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 non-profit & ngo grants live or die at Cultivation, or why Cultivation is not the formality it appears to be.
Cultivation takes months and review takes longer. Treating grants like sales deals misreads both.
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 — Prospect → Cultivation → Proposal → Under Review → Funded — and what genuinely has to be true for a grant to move between each. Product knowledge can be learned on the job; a wrong mental model of the pipeline produces a year of misforecast grants.
- What each stage means and what evidence advances it
- Which stage historically loses the most grants
- Who the donors typically are, by function and seniority
- What a good funder 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 Cultivation objection is handled, how coverage is widened, how a stalled grant 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 grant to reach Cultivation. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-cultivation across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.