You will be able to set ramp milestones that tell you whether a new hire is on track.
Your new hire starts on Monday. HR has sorted the laptop and the access card, and someone has booked a welcome lunch. Ask most managers what happens after that and the honest answer is: we give them a few weeks to settle in, and then we see. Three months later, the hire either has a pipeline or does not, and nobody can say whether that was the plan.
That waiting period has a name in sales teams. Ramp is the time between a new rep's first day and the point where they are expected to carry a full quota. This lesson treats ramp as a plan with checkpoints, so you know in week five whether a hire is on track, not in month four when it is too late to help.
Wei Ming has now filled his open role. Hui Min joins next month from a recruitment firm, where she sold placement services to HR managers. We will follow her through this module.
You will see figures quoted for how long ramp should take. Ignore them. Ramp depends mostly on how long your deals take from first contact to signature, and that varies hugely. A team selling a low-cost subscription with a two-week cycle can see a new hire close within a month. A team selling a large system to companies that run a formal tender might wait half a year for a first win, however good the hire.
So set ramp from your own team's history. Look at the last few people who joined and went on to do well, and note when each one reached certain points. If you have no history because you are hiring your first rep, use your own sales cycle as the starting estimate and treat the first hire as the one who sets the baseline.
Wei Ming looked at the four reps who had joined in the past three years and stayed. Using the CRM and their calendars, he found the week each one first hit four milestones. These are his team's example figures.
First solo call: weeks 2, 3, 3 and 2. First discovery meeting: weeks 4, 5, 4 and 3. First proposal sent: weeks 7, 8, 6 and 7. First closed deal: weeks 10, 12, 9 and 11.
Those four milestones are common in B2B sales, but you should use whatever points fit your process. The test is that each one is a clear event with a date. "Getting comfortable with the product" is not a milestone. "Ran a full demo to a prospect without help" is.
The order matters as much as the milestones themselves. In the first weeks, results cannot tell you anything, because no deal could have closed yet. If you only watch revenue, you learn about a problem in month three. Activity and skill milestones come first and show you the trend much earlier. A hire who has not run a solo call by week four is a concern now, even though their first deal is not due until week twelve.
For each milestone, Wei Ming set the target week at the slowest of his four successful hires: first solo call by week 3, first discovery meeting by week 5, first proposal by week 8, and first closed deal by week 12. Using the slowest successful hire is a deliberate choice. It means a new rep who misses a milestone is behind every person who succeeded before them, which is a real signal, and it avoids judging a new hire against the best start the team ever had.
You could choose the average instead, which would set targets at weeks 2.5, 4, 7 and 10.5. That is a tougher standard. Pick one approach, write down which, and use it for every hire.
A new hire with a full quota from day one will miss it for months. That teaches them that the target is not real, or it teaches them to panic and push buyers too early. Either habit is hard to undo.
Instead, set a reduced ramp quota that steps up on dates you decide in advance. Base the steps on your milestones. If the first closed deal is expected by week twelve, there is little point in any quota before month three.
Wei Ming's team carries an example monthly quota of S$16,000 per rep. Hui Min's ramp quota was set as nothing in months one and two, 25 percent in month three, which is S$4,000, then 50 percent in month four, S$8,000, 75 percent in month five, S$12,000, and the full S$16,000 from month six.
Write these steps into the offer letter or the onboarding plan, and agree how commission works during the ramp months with HR or finance, so the new hire knows exactly what counts and when. Module 7 covers quotas and pay in detail. What matters here is that the steps are fixed before the hire starts, so they never feel like a judgement made halfway through.
A ramp plan with dated milestones turns a vague worry into a clear question. Instead of "Hui Min seems a bit slow", Wei Ming can ask "Hui Min was due to run her first discovery meeting by week five and it is week six. What is getting in the way?" Lesson 3.3, When a new hire falls behind, covers what to do with the answer.
It also helps the new hire. Hui Min can see the path, knows that a slow first month is expected, and can tell for herself whether she is on track.
In the activity below you will list four ramp milestones for your own team, with the week you expect each one. Use your team's history if you have it. If you do not, start from your sales cycle and mark the weeks as first estimates to replace after your next hire.
List four ramp milestones for your team with the week you expect each to be reached.
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