Listen hard and move early. Get what success looks like at thirty, sixty and ninety days in writing before you start, then learn the business before you commit to anything. The first ninety days in a building products sales role is where you build the evidence that every later conversation rests on.
What follows is how to run that, and what to sort out in the first week so the rest of it works.
What should you agree with your manager first?
What success looks like at 30, 60 and 90 days, in writing, before you start doing anything.
Ask for it directly and early. What does good look like at each of those points, what will you be measured on, and who decides. If your manager has not written it down, asking is what makes them, and that is worth doing for both of you.
Do it in week one. Expectations harden quietly. If your manager thinks you should have revenue at 90 days and the role cannot produce revenue at 90 days, you want that surfaced while there is still time for either of you to change what you are expecting.
Agree short structured review points at 30, 60 and just before 90 days so the expectations are explicit.
What should you learn before you try to sell?
Learn the business first, then the product and the area.
Get across how the business actually works before you learn the range. Spend time with operations, customer service, the warehouse, estimating and marketing if you can get it. Ask how an order moves, where it gets stuck and who fixes it. It shows you what you can honestly promise a customer, who to ask and how an order moves.
Then the product. Do not wait to be trained. Ask marketing for what you need, sit in on other people's presentations, get out with someone experienced before you go out alone. The test at the end of month one is whether you could present this properly to a real audience without a safety net.
Then the area. Work out what you have actually inherited, account by account, before you take anyone's description of it as read.
How do you check what you have inherited?
Build a baseline early, and write it down.
Go through the accounts and the pipeline and record what is actually there: which accounts are live and which have gone quiet, what is in the pipeline, what stage each project is at, who the decision-maker is, when it was last touched and what the next action is. Note anything resting only on your predecessor's relationship, because that is the weakest part of what you have been handed.
Two reasons to document it. It is the fastest way to learn the area properly, and it gives you a dated starting point. A written baseline gives you a dated record if the area is materially different from the brief.
Raise what you find early, calmly and with the evidence attached.
What does the first 90 days look like for your route?
The plan depends on the route, because specification and BDM seats run on different clocks.
The table below is the template I use with candidates. The 30, 60 and 90-day intervals are planning points I have chosen, not an industry measure.
| Specification | BDM | |
|---|---|---|
| First month | Product and system depth, build and segment a practice list, prepare presentation material | Product confident, area mapped, key accounts and contacts identified, out on the road |
| Month two | First practices seen, projects identified early in the design process, present at least once | Call cycle running, live opportunities logged, quoting rhythm, first orders or first pricing conversations |
| Month three | A pipeline you can describe project by project, with stage and decision-maker | Coverage established, a qualified pipeline with real stages and dates, growth accounts named |
| What nobody should expect | Closed revenue. What you specify now decides much later | Full run rate, though movement should be visible. Little closed revenue beyond whatever was already at tender |
If you are in a specification seat, show this table to a manager who has not run a specification seat before, so the expected work and evidence are explicit.
What should you not promise while you are still learning?
Anything technical you cannot personally stand behind.
This is the one that is hardest to undo. While you are learning, you will be asked about performance, compliance, warranty and application suitability, and the temptation is to answer because you want to look capable.
The right answer is that you will check and come back with it. In a technical product that is the professional response. Confident advice that turns out to be wrong is hard to come back from with the customer who relied on it.
Same with lead times, pricing latitude and anything operational. Find out what you can actually commit to before you commit to it. That is exactly what the time with operations and customer service was for.
How do you handle it if the role is not what you were sold?
Raise it early, in writing, against what you agreed in week one.
If the area, the support or the role is materially different from the brief, put it to your manager plainly and with your baseline attached. If it is contractual, remuneration or safety, get advice from someone qualified. If you came through a recruiter, tell them early while the issue can still be addressed. If the role itself is the problem, working out whether to move becomes the live question, and the readiness check is a quick way to test whether you are.
Nobody can promise a role gets fixed. Raising it early with evidence gives the business a clear issue to answer, and it keeps the conversation on a gap you can name and point at.
How long until you actually feel on top of it?
Expect it to take longer than you want.
I plan on six months to a year for someone to properly get into the groove, and I set that expectation on every role I work on. It varies by route. A trade-facing seat comes good faster because you can be out and covering ground almost immediately. A specification seat takes longer, because the work compounds and the result arrives late. That is the standard I plan to, not a market measurement.
And the part nobody enjoys hearing. Ask constantly, chase your own answers, and accept that effort is what you control while experience is the thing that compounds. It is not meant to be easy. I wish more businesses tried to make ramp easier than they do, so how you approach it yourself matters.
Own the fact that you are new. Ask more questions than feels comfortable. And try to enjoy it, because the first 90 days of a good role are one of the few times you are allowed to be curious about everything.
If what you are being asked for does not look realistic for the route, ask me for a read on it. What a good employer should be doing for you over the same 90 days is on the paired page.