You hired someone good. They looked great on paper. They interviewed well.
Three months later they are gone.
So you ask yourself how long to train a sales rep before they should be pulling their weight. And under that question is a quieter one. Did I hire the wrong person again?
Probably not. The hire was fine. The runway was not.
The Trap: Treating Sales Like an Entry Level Job
Here is the mistake I see in almost every location I walk into.
Leaders post the job as a sales associate, a sales consultant, a sales specialist, whatever you call it. In their head, it is an entry level role. Simple. Anybody can do it.
Then they turn around and expect that same person to close a complex deal in week two.
Sales is not entry level. It is a craft. It takes mastery. I have worked projects that closed at five thousand dollars and I have worked projects that closed at over one hundred thousand dollars. The skill it takes to handle those is not the same skill. It is not close.
I have known wireless sellers, appliance sellers, furniture sellers, and AV sellers who make a healthy six figure income. Not B2B. Consumer level. That is a profession. When you treat it like a starter job, you train it like a starter job, and then you wonder why nobody stays.
The Real Timeline
Let me give you numbers instead of feelings.
Day 45 to day 90. A new rep should be sitting at about 60 to 80 percent proficient. That is the window. If they hit it, you are in good shape.
Around one year. Now you are looking at 80 to 90 percent. Why so long? Because there are situations they will not run into for months. A weird install. An angry customer with a problem nobody wrote an SOP for. A deal shaped a little different than the last twelve.
Day 30 to day 45, if they have industry background. If somebody comes from wireless, AV, appliance, or electronics, I will bet on them hitting 70 to 80 percent fast. But even then, expect bumps. Your organization is still brand new to them.
And do not chase 100 percent. Nobody is 100 percent. There will always be a situation that needs a second set of hands. But once your people cross 80 percent competency, it will blow your mind what your location can do.
The Part Everybody Skips
Here is what usually breaks the good hires.
It is not the selling. People rarely get stuck on the selling part. They get stuck because they do not know your processes. Your procedures. Your SOPs. The backend stuff nobody walked them through.
That is where the great hire falls flat on their face. Especially when they came from the same industry, because they assume it works the way it worked at their last place. It does not.
So they get hung up. They lose the deal. You see the lost deal and you think you hired wrong.
Then most of them leave in the first 30 days. Not because of Gen Z. Not because of ghosting. Because they got handed a set of expectations, then got told to figure it out, and there was another job down the street for about the same money with half the headache.
You did not lose them to the market. You lost them to the runway.
What Happens When You Actually Coach
I took over a location in one of my markets. Wireless. Good store, by the way. Not a problem store.
They were averaging three to four hundred units a month. Holiday season would push them to five or seven hundred. Everybody in the company believed that was the ceiling for that building.
I paid attention for a while and found the thing. There was no real leadership focused on training and helping them aim their effort.
I told the team straight up that my goal was for them to make the most money with the least amount of work. That broke their brains a little. A leader wants me to work less?
Yes. Because when you get truly proficient, the work stops feeling like work. It becomes second nature. You are flowing in it.
About six months later, that same location was averaging six to seven hundred units a month. Almost double. Not for one hot month. Month over month, outside of Q4.
Same building. Same people. Different level of coaching.
Motivation Comes Second, Not First
One more thing, because it changes how you spend your energy.
Motivation does not come before production. It comes after it.
When you focus on pumping people up, they feel good for a minute, but nothing changed. They are not seeing results because you did not give them anything that creates results.
When you focus on training and development, it feels slow at first. They do not love it. Then something works. Then it works again. Then they start thinking, let me keep doing this, because it is easier and I am making more from it.
That is when motivation shows up.
It is the gym. You do not do one workout and walk out shredded. You keep showing up before you see anything, and then one day you see it.
Hiring somebody is not the finish line. It is the starting line. The work begins the day they walk in.
Start With Fifteen Minutes
You do not have to build a whole training program this week. You just need one repeatable habit that develops the people you already have.
That is what the free 15-Minute Coaching Framework is for. One short conversation per rep, structured so they do most of the talking and leave with something to do.