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 insurance policys live or die at Underwriting, or why Quotation is not the formality it appears to be.
Underwriting is where policies die. Giving it a stage makes the drop-off visible instead of mysterious.
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 → Quotation → Underwriting → Policy Bound → Renewal — and what genuinely has to be true for a policy to move between each. Product knowledge can be learned on the job; a wrong mental model of the pipeline produces a year of misforecast policys.
- What each stage means and what evidence advances it
- Which stage historically loses the most policys
- Who the policyholders typically are, by function and seniority
- What a good account 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 Underwriting objection is handled, how coverage is widened, how a stalled policy 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 policy to reach Underwriting. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-underwriting across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.