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 professional services engagements live or die at Scoping, or why Scoping is not the formality it appears to be.
Scope creep starts before the contract. Separating scoping from commercials is how firms protect margin.
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 → Scoping → Proposal → Commercials → Engaged — and what genuinely has to be true for a engagement to move between each. Product knowledge can be learned on the job; a wrong mental model of the pipeline produces a year of misforecast engagements.
- What each stage means and what evidence advances it
- Which stage historically loses the most engagements
- Who the clients typically are, by function and seniority
- What a good client org 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 Scoping objection is handled, how coverage is widened, how a stalled engagement 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 engagement to reach Scoping. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-scoping across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.