What this covers
- Why generic sales training under-prepares
- Week one: the pipeline, not the product
- Week two: shadowing with a specific brief
- Month one: measure ramp honestly
Why generic sales training under-prepares
A rep arriving from another industry knows how to run a discovery call. What they do not know is that construction & contracting projects live or die at Site Survey, or why Site Survey is not the formality it appears to be.
Estimating is expensive. Knowing your tender win rate tells you which bids are worth preparing.
Teaching the stages is therefore not administrative onboarding. It is the core of the job.
Week one: the pipeline, not the product
Start with the pipeline — Lead → Site Survey → Estimate → Tender → Awarded — and what genuinely has to be true for a project to move between each. Product knowledge can be learned on the job; a wrong mental model of the pipeline produces a year of misforecast projects.
- What each stage means and what evidence advances it
- Which stage historically loses the most projects
- Who the contacts typically are, by function and seniority
- What a good client looks like, and what a bad one looks like
Week two: shadowing with a specific brief
Shadowing without a brief is watching. Give the new rep one thing to observe per call — how the Site Survey objection is handled, how coverage is widened, how a stalled project is restarted — and debrief on that one thing.
Three focused observations beat twenty passive ones.
Month one: measure ramp honestly
The useful ramp metric is not activity. It is first project to reach Site Survey. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-site survey across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.