Sales Onboarding
Also called: sales ramp, rep onboarding, new hire ramp
Sales onboarding is the programme that takes someone from hired to productive. Its output is measured as ramp time, and ramp time is one of the few sales metrics that has proved stubbornly resistant to improvement — largely because the component that most determines it is the component that scales worst.
Sales onboarding is the structured programme that brings a new sales hire to productivity, typically covering product knowledge, ideal customer profile, systems, process and conversation practice. Ramp time is constrained mainly by the practice component, because one-to-one conversation coaching consumes one trainer-hour per rep-hour.
What a programme covers
Most onboarding splits into two categories with very different scaling behaviour. Broadcast components — product training, ICP context, systems, process, compliance — cost one trainer roughly the same whether the cohort is three people or thirty. One-to-one components — conversation practice, roleplay, individual coaching — cost one trainer-hour per rep-hour and therefore scale linearly with cohort size.
Since the one-to-one component is also the one that determines whether the rep can actually do the job, this is the structural reason ramp time correlates with trainer headcount rather than with programme quality.
Why ramp stalls
When a cohort grows, the practice component gets compressed because it is the only one that can be. Reps finish onboarding having consumed the material and rehearsed the conversation two or three times, then make their first genuinely difficult call on a live prospect. The cost shows up a quarter later as slow pipeline and early attrition, by which point it is attributed to hiring quality.
What changes the arithmetic
Making practice capacity independent of trainer availability. When an entire cohort can run identical scored scenarios in parallel, the practice component stops being the one that gets rationed, and trainer hours redirect from delivering repetitions to reviewing the scorecards that flag a problem. Adding a readiness gate — a score threshold on a fixed scenario before go-live — converts the end of onboarding from a date into a decision.
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