In 2023, Northwestern Kellogg Professor Craig Wortmann interviewed me about ramping into new sales roles effectively. With each career move, I've refined my approach. Now two weeks into my role at Codeium, here's my new framework combining past lessons with fresh insights.

Quick hack: Granola has transformed my onboarding. Instead of frantic note-taking in meetings, I use it to transcribe conversations into key takeaways, then run topics I don’t understand through Claude for clarity.

Practice 1: Preparation (Before Day 1)

Day 1 should start before your official start date.  Three things should happen before you start

Mental Reset: Elite athletes take time off between seasons—you should too. At a minimum, I recommend a 36-hour tech detox (no phone, TV, or computer) before starting. During my recent detox, I focused on things that give me energy:

• Morning CrossFit

• Built Legos

• Hiked a mountain

• Re-read past journals

• Reflected on past work experiences

• Watched the sunset over the Pacific

• Topped it off with the best night of sleep in months

Know Your Core Team: In sales, success depends on your "core team"—your Sales Engineer, SDR, and manager. Before my official start, I invested 60 minutes each with my SDR and SE to understand working styles, strengths, weaknesses, pet peeves, personal ambitions, and energy-draining activities. This foundational understanding will pay dividends during future stressful times.

Onboarding Plan: Create a detailed 4-6 week plan with specific objectives and daily activities. Share it with your manager before day one to align expectations and demonstrate initiative.  The most important piece is to have a clear game plan for specific activities each day to accomplish the goal

Practice 2: Quick Wins

You likely won't close major enterprise deals immediately, so focus on smaller victories to build credibility and prove to yourself that you’re in the right environment.  

Pipeline Generation: On my first day at Codeium, I secured a meeting with a C-Suite executive at a Fortune 500 company. This immediately caught attention. While it may have appeared lucky, I had orchestrated this weeks before my start date through my network.

Account Mapping: I've fully mapped the organizational structure of two strategic accounts within my first two weeks.

• My approach: Find someone in my network at the target company (often outside my buyer's department) and ask for help navigating the org chart

• Approach this as, “hey, I’m new to this industry and would love your help.”  This person typically has access to company directories and can help identify decision-makers and reporting lines.  Send them a small gift to show appreciation afterwards

Operational Improvements: Top AEs should improve the systems they inherit, not just complain that they aren’t working. I noticed our team's CommonRoom adoption was nearly non-existent. After investigation, I discovered that we had not configured the right signals to extract value from the platform. This became my first improvement project—benefiting myself, my SDR, and the broader GTM team.

Practice 3: Product Knowledge

Deep product knowledge is a secret weapon when selling emerging technologies to technical audiences. You earn credibility when you don't need an engineer present for every conversation.

Industry Foundation: Prior to joining Codeium, I took Professor Malan’s CS50 class @ Harvard to learning coding fundamentals.  Highly highly recommend.

User Journey Immersion: I’ve frankly missed on my onboarding goals here.  Ideally, I’d like to interview 2-3 customers about their experience—focusing on what they love and hate. Next, I’d like to identify top 3-5 use cases and attempt to build them myself in Windsurf.  I plan to use Claude to create a sample codebase to work off of for the purposes of testing the use cases.  

Quick at Bats: By day three, I was on a call with a low-risk prospect—an IC engineer using our product in a self-serve capacity. I documented questions received and quickly sourced answers.

Conclusion: Two Week Report Card

Grade yourself at the two-week mark to recalibrate priorities. 

Here’s my self-assessment:

Preparation (A): Entered with a clear plan

Quick Wins (A -): Secured several wins but could have improved execution on an early meeting

Product (C): This took a backseat to quick wins and needs to be prioritized.  

My focus for weeks 3-4 is clear: deep product immersion. Without this foundation, I'll hit a ceiling quickly.

Bisous,

Julian