In-person onboarding at a fully remote company?

If you follow me on LinkedIn, you'll probably have noticed that we hired two new Sales Executives (SE), who joined our team on January 5th.

They both live in/near Copenhagen, some 300+ kilometres away from me.
Which is fine - it doesn't matter - we're a fully remote company!

But, following the advice of my Advisory Board, we've done onboarding of Signe and Daniel a bit differently than before:

In January, we meet every week for 2 days for super intensive in-person onboarding.

I've booked a location for us at a great hotel/conference centre in Aarhus with great facilities, food and lots of beautiful nature right outside the windows, to give us the best setting for effective onboarding!

But before I dive into that, let's back up a bit...

At the end of last year, I had the final Advisory Board meeting of 2025. Among the things we discussed was what I should do to give the two new SEs the best prerequisites to be a huge success at Herodesk.

It's a (for me, anyway) huge investment and also a risk to start a new Sales team and hire two people (at once!) to join it. So it just HAS to be a success.

Their recommendation was: Do in-person onboarding to speed it up and ensure everything you say sticks and everything is crystal clear for the new SEs.

Initially, I wasn't a big fan of the concept, to be honest. In-person onboarding at a fully remote company? I was like; How the hell is that ever gonna work or scale?

I agreed with their analysis of how important a successful onboarding is for the business, though, so I took it to heart and booked it.

I figured my concern about how in-person onboarding at a fully remote company would ever scale in the future would be a problem for future-me, anyway...

Right now, we're halfway through, and I just gotta admit: Doing this in-person onboarding is 100% the right thing to do, no questions asked!

I often preach that people should communicate using a medium that matches the complexity of the matter.

• Simple question? Send a chat.
• Something to discuss? Call.
• Onboarding of two new SEs in a newly established sales team in an organisation that's been inbound-focused until now? In-person meetings!

Instead of the "usual onboarding" where people are bombarded with information overload for two weeks, and then cut loose to "go execute", I've spread it over four weeks.

Each week has a new topic: 

• Week 1: Systems, processes, prospect qualification and cold calling.
• Week 2: Executing "The good sales meeting" & closing deals.
• Week 3: Finding new prospects (channels).
• Week 4: Sales Process A-Z + next steps.

In weeks 2 and 3, I'm using the skills from my advisory board and including two members in the onboarding to teach what they know (they're much better at sales than me, so that's a no-brainer). 

This takes everything to the next level, both in terms of sales and engagement.

The purpose is that each week, the two SEs learn something new, and they'll spend the next few days at home executing on that, learning and sharing feedback so we can improve the process, before moving on to the next step.

Remember, the two SEs are already skilled professionals. They know everything about selling. I "just" gotta teach them about our customers, product and why we're awesome!

The goal is for Signe and Daniel to be 100% onboarded and ready to execute the full sales process, A-Z, on their own, by February 1st.

They're already booking new meetings every day.

They've already held sales presentations for leads.

There's no doubt in my mind that this is the right bet, the right approach and that it'll help lift Herodesk "from one to ten"!