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 legal services matters live or die at Conflict Check, or why Conflict Check is not the formality it appears to be.
No firm can act before the conflict check clears, and nothing is billable until the engagement letter is signed.
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 → Conflict Check → Scoping → Engagement Letter → Active Matter — and what genuinely has to be true for a matter to move between each. Product knowledge can be learned on the job; a wrong mental model of the pipeline produces a year of misforecast matters.
- What each stage means and what evidence advances it
- Which stage historically loses the most matters
- Who the clients typically are, by function and seniority
- What a good organisation 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 Conflict Check objection is handled, how coverage is widened, how a stalled matter 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 matter to reach Conflict Check. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-conflict check across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.