When a new sales rep burns out and quits within their first year, it costs the company well over $100,000 – it’s a massive hit to the bottom line, and the worst part is that most of this financial damage comes from the ramp periods that weren’t set up right from the start.
These onboarding periods either pile unrealistic expectations onto new hires before they’re ready to take care of them, or they go too far in the opposite direction and don’t hold anyone accountable for any progress. In either case, the new reps never get the chance to build any momentum.
Let’s go over how to create the ramp quotas that work and set your new reps up for success!
How Ramp Periods Improve Your Revenue
When you bring on a new sales rep, they’re going to need a little time to learn the ropes before they can perform at their best. Every company operates differently, and your business has its own buyer personas for them to learn, product features they’ll need to know well and internal processes that are probably different from what they’ve seen before.
The learning curve for new sales reps is tough, and it takes a while before they start performing at the level you need. Every new hire on your entire team has to learn a whole lot about how your company operates on the inside, and at the same time, they need to build relationships with the right contacts across different departments. They need time to understand your sales cycle well from beginning to end, and new reps also have to get comfortable with the most common objections they’ll hear from prospects. Add it all up, and you’re usually looking at a few weeks or a few months before a new rep can work at full speed.
The numbers support this. Sales reps who go through a structured ramp period will generate around 23% more revenue in their first year compared to reps who get full quotas right from day one. A 23% gap piles up fast, and you’ll see the difference show up directly in your revenue.
Some sales leaders get nervous about ramp periods and worry that a lower quota might make new hires feel like they can slow down, or that it sends a signal that performance expectations aren’t as high as they should be. Well-structured ramp periods with milestone tracking can reduce these problems.
Milestone tracking is what makes a ramp period actually work – it holds everyone accountable at every stage along the way. New reps should have targets to hit every month as they work toward carrying a full quota. Most of these milestones will be activity-based in the beginning (like the discovery calls they finish or the demos they can schedule). After a few months, once your rep has built up some experience and confidence, you should move those milestones toward results instead of just activities.
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It’s a great way to measure how your new employee is actually performing, and it helps you find problems before they have a chance to turn into bigger issues. If a rep is starting to fall behind on their milestones, you’ll find it early enough to step in and help them get back on track. These milestones also give your new hire a roadmap that they can follow throughout their first few months on the job.
It’s a much better strategy than just throwing them into the role on day one and hoping that they’ll somehow figure everything out on their own.
How Most Companies Ramp Their Quotas
Most ramp-up plans work the same way, and the standard strategy is to start new hires at around 50% of their full quota for the first 3 months. That smaller number gives them enough breathing room to actually learn what you’re selling and get comfortable with how your entire sales process runs from the beginning to the end. Reps still need to perform during their ramp period, though. Even at 50%, you should see them closing deals and pulling their weight as part of the team.
Once you get past those first 3 months, months 4 through 6 move to 75%. At this point, your new hires should start to work more independently. The basics are already in place from the earlier training period, so they can build some momentum – and they do it without having the full weight of a quota on their shoulders just yet.
A new sales rep joins your entire team with an annual quota of $1 million. For their first 3 months on the job, they’re working toward $41,666 each month instead of the full amount from day one. When they get to months 4 through 6, their monthly target bumps to $62,500. When month 7 rolls around, they’re finally expected to hit the full $83,333 monthly quota.
This entire structure gives your new hires a legitimate path to actually develop the skills and the confidence they need to succeed. Every stage builds on the previous one and each one prepares them for whatever comes next. You might be tempted to accelerate through these stages and push for faster results when you need the revenue to start coming in soon. A rushed ramp process usually backfires mainly because your reps just don’t get enough time to build genuine confidence or work on their style.
Reps who are allowed to move through each stage at the right pace will perform much better down the line than those who get rushed through the program too fast.
Match Your Ramp to Sales Cycle
Your ramp length has to match up with your sales cycle. If your business takes about 6 months to close a deal from first contact through to a signed contract, then a 3-month ramp period just won’t work. What ends up happening is that your new reps get asked to hit quota before they’ve even had the chance to close their first deal, and nobody can succeed under those conditions.
When the timing gets misaligned on this, it creates problems for everyone involved. A new rep will spend their first couple of weeks just trying to get familiar with your product and learn how your sales process actually works. Month 2 comes along, and they finally start reaching out to prospects, and by month 3, management expects them to hit their full quota numbers. The issue with this timeline is that none of their deals have had nearly enough time to mature yet. They find themselves staring at a nearly empty pipeline right at the time when performance pressure is at its highest.
Software businesses run into this all of the time. When you’re selling expensive products that take time to review, sales cycles usually drag on for 6, 9 or 12 months because every deal has multiple stakeholders who need to sign off and a long evaluation period that everyone has to work through. A 12-month ramp period gives new sales reps the time to build up a healthy pipeline and actually watch some of their early conversations convert into real, closed deals. Transactional SaaS businesses work at a different pace. Customers in that space make buying decisions in a matter of weeks instead of months, and that means a 3-month ramp period works well to get new reps up to speed and see results.
Multiplying your average sales cycle by 1.5 gives you a great benchmark for the length of your ramp period. The extra time in there accounts for the learning curve that comes when a person starts a new role. Reps have to learn the product, build genuine relationships with prospects and get comfortable with the process before any of that effort turns into closed deals!
This also helps you avoid that frustration when new hires aren’t performing at the level you expected. They usually actually do have the talent and the work ethic to succeed. But the timeline that they’re operating on doesn’t match up with the way your sales cycle plays out.
Activities Matter More Than Revenue for New Reps
When you onboard a new sales rep, you want to help them build the right day-to-day work habits, and those habits are going to matter a whole lot more than the number of deals they manage to close in the first month or two. For at least the first 90 days, activity metrics are what you should be measuring – not closed revenue. Track the calls they’re making each day, the number of emails they send out, the demos they can get booked and what the total pipeline value looks like as they add in new opportunities. Early activity is what builds momentum, so these numbers give you a much better picture of whether your new rep is actually on the right track.
A new rep who makes the commitment to dial 50 calls each day during their first month is setting themselves up with the habit that’s going to pay off for years. All that repetition does something really valuable for them – it builds their confidence level up fast, and it teaches them which talking points work the best with prospects. They get enough conversations under their belt to polish up their pitch and learn how to handle pushback without the stress of needing every call to close a deal.
Activity metrics make it much easier for you to see which reps are actually ready for bigger targets. When a rep keeps hitting around 120% of their activity benchmarks, it’s usually a strong indicator that they can move out of the ramp period ahead of schedule. At that point, they’ve already proven that they can manage their time well and execute on the fundamentals.
Early activity metrics help you to tell which reps are actually doing the work versus which ones just haven’t cracked the code yet. A new rep might only close one or two deals in their first 90 days, and that’s totally normal. What matters more is if they’re booking meetings on a consistent basis and filling up their pipeline with qualified opportunities. Great activity numbers free you up to focus your coaching on how they can move deals forward instead of worrying about if they’re just spinning their wheels all day. Activity benchmarks give you something concrete to measure and a way to create some forward progress even before those bigger revenue numbers start to matter.
How Market Types Affect Your Sales Reps
Your new rep’s ramp time depends on what type of customers they’ll be working with. For reps selling into Fortune 500 accounts, plan on about 9 – 12 months before they’re fully productive. Deals at that level just take longer to move through the pipeline, and they have to build trust with a whole bunch of different stakeholders across massive organizations. SMB reps can usually get there in around 3 – 4 months instead. The sales cycle is much shorter, and it’s a whole lot easier to get face time with the person who actually makes the buying call.
The territory you give a new rep is as big a deal as which market segment they’re working in. When a rep takes over a territory that already has warm accounts and established connections, they’ll be ready to hit their numbers about 30% faster than a rep who has to build everything from the ground up. Those existing relationships create momentum from day one, and the brand new territories just can’t match that type of head start.
International markets are going to tack on at least a few more months to the timeline. Your reps will probably need an extra 2 – 3 months just to get a decent feel for the cultural differences that can change the way that deals actually move along in different parts of the world. Business relationships don’t work the same way from one country to another, and each market has its own buying patterns and expectations that will take your entire team some time to learn.
Two sales reps start on the same day and go through the exact same training program. One of them gets the big company accounts in a new territory, and the other one gets SMB deals in a territory with accounts already in place. Even if they have the same talent level and work ethic, the time it takes for each one to reach full productivity might differ by as much as 6 months or more. The market segment matters quite a bit when you’re setting quotas for your entire team, and the territory situation matters just as much.
Level Up Your Incentives and Rewards
A strong ramp program is an investment in your whole team’s future. It helps your reps build the habits that stick with them for years. Quick wins look great on paper for a month or two – they burn your reps out fast and send them packing by month six. A strong base gives new reps room to grow their skills, gain confidence and start building their pipeline in a way that lasts.
It’s pretty simple to start from here. Write down your ramp policy and make it official so every manager and every new hire you bring on knows what those first few months are going to look like. Then you’ll need to get your managers familiar with how to coach a rep who’s still ramping. A brand new rep needs a different strategy than a rep who’s been selling for you for two years.
You should watch how each group of new hires is performing over time. This lets you see what’s actually working in your ramp program and what might need a little fine-tuning. The data supports this, too – businesses that have a ramp program in place see about a 15% better retention with their reps and around a 19% higher quota attainment across their whole sales team. What we’re talking about here is more revenue and reps who stay long enough to turn into your best performers.
Level 6 helps businesses build incentive programs that actually move the needle on performance. We’ve built our entire company around one main idea – we want to give you the right tools so you can get more out of your sales team and keep your employees happy and motivated at the same time. We help our clients with branded debit cards, employee rewards and recognition programs and sales incentive programs that we can customize for your business and for what you’re going for. Every program we build fits your exact situation – not some one-size-fits-all template that barely works for anyone.
Contact us to see how this all works in action, and we’ll set up a free demo to talk about how other high-performance businesses are working with our platform to improve their ROI and push their sales numbers up.
Claudine is the Chief Relationship Officer at Level 6. She holds a master’s degree in industrial/organizational psychology. Her experience includes working as a certified conflict mediator for the United States Postal Service, a human performance analyst for Accenture, an Academic Dean, and a College Director. She is currently an adjunct Professor of Psychology at Southern New Hampshire University. With over 20 years of experience, she joined Level 6 to guide clients seeking effective ways to change behavior and, ultimately, their bottom line.
