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 saas & technology deals live or die at Discovery, or why Discovery is not the formality it appears to be.
The trial is the real qualifier. Deals that skip it close slower and churn faster.
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 → Discovery → Demo → Trial/POC → Negotiation → Closed Won — and what genuinely has to be true for a deal to move between each. Product knowledge can be learned on the job; a wrong mental model of the pipeline produces a year of misforecast deals.
- What each stage means and what evidence advances it
- Which stage historically loses the most deals
- Who the contacts 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 Discovery objection is handled, how coverage is widened, how a stalled deal 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 deal to reach Discovery. Activity can be manufactured in week one; reaching the stage that actually predicts revenue cannot.
Track median days-to-first-discovery across hires and you will have something to improve against, rather than a vague sense that onboarding takes about a quarter.