New salesperson is five months in. Still no closures. Did I hire wrong?
You may be judging the salesperson before the sales cycle has had time to judge him.
Start with the sales cycle, not the salesperson
A new salesperson cannot close a deal faster than your sales cycle allows. If your average cycle is six months, that cycle starts from his first real opportunity — not from his joining date.
Most new hires spend their first six weeks learning the product, building a prospect list, understanding the market and meeting existing customers. That means his first real opportunities may only start around week seven.
Now lay out the timeline
A deal opened in week seven, with a six-month sales cycle, closes around month eight. At month five, you do not yet have the evidence to judge him.
Joins
Learning the product, the market and the existing customers.
First real opportunity
The first deal he finds himself. The sales cycle starts here.
You budgeted first revenue
The assumption in most annual hiring plans.
First deal actually closes
Week seven plus a six-month cycle.
At month five he is not behind. He is exactly where the arithmetic puts him
The cost nobody budgets
Every new salesperson carries roughly seven months of cost before the first meaningful order arrives. That includes salary, travel, training, manager time and incentives.
Multiply that by every salesperson you plan to hire this year. That is the real cost of adding sales capacity — and it is rarely reflected properly in the hiring plan.
The 20-minute check: how long it actually takes in your business
You can measure your real time-to-first-order using your last four sales hires.
Time to First Order
Write each hire's joining date
Use your last four sales hires, whether they stayed or not.
Write when they started generating their own opportunities
Not when they were handed accounts — when they found something themselves.
Write the date of their first meaningful order
Ignore business that was already sitting in the pipeline when they joined. That revenue belongs to whoever built it.
Count the months between joining and first order
Take the median, not the average. One fast hire who inherited a warm account, or one slow outlier, will distort an average.
The median is how long a salesperson actually takes to produce revenue in your business. Compare it with what you assumed in the annual plan.
what you budgeted
what your business runs at
Every hire needs four more months of salary and support before the revenue appears.
Two problems, not one
A wrong ramp assumption creates two separate problems. Your manpower budget is wrong, because every hire costs more months than you planned for. And you will start judging good salespeople as bad hires, because they look late against a timeline that was never realistic.
The second problem is the expensive one. Letting a good salesperson go at month five means paying for the full ramp and walking away just before the return — then starting the same seven months again with someone new.
You may not have hired wrong. You may have budgeted for a sales cycle you do not have
Related: 283% of target, then four hires and two empty quarters — when the problem really is the hire, and how to tell the difference.