How Long Until a New Salesperson Is Productive?
Don't take a benchmark. Calculate it from your own numbers.
One full sales cycle, plus a quarter.
The cycle is however long your median deal actually takes from first contact to PO. Pull it, don't estimate it. The number most teams carry in their head came from a good quarter some time ago.
The extra quarter is for the product. In engineered goods that isn't a week of onboarding. It's learning which applications you're genuinely better at, which ones you should walk away from, and enough failure-mode detail to hold a conversation with an engineer who has been solving this problem for fifteen years.
If your median cycle is nine months, a seller hired in January starts contributing around Christmas.
Three things follow from that.
The cost isn't the salary. It's the salary plus a year of a territory not being worked by someone effective. That's the number to compare against the alternatives.
Their first-year quota is a fiction if it assumes production before the ramp completes. Set it against pipeline created rather than revenue closed, or you'll be managing someone out at month nine for a shortfall that was baked into the hire.
And the hiring decision belongs to the plan two years out, not the gap in this one. A hire made to fix a bad quarter arrives after the quarter that follows it.
Some of it compresses. The cycle doesn't, because that clock belongs to the customer. The product quarter does.
Give them the last fifty won and lost deals with the reasons attached. Give them the applications you walk away from and why you walk away. Put them in front of the application engineers in week one rather than month four.
The obvious shortcut is hiring from a competitor. It helps less than it looks. They still face your full sales cycle, and the relationships only pay off where their old accounts buy what you make.
Whatever the right answer is, the calendar has already decided part of it.
Originally posted on LinkedIn, 18 September 2026. Read the discussion on LinkedIn
Part of Chasing Flow, a newsletter on how industrial technology companies get to revenue, every other Tuesday.