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 education & edtech enrolments live or die at Counselling, or why Counselling is not the formality it appears to be.
Counselling converts, offers lapse and fees decide. Tracking enrolments as deals hides all three.
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 — Enquiry → Counselling → Offer → Fee Payment → Enrolled — and what genuinely has to be true for a enrolment to move between each. Product knowledge can be learned on the job; a wrong mental model of the pipeline produces a year of misforecast enrolments.
- What each stage means and what evidence advances it
- Which stage historically loses the most enrolments
- Who the students typically are, by function and seniority
- What a good institution 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 Counselling objection is handled, how coverage is widened, how a stalled enrolment 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 enrolment to reach Counselling. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-counselling across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.