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 healthcare & clinics cases live or die at Insurance Approval, or why Consultation is not the formality it appears to be.
Nothing moves until the insurer says yes, so approval is a stage in its own right rather than a note on a deal.
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 → Consultation → Insurance Approval → Treatment → Closed — and what genuinely has to be true for a case to move between each. Product knowledge can be learned on the job; a wrong mental model of the pipeline produces a year of misforecast cases.
- What each stage means and what evidence advances it
- Which stage historically loses the most cases
- Who the patients typically are, by function and seniority
- What a good referrer 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 Insurance Approval objection is handled, how coverage is widened, how a stalled case 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 case to reach Insurance Approval. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-insurance approval across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.