Set Your Reps Up
Outcome: a written setup a rep can follow unaided, a verification step that proves it works, and a clear line between what reps run and what runs centrally.
- Surface
- MCP server
- Level
- Advanced
- Uses
- Setup only · check_credits to verify
- Credits
- 0
- Prerequisite
- Lesson 01
Standardize on one client
Supporting three AI clients means three sets of instructions, three failure modes and three sets of questions.
Pick one. The right choice is whichever your team already has open — the setup guides cover each — and the decision matters less than the standardization.
Reference: MCP setup.
The setup doc
Written once, one page, and it must work without you in the room.
Prerequisites
Which client, which version, what access they need. Anything they must request before starting.
The install steps
Numbered, with the exact values. Do not describe the configuration — provide it, ready to paste.
The verification call
One free call — check_credits — that proves the connection works. This is the difference between “I think it worked” and “it worked”.
What to do when it fails
The three or four things that actually go wrong, with the fix for each. Write them from your own first install.
Who to ask
A named person, not a queue.
The verification step is the piece people leave out and it is the most valuable line in the doc. Without a definite success signal, a rep with a broken connection will assume it works, run a real prompt, get an unhelpful answer, and conclude the product does not work.
What reps run, what runs centrally
The split that keeps a rollout affordable and consistent.
| Reps run | Runs centrally |
|---|---|
| One contact card before a call | ICP scoring runs |
| A company brief before a meeting | Inbound lead triage |
| Ad-hoc questions about an account | The weekly signal digest |
| Drafting a message from data already pulled | Anything writing to the CRM |
| Small, immediate, single-account work | Anything list-shaped or scheduled |
The principle: reps do ad-hoc work on accounts in front of them; RevOps does anything list-shaped, scheduled, or writing to a system of record.
Fifteen reps each building their own scored account list produces fifteen different definitions, fifteen times the spend, and no way to compare results.
Give them the prompts
Do not hand a rep fifty tools and hope. Hand them four or five prompts that work, with the caps already in them.
The four from AI for Sales Reps are a good starting set:
- Contact card from a profile URL
- Company brief before a call
- Warm list from a post
- Draft an opening line from what was pulled
Saved as skills, they are a slash command rather than a paragraph to remember. See AI-Powered GTM lesson 05 and the GTM agents library .
Onboarding session
Thirty minutes, in this order:
- Show, do not explain. Run a contact card live on an account they know.
- Have them run it while you are there.
- Show the balance before and after, so cost is concrete from the first minute.
- Give them the four prompts.
- Say what not to do — no unbounded lists, no writing to the CRM, no “find all”.
That fifth point is where lesson 03’s guardrails get introduced, and it lands better as part of onboarding than as a policy document later.
Do this now
Pick one client
And write down why, so the decision does not get relitigated.
Write the one-page setup doc
Five sections, with paste-ready values.
Test it on someone unfamiliar
Watch them without helping. Whatever they ask is what the doc is missing.
Add the verification call
Write the rep/central split
And share it before anyone asks.
Package the four prompts
As skills if you can, as a doc if not.
Run a thirty-minute onboarding
Check your work
- One client, standardized
- The setup doc works for someone you did not help
- A free verification call proves the connection
- The rep/central split is written down
- Reps have four working prompts, not fifty tools
Where this breaks
A rollout without a rep/central split produces fifteen slightly different versions of the same list. Each rep builds their own scoring, their own filters and their own definition of qualified — so nothing is comparable, spend multiplies, and when results are poor nobody can say which definition was wrong. Draw the line before the first rep starts, not after the first invoice.
Further automation
Track who has completed setup and who has actually run something. A rollout where twelve people installed and four use it weekly is a training problem, not a tooling one — and the difference is invisible unless you look.
Next lesson
03 — Credit budgets and guardrails, making the spend predictable before it is a surprise.
Reference for this lesson: MCP setup, MCP prompting guide, Workspaces, AI for Sales Reps.