$150K OTE.
$15K in recruiter fees.
$5K on tools, tech, swag.
And they don’t fully ramp for 6 months. Then churn in month 14 lol.
That means you spent 10 - 12 months paying CAC for a rep that gave you 2 quarters of yield.
Congrats - you just lit 30% of your customer acquisition budget on fire! 🕺
Let’s break down the math a tiny bit:
- Avg ramp time = 5-6 months.
- Avg tenure (esp. post-COVID) = 14-18 months.
- Which means ~40% of their employment is ramp.
- And if they never become top performers, you never recover the CAC.
This is more of a design issue than a rep issue.
Why? Because most onboarding programs are still built like it’s 2015.
Here are a few ideas of what to do differently:
1. Teach outcomes, not org charts.
Week 1 shouldn’t be 42 slide decks and a parade of “meet the team.” You want reps to ship value fast.
That means:
- Role-based onboarding tracks.
- Call listening and deal review by Day 3.
- One real buyer-facing output by end of Week 2.
Most onboarding doesn’t fail from lack of content. It fails from lack of intent.
2. Measure progression like pipeline.
You don’t manage deals by feels. Stop managing rep ramp that way.
Track:
- Time to first meeting booked.
- Time to first qualified op.
- Time to first closed deal.
- % of milestone behaviors completed by Week 4 / Week 8.
If you can’t see it, you can’t coach it. And if you’re not coaching it, you’re just hoping.
3. Don’t wait until Month 6 to inspect performance.
Ramp is not a free pass. It’s a pattern detector.
By Week 3, you should know:
- Are they consistent in activity?
- Are they asking layered discovery questions?
- Do they understand the buyer, or just the product?
Onboarding is not “set it and forget it.” It’s “inspect and iterate weekly.”
4. Align managers lest nothing sticks.
If enablement teaches one thing and managers coach another, reps will default to survival.
You want:
- Managers running onboarding check-ins every week.
- Deal reviews tied directly to onboarding concepts.
- A shared view of “what good looks like” across the first 90 days.
Onboarding doesn’t end with a checklist. It ends when reps think like your buyer and execute like your top 30%.
tl;dr = most onboarding isn’t too light.
It’s too slow, too generic, and too detached from actual revenue motions.
Fix that, or keep watching CAC go up while rep yield stays flat.
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