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 manufacturing & industrial orders live or die at RFQ, or why RFQ is not the formality it appears to be.
An industrial sale is four approvals wearing one name. Costing and sampling each deserve their own stage.
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 → RFQ → Costing → Sampling → PO Received — and what genuinely has to be true for a order to move between each. Product knowledge can be learned on the job; a wrong mental model of the pipeline produces a year of misforecast orders.
- What each stage means and what evidence advances it
- Which stage historically loses the most orders
- Who the contacts typically are, by function and seniority
- What a good buyer 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 RFQ objection is handled, how coverage is widened, how a stalled order 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 order to reach RFQ. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-rfq across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.