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 retail & e-commerce orders live or die at Quote, or why Quote is not the formality it appears to be.
B2B retail runs on quotes, not carts. Order placed and fulfilled are different revenue events.
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 → Quote → Order Placed → Fulfilled → Repeat — 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 customers typically are, by function and seniority
- What a good account 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 Quote 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 Quote. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-quote across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.