Time: Ramping New Reps Measure and pay attention to the reality (rather than your unrealistic expectations) of how long your reps take to ramp up their results. This amount of time can and will vary widely from company to company, depending on your lead flow, the people you hire, how well you train them, and whether they’re picking up an established territory or starting a brand new one. My advice: Put new reps through some kind of training program that has them working in other parts of your company first, talking to customers, before they go on active sale duty. This will make them much more effective salespeople and actually ramp them faster. Slow down to speed up! Time: Prospecting and Sales Cycle Lengths How long does it take for a prospector to generate a qualified opportunity? How long does it take for those opportunities to close? Are small ones faster than large ones? What are some imperfect but useful rules of thumb for you? Prospecting cycle length: Measure the time between a) when the prospect first responds to a campaign to b) when a quality opportunity is created or qualified (this means the quotacarrying Account Executive has re-qualified and accepted the opportunity that the prospector passed over). Incidentally, my rule of thumb is that it takes 2-4 weeks, on average, to qualify a new opportunity from an initial response. Sales cycle length: I like to measure the time from a) when the opportunity was created or qualified to b) when it closed. If you have trouble measuring this, just sit down with your reps and have a 15 minute conversation to talk about the last 10 deals that closed, to get a rough ballpark of the length. Example: To use realistic numbers, let’s assume: