOH Sales Onboarding Actually Looks Like
By Jonathan “JG” Graviss, Graviss Marketing
Most independent OOH operators have a sales onboarding process. It just exists entirely in the owner’s schedule or the sales manager’s calendar, and it ends whenever they get busy. That is not a system. It is a placeholder that looks like one until a rep leaves, a busy quarter hits, or a new hire starts asking questions nobody has time to answer.
The cost of informal onboarding is not always visible in the first 90 days. It shows up later: in longer ramp times, inconsistent performance across the team, and the slow erosion of institutional knowledge every time a rep transitions out.
How Most Onboarding Actually Works
In most independent OOH companies, onboarding looks like this: the new rep shadows the owner or sales manager, picks up the house style over a few weeks, gets shown the CRM when someone has time, and is considered ready after their first solo call.
This approach is understandable. The owner knows the market, the advertisers, and what works. Passing that knowledge directly feels efficient. And for a small operation, it can work reasonably well as long as nothing changes.
The problem is that things change. Reps leave. Owners get pulled into operations. Sales managers get promoted or move on. And when the person who held the process in their head is no longer available, the company discovers it never actually documented what good looked like.
What That Approach Actually Creates
Osmosis-based onboarding produces rep-dependent processes rather than company-owned ones. Each new hire learns a slightly different version of how things are done, shaped by whoever had time to train them and what was happening in the market that month.
Over time, institutional knowledge deepens inside individuals rather than inside the organization. The rep who has been there three years knows things the newer rep does not. When the experienced rep leaves, that knowledge leaves too.
This is also a leadership problem, not just a training problem. When onboarding is informal, there is no standard to coach against, no baseline to measure performance from, and no way to identify whether a rep is struggling with the process or struggling with something else entirely.
The Four Components of a Minimum Viable Onboarding
A structured OOH sales onboarding does not require a lengthy manual or a dedicated training department. It requires four documented standards that every rep runs from day one, regardless of who hired them or when they started.
Positioning clarity comes first. Before a rep learns the inventory, they should be able to articulate in three sentences why this operator over any other in the market. If they cannot do that, every conversation they have is starting at a disadvantage. The positioning brief is the first onboarding deliverable, not the last.
Discovery criteria come second. Defined questions that every rep runs on every first call: what is the advertiser trying to accomplish, what have they tried before, how do they define success, what is their timeline. These questions should not be improvised. They should be documented, practiced, and consistent across the team.
Follow-up cadence comes third. This is where most informal onboarding falls apart entirely. Reps learn to follow up by watching how the owner follows up, which means every rep develops a slightly different pattern. A documented cadence defines the sequence, the timing, and what each touch is designed to accomplish. Osmosis creates variation. Documentation creates consistency.
CRM standard comes fourth. What gets logged, when it gets logged, and why. Not as a reporting requirement, but as institutional memory. When the CRM reflects what actually happened in a conversation, it becomes a tool that makes every rep better prepared. When it does not, it becomes a compliance burden that nobody respects.
What Changes at 30, 60, and 90 Days
A structured onboarding creates natural checkpoints that informal onboarding never produces.
At 30 days, the question is whether the rep can position the company correctly and run a first call without coaching in the room. With documented standards, leadership can evaluate this against a defined baseline rather than a gut feeling.
At 60 days, the question shifts to follow-up discipline. Is the rep running the documented cadence consistently? Are CRM notes reflecting real conversations or generic check-ins? This is where the habits either form or start drifting, and it is the right moment to course-correct before patterns become permanent.
At 90 days, the rep should be independently managing their pipeline with leadership coaching on approach rather than execution. If that is not happening, the 30 and 60 day checkpoints will have surfaced why.
Reps reach full productivity faster when the process is documented. Performance is more consistent across the team because everyone is building on the same foundation. And when a rep eventually leaves, the company’s sales capability stays intact, because it was never stored in one person’s institutional memory.
Building the Infrastructure Before the Next Hire
The operators who build this structure while the owner or sales manager is still the primary seller are the ones who scale without regret. The process gets documented when someone who knows it well is still available to document it, rather than after a departure forces the question.
Next week in OOH Today, we address the part of this that most leaders find harder than the onboarding itself: getting the team to actually use the CRM, and why resistance there is almost always a leadership problem before it is a sales problem.
You can explore our approach to sales infrastructure and revenue-ready growth at GravissMarketing.com
If you are at the point where you need the process before you can make the hire, that is exactly where Graviss Marketing works.
Graviss Marketing helps independent OOH operators build the sales infrastructure, positioning systems, and leadership frameworks that turn strong inventory into consistent revenue growth. Learn more at GravissMarketing.com
Let’s elevate OOH together and make sure your company’s marketing is as strong as your locations.