Ramp time is the gap between a rep’s start date and the point they’re carrying a full, consistently-met quota. It’s the clearest single read on how well your onboarding, training, and enablement actually work — and it’s expensive, because every week of ramp is a week of salary against partial production.
A common way to estimate it: take your average sales cycle length and add the length of your training period. A 90-day cycle plus 30 days of onboarding implies roughly a four-month ramp before a new rep should be expected to hit full numbers.
Ramp is where gamification earns its keep early. New reps can’t win a revenue leaderboard for months, but they can win on the leading-indicator behaviors that ramp is built from — activity, qualified meetings, pipeline created — which keeps them motivated and visible while the deals are still maturing. Scoring those behaviors instead of outcomes is the same principle behind why your busiest rep isn’t your best rep.