The slow leak: a laptop, a CRM login, and "shadow the top rep for a week" - then a chronic drag of slow ramps and early turnover.
You hire a rep, hand them a laptop and a product brochure, tell them to shadow someone for a week, and put them on the phone. Six months later they’re still not producing - or they quit at month four feeling lost and unsupported. Either way you’ve burned six figures and you’re starting over. It doesn’t show up as one bad quarter. It shows up as a permanent gap between what your team should produce and what it does.
Leadership will say "three to six months" because it sounds reasonable. Instead, look at when each recent hire closed their first deal, hit 50% of quota, and hit full quota. The real number is almost always longer - SaaS ramp has ballooned to 5.7 months, up 32% since 2020. Source: SalesSo. Pair ramp with tenure: ramp in five months, stay 2.6 years, and you get roughly two years of full productivity per hire. Everything outside that window is cost. Then ask recent hires what their onboarding was like; "I just shadowed someone for a week" seals it.
Total cost to ramp a rep is about three times base salary - recruiting, training, lost productivity, management time. For a $75K base, that’s $225K before they produce a dollar. The ongoing drag is worse: a six-month ramp loses $75K-$100K in production. Hire two a year and you’re carrying $150K-$200K in annual ramp cost on top of salaries. Nobody budgets for this.
Replace "figure it out" with a sequenced program built on the documented process from Leak II - so a new hire ramps in sixty days, not five months.
Document the first 30 days of your current onboarding - not what you wish it was, what it actually is. Write down every resource, training, and touchpoint a new hire gets in their first month. If the list fits on a Post-it note, you’ve found Leak VII - and that list, with its gaps, is the starting point for the blueprint.
SYSTEMIC REVENUE