Latest / Sales Leadership with Fexingo: Quota Carriers, Sales Managers, and Revenue Teams / The Hidden Cost of Sales Ramp Time
Transcript
- Lucas: Most sales leaders think their biggest problem is closing deals slowly. But if you look at the actual P&L for a mid-market software company today, the bleeding happens before the first deal closes. It is the silent drag of ramp time. Luna: Right, because everyone celebrates the new hire who hits quota in month four as a miracle, ignoring the eight months of salary and benefits paid while they were still learning the CRM. Lucas: Exactly. And the data from Salesforce shows that average ramp time has actually stretched to nine months over the last year. That is not a typo. Nine months for someone to go from signed offer to consistent performance. When you factor in the cost of bad hires or attrition during that window, you are looking at a massive capital inefficiency. Luna: It feels like we are treating onboarding like an event rather than a process. You hand them a laptop, a login, and a PDF handbook, and then you hope they figure out the rest. Lucas: That is the standard playbook, and it is failing. The reason it fails is that we confuse activity with competence. A new rep might be making fifty calls a week in month two, but if those calls are misaligned with the buyer journey, they are just burning fuel. They are creating noise, not signal. Luna: So the metric shouldn't be call volume. It should be quality of interaction or perhaps even win rates against qualified leads during that initial period. Lucas: Precisely. And this brings us to a specific case study that illustrates the shift perfectly. There was a mid-sized fintech firm that decided to restructure their entire first ninety days. They stopped letting new reps shadow random senior account executives. Instead, they built a simulated environment where reps handled pre-recorded objections from actual customers. Luna: I have heard of those simulations. Are they expensive to build? Lucas: They are costly upfront, but the return is stark. This company cut their average ramp time from eleven months down to six. Not because the reps worked harder, but because they made fewer critical errors in their early conversations. They learned the script, the product nuance, and the objection handling in a safe space before ever touching a live lead. Luna: That makes sense. You are de-risking the early phase. If they mess up a demo in simulation, nobody loses money. If they mess it up in front of a prospect, the pipeline shrinks. Lucas: And that is the core insight. Traditional onboarding assumes that mistakes are part of the learning curve. In high-stakes sales environments, that assumption is too expensive. By front-loading the training on common failure points, you accelerate the path to competence. Luna: But does that take the joy out of selling? Or do the reps feel micromanaged by having such a rigid structure initially? Lucas: Actually, the opposite. Top performers hate ambiguity. They want to know exactly what works. When you give them a clear framework, they feel more confident. Confidence drives persistence. And persistence is what gets you through the first few rejections without quitting. Luna: So confidence is a retention tool as much as a performance tool. If they feel competent early, they stay longer. Lucas: Absolutely. And let us talk about the manager's role here. Because in many teams, the manager becomes the bottleneck. They are so busy managing their existing book of business that they have no bandwidth to coach the new hire deeply. Luna: Yeah, I see that all the time. The manager says, 'Go make some calls,' and then checks in once a week to see if the numbers are moving. That is not coaching. That is neglect. Lucas: It is structural neglect. We ask managers to do two jobs: generate revenue and develop talent. Most systems are designed to prioritize the former. So the latter gets starved. To fix ramp time, you have to separate the coaching function from the management function, at least temporarily. Luna: Like assigning a dedicated mentor who isn't responsible for the new hire's quota? Lucas: That is one model. Another is using technology to handle the repetitive coaching. Chatbots that review call transcripts in real-time and suggest improvements. AI tools that tell the rep, 'You talked for forty seconds before asking a question. Try waiting.' That frees up the human manager to focus on strategy and relationship building. Luna: I love that. It scales the wisdom of your best reps to everyone else. Instead of waiting for the manager to hear three bad calls, the system catches them instantly. Lucas: Exactly. And this brings me to a quick thought on support. If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, consider backing the show directly. A couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It helps us keep producing deep dives like this without ads interrupting the flow. Luna: Yeah, it really does help. And it means we can spend more time digging into the data rather than worrying about ad slots. Lucas: Back to the ramp time issue. There is another layer here that people miss. It is the psychological aspect of identity. New reps often struggle with imposter syndrome because they don't yet see themselves as salespeople. They see themselves as students. Luna: That transition is huge. Going from 'learning' to 'doing' is a mental leap. How do you bridge that gap? Lucas: By giving them early wins. Small, achievable goals that prove their capability. Maybe it is not closing a million-dollar deal. Maybe it is successfully navigating a complex procurement conversation with a mid-level buyer. When they experience that success, their identity shifts. They start believing they belong in the seat. Luna: So the curriculum needs to be designed around achieving these micro-wins quickly. Not just teaching facts, but enabling moments of proof. Lucas: Yes. And those micro-wins feed back into the pipeline. Every successful interaction builds trust with the prospect. Prospects can smell desperation or incompetence. When a rep is confident and well-trained, the dynamic changes. The sale becomes easier. Luna: It also reduces churn later on. If they hit quota quickly, they stay motivated. If they struggle for nine months, they burn out and leave. Lucas: Which circles back to the original point. The cost of a bad hire isn't just the salary. It is the vacancy cost, the training cost, the lost revenue, and the morale hit to the rest of the team. Reducing ramp time is essentially reducing the risk profile of every new hire. Luna: It turns hiring from a gamble into an investment. An investment with a known return timeline. Lucas: Exactly. And that is something boards and CFOs respect. They understand ROI. When you can say, 'We are investing in structured onboarding to reduce ramp time by three months,' you are speaking their language. Luna: It moves sales from a black box of magic to a science of process. Which is exactly what modern businesses demand. Lucas: So the takeaway is simple. Stop treating onboarding as a passive intake process. Make it active, structured, and focused on early competence. Your pipeline will thank you. Luna: And your new hires will thank you for not leaving them to drown in ambiguity. Lucas: True. But I wonder, for those of you listening who are in leadership, what is the one part of your current onboarding that feels most broken? Luna: I bet it is the feedback loop. Everyone talks about feedback being important, but rarely is it timely. Lucas: Probably. If you have any thoughts on that, share them in the comments. We read them every week. Until next time, keep your pipelines full and your ramp times short.