Sales Onboarding Manager

Location: San Francisco Workplace: Hybrid Perplexity is hiring sellers fast, and every new seller has to learn a fast-moving product line: Enterprise, Comet, Computer and the API. We're looking for a Sales Onboarding Manager to own how new sellers go from their first day to selling on their own. You'll build the program, keep it current, run it, and certify that each seller is ready before they sell independently. This is a high-ownership, highly visible role on a small Sales Enablement team. You'll partner with the Sales Enablement Lead and work closely with sales leaders, frontline managers, Product, Product Marketing, Solutions and Revenue Operations. Your goal is a robust, relevant, progressive and measurable ramp that gets faster as we scale. ABOUT THE ROLE The Sales Onboarding Manager owns the onboarding experience for Enterprise and Commercial Account Executives (AEs) and Business Development Representatives (BDRs), from Day 1 through field certification. You'll design the curriculum, keep it up to date as the product changes, lead the sessions yourself, manage the logistics of placing each cohort into the right sessions, and run the certifications that decide when a new hire is ready. Company-wide new-hire orientation is owned by a separate onboarding role. Ongoing training for ramped sellers is owned by Sales Enablement. You'll partner with both so new sellers move smoothly from orientation into their sales ramp and then into working independently with ongoing training from Enablement. RESPONSIBILITIES - Own the sales onboarding program. Co-design and run role-based ramps for BDRs and for Enterprise and Commercial AEs, including learning objectives, milestones and time-to-productivity targets for each stage. Where BDRs and AEs need the same foundations, they learn them together. Where the jobs differ, each gets its own track. - Build the BDR ramp. Teach new BDRs prospecting and outbound: ideal customer profile and persona research, account and territory rules, multi-channel sequences, cold calling, cold email, qualification, and clean handoffs to AEs. Get BDRs productive in the prospecting stack, including Salesforce, Apollo and the dialer. - Build and maintain content. Create and update modules, playbooks, talk tracks, demo guides, knowledge checks and self-paced content. Update materials as products, pricing, positioning and process change, and retire anything out of date. - Facilitate live sessions. Lead engaging, interactive sessions (virtual and in person) on Perplexity's products, sales process, customer personas, discovery, demos, objection handling and tools. Bring in subject-matter experts from Product, Product Marketing, Solutions and top sellers. - Run cohort logistics. Work with Recruiting and sales leaders to track incoming hires, assign each one to the right sessions for their role, segment and start date, and manage calendars, attendance, make-ups and pre-work. - Certify field readiness. Design and run role-specific certifications using clear rubrics. For BDRs, that means cold-call, email and qualification certifications. For AEs, it means pitch, discovery and demo certifications. Both roles also certify on tools. Calibrate scoring with BDR and sales managers, give actionable feedback, and decide when a new hire is ready to sell on their own. - Partner with frontline managers. Give managers visibility into each new hire's progress, flag risks early, and equip managers to reinforce onboarding through coaching and call reviews. - Measure and improve. Track completion, certification pass rates and ramp attainment. For BDRs, also track activity, meetings booked and accepted, and pipeline sourced. For AEs, also track time to first meeting, pipeline and closed business. Use the data and new-hire feedback to improve the program each cohort. - Scale with leverage. Use AI tools, including Perplexity's own products, to build content faster, personalize learning paths and automate repetitive logistics so the program keeps up with hiring. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR The best candidates are strong facilitators who also design programs and run operations well. You can command a room, build a curriculum from a blank page, and keep a complicated cohort calendar running smoothly. You hold a high bar for readiness and know how to tell a manager when a seller isn't there yet. Must-haves - 2–4 years in sales enablement, sales onboarding or sales training, ideally at a high-growth B2B SaaS or AI company. Experience carrying a quota or managing sellers is a strong plus. - A track record of designing and running a sales onboarding or ramp program end to end, with measurable impact on ramp time or productivity. - Excellent live facilitation, virtual and in person, with sellers at different experience levels, from early-career BDRs to seasoned AEs. - Experience designing and running certifications or skills assessments (such as cold-call, pitch, discovery or demo) using rubrics that sales managers trust. - Strong program management and operational rigor. You can run several overlapping cohorts, schedules and stakeholders without dropping details. - Working knowledge of modern sales methods (such as MEDDICC, Command of the Message or similar), outbound prospecting and the full sales cycle from first touch to close. - Comfort learning technical products quickly and explaining them clearly. You can learn an AI product well enough to teach and demo it. - Fluency with the sales tech stack, such as Salesforce, a conversation-intelligence tool and an LMS or content-management platform. - High ownership and comfort with ambiguity in a fast-moving environment where the product changes weekly. Nice to have - Experience onboarding sellers for AI, developer or other technically complex products. - Background in instructional design or adult learning. - Previous experience as a BDR/SDR or as a BDR/SDR manager. - Experience building onboarding for both Enterprise and Commercial/velocity sales motions, or for Customer Success roles. - Experience standing up enablement tooling (LMS, content hub, call library) or reporting on ramp metrics. - Experience using AI to build content or automate enablement operations