Last updated: May 2026
Month four. The Sales Director's office.
The pipeline is empty. The rep you hired in February has been to all the right meetings, said all the right things, and come back with nothing closed. The Sales Director is already drafting the email in their head. "We need to cut our losses."
Maybe. But before you fire the rep, look at what they walked into. The vague induction. The buddy that got pulled into a project in week two. The product training that was a PowerPoint deck. The territory plan that didn't exist. The previous rep who left without a handover and took the relationships with them.
Most building products reps who fail in their first year don't fail because they're not capable. They fail because the runway was never built. This is the 90-day cliff. And in this sector, it's almost always self-inflicted.
How long does a new building products sales rep actually take to ramp?
Twelve to eighteen months. Not ninety days. Not six months. Twelve to eighteen.
That's the gap between hiring a sales rep and seeing them carry a number independently. I've placed enough BDMs and Spec Managers across building products to know the curve, and the curve doesn't bend just because the company wants it to. If you signed up for a six-month payback, you're working from a generalist B2B SaaS playbook. This isn't that.
Why is the cliff worse in building products than in other sales sectors?
Because the product, the standards, the channels, and the relationships all take time to learn, and most companies treat onboarding like a one-week induction.
A new building products rep needs to absorb four things at once. Most companies plan for one.
The product portfolio is technical. Reps need application knowledge, not feature memorisation. A waterproofing BDM needs to know where AS 3740 stops and AS 4654 starts. A facade rep needs to talk Section J and AS 5113 with a builder who's about to substitute. A lighting rep needs to understand DALI-2 controls before they walk into an A&D meeting.
The market splits two ways. Specifier channel and contractor channel are different sales motions entirely. A&D firms move on relationships and aesthetic credibility. Builders move on price and freight reliability. A new rep needs both maps before they're useful.
The applicator network can save or sink the spec. In sectors like waterproofing, cladding, and coatings, who's certified, who's reliable, and who'll quietly substitute on site is critical knowledge. New reps don't know any of it.
The relationships compound over years. Specifiers don't take meetings with strangers. They take meetings with the rep their old rep handed them off to. If the previous person left and the relationship died with them, your new rep is starting from zero.
You can't compress this to ninety days. You can build a runway that gets them ramped by month twelve instead of month twenty. That's the lever. Ramp-time gap is one half of the replacement-cost equation. The other half - counter-offer maths, Robert Half data, and what actually retains the rep before they resign - is covered here: why your best salesperson is the most undervalued asset on your headcount.
Where does the 90-day cliff show up first?
Different sectors fail in different ways, but the pattern is identical. Inadequate runway in months one to three causes empty pipelines in month four. Five quick reads:
Chemicals and waterproofing. Engineers Australia identifies water leaks as the leading cause of defects in Australian apartments and commercial buildings, and notes they account for around half of insurance claims by volume and value. Research commissioned by the NSW Building Commissioner and Strata Community Association NSW found that in strata buildings with serious defects, waterproofing defects were present in 42 per cent of cases, with fire-safety system defects in 24 per cent. So the rep walking into a chemicals BDM role is selling technical judgement under defect risk, not features. New reps with paint backgrounds get hired into specialty waterproofing or sealants and never get walked through the chemistry, the applicators, or the project specs. Six months later they're guessing on AS 3740 versus AS 4654 questions and losing specs they should have defended. The reviews I read in this sector consistently describe the same pattern. Minimal training, no direction from management, freedom to chase business they were never given the tools to win.
Civil infrastructure. A review of a front counter role at a major Australian civil supplier branch summarised the issue in five words. "Poor Training, Poor Management, Inappropriate Culture." Civil is the sector with the longest sales cycles and the most complex stakeholder maps. Government tenders, council specifications, contractor relationships, drainage standards, project pipeline tracking. Infrastructure Australia's 2021 Workforce and Skills Supply report projected a peak public infrastructure labour shortfall of around 93,000 workers in early 2023, equivalent to a 48 per cent gap between supply and demand. Plenty of that demand is still flowing through the pipeline. A new BDM in this market needs to be wired into the contractor and procurement conversation early, because in my placement experience the work in this sector rarely comes through inbound RFQs. Contractors and authorities tend to know which suppliers they trust well before a tender is drafted. Which means a civil rep who hits month four still waiting for tenders to land has been onboarded onto the wrong job. They should have been building pre-tender relationships from week three. A rep without proper backing in civil infrastructure won't survive the gap between hiring and first revenue.
Building envelope. Cladding and facade reps need to be conversant on combustibility, the energy-efficiency provisions in NCC 2022 Section J (including the J4D series for facades and building sealing), AS 5113 fire compliance, and applicator credentials. Without that, they walk into a builder meeting and get exposed inside ten minutes. A wrong call on combustibility now carries individual accountability under current Australian compliance rules, not just commercial fallout. Reps in building envelope need an onboarding period that builds standards literacy first. Charisma without DtS understanding is a liability, not an asset.
Lighting. Three different sales motions inside one role. A specifier-facing motion (A&D, lighting designers, electrical engineers), a contractor-facing motion (electrical wholesalers, project electricians), and an end-user motion (commercial property, multi-res developers). Add DALI-2 and addressable controls upskilling on top. New reps in lighting need months, not weeks, to get fluent.
Interiors and A&D. Specifier relationships in interiors compound over years. A new rep with no warm intro book is starting from absolute zero, and in my placement experience Brisbane and Sydney specifier hiring has been the tightest it's been in years. Strong candidates field offers within days. Onboarding here is mostly about engineered exposure. Ride-alongs, joint meetings, library visits, samples through the door. Companies that throw a new specifier rep into the patch with a CRM password and no warm handover are doing the equivalent of starting from scratch and calling it experience.
In every one of these sectors, the same pattern. Month four arrives, the pipeline is empty, the hiring manager loses faith, and the rep gets blamed for an onboarding failure they had no power to fix.
What does a real 30-60-90 day plan look like in building products?
It looks like a runway, not a probation. Three milestones, each one a dependency for the next.
Days 0 to 30. Product fluency and team integration. The rep should be deep into the technical files. Reading product specs. Sitting with the technical team. Visiting the warehouse. Meeting the customer service team who answer the phones. Mapping the territory. Reading the last 12 months of CRM activity for the patch they've inherited. Joining ride-alongs with whichever rep is performing best in the team. Not selling. Absorbing.
Days 31 to 60. Standards literacy and channel exposure. Now the technical work starts. Australian Standards relevant to the product. NCC sections that govern application. Compliance and certification details. By the end of this block, the rep should be able to walk into a specifier meeting and not embarrass themselves. They should also have visited every applicator in their patch, met two or three key distributors, and sat in on their first three or four specifier meetings as the second person, not the lead.
Days 61 to 90. Independent meetings and pipeline formation. The rep starts running their own meetings. Specifier introductions. Builder check-ins. CRM hygiene tightens. They should have a working list of fifteen to twenty live opportunities by day ninety. Not closed deals. Opportunities. Real ones. With names, project codes, and next actions.
If a rep hits day ninety and doesn't have a documented opportunity list, you don't have a rep problem. You have an onboarding problem. The work to identify those opportunities was supposed to start in week two.
What should the rep be measured on at month four?
Pipeline build, not closed revenue. This is the call that catches most hiring managers out.
A building products rep who's properly onboarded will start closing in month six to nine, depending on sector. Civil sometimes longer. The metric that predicts whether they're on track at month four is pipeline quality. Number of active specifier conversations. Number of projects in pipeline with named decision makers. CRM activity that shows actual specifier and applicator engagement.
If you're judging revenue at month four, you're going to fire reps who would have been your best performers by month nine. I've watched it happen more than once. The cost of that wrong call is brutal.
Onboarding-stage churn is the cliff this post is about; the later-stage version, where reps clear 18 months and then leave at parity pay, is a different animal and I covered it in why long-tenure A&D reps leave.
What questions should candidates ask about onboarding before accepting an offer?
This is the part most candidates skip. They take the offer, walk into a vacuum, and end up wearing the failure six months later.
The good candidates I'm placing now ask about onboarding as part of the offer conversation, not after they've signed. It's not aggressive. It's diligent. And it screens out the worst hiring environments before anyone wastes time.
Five questions every building products candidate should ask their hiring manager before signing:
- Who is responsible for onboarding me, and how much of their time is allocated to it?
- Do you have a documented 30-60-90 day plan I can see, or are we writing it on the fly?
- Can I ride-along with your current top performer for the first two weeks?
- What's the success metric you'll measure me on at month six, not month three?
- What happened to the previous rep on this patch?
The answers tell you everything. If onboarding is undefined, the buddy is unallocated, and the success metric is vague, the role is a coin flip. Worth flagging before you sign rather than after.
What does good onboarding look like for a hiring manager building this from scratch?
If you're a Sales Director or GM reading this and thinking "we don't have any of this", here's the practical checklist.
Document the 30-60-90 plan before the rep starts. Not at the end of week one. Before they walk through the door.
Allocate a buddy or mentor. Not a manager. Someone who's actually doing the job, has time, and gets a small bonus tied to onboarding success.
Build standards literacy into month one and two. Not in the LMS. In the field, with real product, on real sites.
Get the rep in front of specifiers and applicators before week six. Not as the lead, as the apprentice.
Schedule weekly one-on-ones for the first 90 days. Same day, same time, non-negotiable. The rep needs the contact and the manager needs the early warning signal when something's off.
Review pipeline at month four. Not revenue. Pipeline. Quality and quantity. Coach the gaps.
Run a formal onboarding review at month six. Honest conversation. What's working, what isn't, what they need.
If you're not doing this, you're hiring blind. And the spec leakage and lost revenue you'll attribute to "rep performance" was actually onboarding underinvestment.
Where does this leave you if you've already hired and the cliff is here?
Three options.
Option one. Restart the runway. Diagnose what was missed in the first 90 days, build the plan you should have built, and run it from where you are. Add three months to your patience clock. Honest reset.
Option two. Bring in a fractional onboarding lead for sixty days. Sometimes you don't have the internal time, and bringing in someone whose only job is to ramp the rep is the cheaper move. I've seen this work cleanly in SME environments where the GM is wearing four hats.
Option three. Accept the loss and rebuild. Sometimes the rep was wrong. Most times the runway was. Be honest about which it is before you make the call.
The real cost of a wrong call here is significant. Use the cost of a bad sales hire calculator before you decide. The numbers usually tell the truth that the post-mortem won't.
The honest read
Most building products onboarding failures aren't the rep. They're the company. The good news is that this is fixable. A documented 30-60-90 plan. A real buddy with allocated time. Standards literacy in field rather than LMS. Weekly one-on-ones. Patience until month six instead of month four. That's it. It's not complicated. It's just disciplined.
The companies that get this right have a different problem. They keep their reps. The reps stop leaving at month nine because they actually learned the patch. The pipelines compound year on year because the relationships were built properly. The hiring managers spend less time managing turnover and more time managing growth. None of that happens by accident. It happens because someone sat down before the rep started and built the runway.
If you're hiring in this sector and you want a 90-day onboarding template that lays out exactly what to put in front of a new rep on day one, I'm building one. While that goes through final review, the cost of a bad sales hire calculator gives you the financial framing for why the onboarding investment is the cheapest call you'll make.
If you're a Sales Director or GM and you read this and recognised a few too many of your own habits, that's the point. The fix is straightforward. The hard bit is admitting where you started.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a new building products sales rep take to ramp up?
Twelve to eighteen months for full independent revenue contribution in most building products sectors. Civil infrastructure can stretch to twenty-four months due to longer project cycles. The first ninety days should produce pipeline build, not closed deals.
Who should own onboarding a new BDM in their first 90 days at a building products company?
A documented buddy or mentor allocated specific time, plus the hiring manager owning the milestone reviews at day 30, 60, 90, and the formal review at month six. If onboarding is "everyone's job", it ends up nobody's. Ownership without time allocation isn't ownership.
What's the most common reason building products sales reps fail in the first year?
Inadequate runway in months one to three. Reps walk into vague onboarding, no documented plan, no buddy, and no standards training. By month four the pipeline is empty and the rep gets blamed for a setup failure they had no power to fix.
Should I judge a new BDM on revenue at month four?
No. Pipeline quality and quantity is the right metric at month four. Active specifier conversations, named project pipeline, applicator relationships built. Revenue should start landing month six to nine.
What should candidates ask hiring managers about onboarding before accepting?
Five questions. Who owns onboarding. Is there a documented 30-60-90 plan. Can they ride-along with the top performer. What's the month six success metric. What happened to the previous rep on the patch. The answers tell the truth the job description won't.
How do I onboard a sales rep when the previous person left no documentation?
Spend week one rebuilding the territory map from CRM activity, customer conversations, and the warehouse team's memory. Then build forward. The first 30 days for a rep on an undocumented patch is mostly intelligence gathering, not selling.
Related reading: the 90-day cliff lands differently on Spec Managers and BDMs.
For why civil sales ramps run 18 to 24 months rather than 90 days, see the civil sales recruitment guide.