If you ask sales managers how long it takes to onboard a new sales rep, you’ll get a range of answers.
On the low end, about 7% of companies expect brand new salespeople to be talking to buyers on day one.
Much more commonly, firms put new hires through two to four weeks of intensive training. They sit through some online videos and get some hands-on product training. Someone shows them how to use the CRM. They go through sales methodology training and shadow an experienced rep. Maybe they even do some role-playing exercises.
When it’s all over, there’s a small celebration. The new rep gets a territory assignment and a quota. They’re officially ramped.
Except they’re not even close.
Expectation vs. reality
Privately, most sales leaders will admit that the true ramp time for a new rep is much longer—6 months, 9 months, a year, maybe even 18 months or 2 years. Sure, new hires can start calling on customers within a few weeks, but they aren’t really productive for a long time.
So what are they doing in between the end of official onboarding and the time when they become effective employees?
Mostly a lot of expensive trial and error.
They are largely left to their own devices to learn important things like:
- Which deals to chase and which to walk away from
- How to navigate internal processes to get things done
- When to bring in solutions engineers, pricing, or leadership
- How to handle objections specific to your market
- Which prospects actually fit your ideal customer profile
- How to interpret buying signals in your industry
This is really important information. But a lot of companies expect reps to figure this stuff out on their own.
Unfortunately, that results in negative consequences:
- Lost deals
- Damaged customer relationships
- Bridges burned in key accounts
- Quarters of missed quotas
- Lost revenue
Less obvious are the costs that don’t show up in financial reports:
- Extended ramp times
- Higher turnover from discouraged reps
- Contaminated territories that the next rep has to clean up
- Damaged reputations
More effective onboarding
So what’s the solution?
Your structured onboarding program shouldn’t end after week two. Sure, the program may become less intensive after the initial month, but you should have activities that extend throughout the entire first year—maybe even longer if your products or markets are complex.
Leading B2B teams build ongoing coaching, deal reviews, check-ins, and additional learning into a long-term ramping program. They support their new reps not just in the early days, but when it matters most.
If this sounds like something that would benefit your team, watch the webinar on More Effective Onboarding. It shows how some companies are training their reps to “succeed by default.” And it explains how to monitor and measure the effectiveness of your improvement efforts to see if they are working or not.
You don’t have to just wait a year to see if a new team member will work out. By building a better, longer-term onboarding process, you can dramatically increase the odds that a new hire will be successful, while also decreasing the time it takes for them to become productive.
More Effective Onboarding
Every sales operation wants to get new reps productive faster. But making that a reality can be a challenge. In this session, we share key insights and principles for making onboarding more efficient and effective.
