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Build onboarding from real ride-alongs and AI personas to cut ramp time
Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, SalesUpLevel
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Reported: "When I first joined Just Works, our average time to ramp for a new sales hire was 18 months ... We've gotten it down to eight months and we have a pretty clear path to get it under six" (about 300 revenue-facing hires last year). Also reported: AE bookings up 28% last year, 44% over two years.
Her team records ride-alongs across roles, has Claude turn the notes into rep and buyer personas, checks them with the people they rode with, and uses a shared Claude skills library to build each launch's plan and training content. A human reviews everything, and new hires are released early when quizzes and AI role plays show they're ready.
By Lauren Hughes (interviewed by Kyle Norton), VP Revenue Effectiveness, Justworks · The Revenue Leadership Podcast, E73 "The AI Enabling 600 Customer-Facing Reps" ↗ · Aug 26, 2026
If you sell: run it before your 10am
- Record ride-alongs across each customer-facing role (she used Granola).
- Feed the notes into Claude to build rep and buyer personas. (An earlier attempt in ChatGPT “fell flat” and was “a lot of slop”; they moved to Claude Code.)
- Go back to the people you rode with and ask "have we nailed your persona".
- Build a shared skills library that, for each launch, produces the project plan, the inputs needed from product, PMM and marketing, and the content (slides, podcast-style audio, video, AI role plays).
- Have a human readiness person review every output.
- Measure onboarding with quizzes, checkpoints and AI role plays, and let hires move on early when they pass.
Here are notes from [number] ride-alongs with our [role] reps and their buyers. Build two personas: the rep (daily tasks, where they get stuck, what good looks like) and the buyer (role, goals, top objections, words they use). Quote the notes for every point and list anything the notes don't support as a question for me. Notes: [paste]
If you lead a team: roll it out
- Start by measuring ramp the same way every quarter; without that number you can't tell if anything worked.
Watch out for
- She credits several changes together (measurement, hiring profile, removing friction), not AI alone.
- Large company with a dedicated enablement team; get ride-along consent before recording.
Source: Lauren Hughes, The Revenue Leadership Podcast, E73 "The AI Enabling 600 Customer-Facing Reps", Aug 26, 2026. Results are as reported by the source; we did not measure them.
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