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 logistics & freight shipments live or die at Rate Quoted, or why Rate Quoted is not the formality it appears to be.
Rates expire. Knowing how long a quote has been sitting is worth more than knowing it exists.
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 → Rate Quoted → Booking Confirmed → In Transit → Delivered — and what genuinely has to be true for a shipment to move between each. Product knowledge can be learned on the job; a wrong mental model of the pipeline produces a year of misforecast shipments.
- What each stage means and what evidence advances it
- Which stage historically loses the most shipments
- Who the contacts typically are, by function and seniority
- What a good shipper 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 Rate Quoted objection is handled, how coverage is widened, how a stalled shipment 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 shipment to reach Rate Quoted. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-rate quoted across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.