You will be able to set ramp milestones that tell you whether a new hire is on track.
When a new salesperson joins, HR usually handles the laptop, the access card and the welcome lunch. After that, most managers give the hire a few weeks and wait. Three months later the hire either has a pipeline or does not, and nobody can say whether that was the plan.
Ramp is the time between a new rep's first day and the point where they are expected to carry a full quota. You can run ramp as a plan with checkpoints. Planned this way, it tells you by week five whether a hire is on track, while there is still time to help. Without a plan, you usually find out in month four, when it is too late.
Ignore published figures for how long ramp should take. Ramp length depends mostly on your sales cycle, which is how long deals take from first contact to signature, and this varies a lot between teams. A team selling a low-cost subscription on a two-week cycle may see a new hire close within a month. A team selling a large system to companies that run formal tenders may wait half a year for a first win, however good the hire is.
Set ramp from your own team's history. Look at the last few hires who did well and note when each of them reached certain points. If you have no history because this is your first sales hire, use your own sales cycle as the starting estimate. That first hire then sets the baseline.
Four milestones are common in B2B sales: first solo call, first discovery meeting, first proposal sent and first closed deal. Use whatever points fit your own process. The test for a milestone is that it is a clear event with a date. "Getting comfortable with the product" fails that test. "Ran a full demo to a prospect without help" passes it.
The order of milestones matters as much as the milestones themselves. In the first weeks, results tell you nothing, because no deal could have closed yet. If you only watch revenue, you find a problem in month three. Activity and skill milestones come first and show the trend much earlier. A hire with no solo call by week four is a concern now, even though their first deal is not due until week twelve.
Wei Ming, the sales manager from earlier in the course, has now filled his open role. His new hire, Hui Min, joins next month. She comes from a recruitment firm, where she sold placement services to HR managers, and the course follows her through this module.
Before she starts, Wei Ming looks at the four reps who joined in the past three years and stayed. Using the CRM and their calendars, he finds the week each of them first hit the four milestones:
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
He sets each target at the slowest successful hire's week: first solo call by week 3, first discovery meeting by week 5, first proposal by week 8 and first closed deal by week 12. He does this deliberately. If Hui Min misses one of these targets, she is behind everyone who succeeded before her, which is a real signal. It also avoids judging her against the team's best-ever start.
The other option is to set each target at the average of the four hires, which here gives weeks 2.5, 4, 7 and 10.5. That is a tougher standard. Pick one approach, write down which one you used, and apply it to every hire.
A full quota from day one means the hire misses it for months. That teaches them either that the target is not real, or to panic and push buyers too early, and both habits are hard to undo. Use a ramp quota instead: a reduced quota that steps up on dates decided in advance.
Base the steps on the 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 a monthly quota of S$16,000 per rep. Hui Min's ramp quota is nothing in months one and two, 25 percent (S$4,000) in month three, 50 percent (S$8,000) in month four, 75 percent (S$12,000) in month five, and the full S$16,000 from month six.
Write the steps into the offer letter or onboarding plan. Agree with HR or finance how commission works during the ramp months, so the hire knows exactly what counts and when. Fix all of this before the hire starts, so the steps never feel like a judgement made halfway through. Module 7 covers quotas and pay in detail.
During ramp, check progress against the dated milestones. A dated plan turns a vague worry into a specific question about a missed milestone. Suppose it is week six and Hui Min has not had her first discovery meeting, which was due by week five. Instead of saying she seems a bit slow, Wei Ming asks why the meeting has not happened and what is getting in the way. Lesson 3.3, "When a new hire falls behind", covers what to do once you know the reason.
The plan helps Hui Min as well. She can see the path, she knows a slow first month is expected, and she can check 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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