Ramp-Up Strategies That Launch Top Producers and Protect Your Momentum
Why Most New Hires Fail Before They Even Start
Many sales leaders believe that once the offer letter is signed, the hard part is over. You plug them into a perfunctory onboarding routine that you may or may not manage, then give them a computer, territory, and quota, followed by a hearty, “go get’em, tiger!”
The truth is, even the right hire can fail if you leave their early success up to chance. And, when you make the wrong hire, a weak onboarding process lets them hide in plain sight, draining critical resources, including money, opportunity, and, most importantly, time.
The Risk of Letting Onboarding Become an Afterthought
Consider the numbers:
- 71% of companies take six months or more to fully onboard a salesperson.
- Of that, more than 30% take nine months or longer.
- In that time, 10–25% of new hires will quit
If you’ve followed Parts One and Two of this series, you’ve invested time and effort to evaluate your team with the WINS Selling Style Profile™, defined what a top performer looks like, and built a disciplined hiring process.
Without a strong onboarding plan, that work will ultimately collapse. Every poorly designed and executed onboarding plan quietly steals months of revenue momentum you and your rep can never get back.
Turning Onboarding Into a Ramp-Up Strategy
Onboarding is not orientation. It’s the final stage of the hiring process, where you either confirm you’ve made the right choice or catch a mistake early enough to correct it.
Onboarding should be an opportunity for top performers to ramp-up and accelerate their earnings and success. It is a time to ensure their rank on your team and accelerate their over-quota performance.
That means your ramp-up strategy needs to:
- Align individual, team, and company goals.
- Define the pipeline, process, activities, and activity levels needed to achieve them.
- Teach the real problem you solve (your buyer’s WIN), not your product-service pitch.
- Track measurable progress in the first 4–6 weeks (candidate validation), the next 6–8 weeks (pipeline acceleration), and the next 8–12 weeks (revenue generation).
- Use accountability and coaching to make new hires more productive, not just busier.
How a Strong Ramp-Up Strategy Protects Your Team and Your Culture
When you treat ramp-up as a continuation of your hiring process, three things happen:
- Top performers accelerate - They hit their stride sooner, bringing in revenue faster.
- Pretenders are exposed early - Before they drain your resources or damage your reputation and culture.
- Your culture strengthens - Because everyone knows the standard is real, measurable, and fair.
This is how teams retain 93% of their top performers year over year, even in high-turnover industries and poor economies, and why those teams can scale with confidence.
Through the focus of James and his team, we were able to hire 8 new Account Executives, train them, and see productivity in record time… most were producing and hitting quotas after the second month!” — Jason Chadwick, Director of Enterprise Sales
This is the power of ramp-up built for acceleration. Your new hires hit stride fast, reach cashflow breakeven, and fuel revenue growth from the start.
Closing the Loop Between Hiring and Ramp-Up Success
By integrating the WINS Selling Style Profile™ into both your pre-hire screening and your post-hire ramp-up, you create a closed loop:
- Only candidates with the ability to be future top performers make it through the door.
- Every new hire proves, in real time, whether they can deliver on that potential.
- You lead your team with your eyes wide open and your confidence high.,
You build and refine a system that eliminates guesswork and turns hiring from a gamble into a high-confidence investment.
Free Trial: Discover Who Has What It Takes to Perform
See for yourself how the WINS Selling Style Profile™ can power both your hiring and onboarding success. Try it free and get a 30-minute review of your results with me.
Walk away knowing exactly who on your team has untapped potential, what your next top producer should look like, and how to get them performing at full speed, faster.
Schedule a strategy session to receive your FREE trial today.
Follow all three steps: Evaluate your current team (Part One), Build a disciplined hiring process (Part Two), and Implement a high-accountability ramp-up strategy (Part Three), and you’ll escape the hiring trap and stack your team with top performers across all of your key markets.
Continued success,
