Onboarding a building products sales rep starts before they arrive, and the first thing to teach is the business, not the product. Have the car, the laptop, the system access and the customer list sorted for day one. A rep who spends week one chasing equipment learns that the company is disorganised, and that lesson sticks.
Start with readiness. As an illustration, take a start that goes wrong. The person arrives, the laptop is not set up, the car has not been sorted, nobody has decided who they sit with, and the first three days go on admin that should have been done a fortnight earlier. That is a bad start you cannot get back, and it is entirely within your control.
What follows is the plan I would want a client to have before a new rep starts.
What should be ready before day one?
Have every item below ready before the person arrives.
| Category | What needs to be done |
|---|---|
| Paperwork | Contract signed and returned, tax and super forms issued and completed, emergency contact and any licence or ticket copies held |
| Vehicle | Car ordered or allowance confirmed in writing, fuel card issued, tolls account set up, insurance and driver declaration done. If the car will not arrive in time, decide the interim arrangement now |
| Technology | Laptop and phone built and tested, email live, CRM licence assigned with the right permissions, quoting and pricing system access, shared drives, VPN, expense platform |
| Uniform and kit | Uniform ordered in the right size, PPE, business cards, sample kit or sample bag, product literature, branded collateral |
| Access | Building and site access, any inductions required to visit customer sites, parking |
| The plan itself | Who owns their first week, who they sit with, the department rotation booked in diaries, first-month customer list agreed |
| Named contacts | Who they ask about product, who they ask about pricing, who they escalate a technical question to, and who they call when something goes wrong on a site |
That last row matters more than it looks. Name the product, pricing, technical and site contacts so the rep knows where each question goes.
What should week one actually teach?
Use week one to teach the business across each department, with no sales target attached.
This is the part of an onboarding programme I push clients hardest on. Put the new person with operations, with customer service, with the warehouse, with estimating, with marketing, with finance. Let them see how an order actually moves, where it gets stuck, who fixes it and what everyone else is dealing with. This week is for learning how the place works.
It shows them what they can promise, who to ask and how an order moves.
It also tells you something. Watch who asks the warehouse manager real questions in week one, and who is just waiting for the rotation to be over.
What does the first month look like?
Product understanding, and getting them to the point where they can present it confidently.
Month one is about the range, the applications, where it wins and where it does not. That means more than a folder. They should be actively requesting what they need from marketing, sitting in on other people's presentations, and ideally partnering with someone experienced on live calls.
The test at the end of month one is simple. Can they present the product properly, to a real audience, without a safety net? If the answer is no, record the training gap and agree the next step.
Alongside that, they should be evaluating what they have inherited: which accounts are live, which have gone quiet, where the pipeline actually sits, and what looks structurally different from how it was described. You want that assessment early, and you want to hear it honestly.
How should the 30-60-90 plan change with the route to market?
A specification manager and a BDM are doing different jobs on different clocks, so they need separate milestones.
Use separate route milestones so the plan reflects the work a specification manager and a BDM can produce at each checkpoint. The table below is the template I work to and adjust per role. Treat the dates as checkpoints you are setting, not as milestones the market has measured.
| Specification | BDM | |
|---|---|---|
| Day 30 | Product and system depth, top practice list built and segmented, first CPD or presentation content prepared, understands where the product wins technically | Product confident, area mapped, key accounts and contacts identified, out on the road and already calling |
| Day 60 | First practices seen, early projects identified at sketch or design stage, presentation delivered at least once, relationships opening | Full call cycle running, live opportunities entered, quoting rhythm established, first orders or first pricing conversations |
| Day 90 | A specification pipeline that exists and can be described project by project, with stage and decision-maker for each | Coverage established, a qualified pipeline with real stages and dates, growth accounts named and a plan against them |
| What you should NOT expect at 90 | Closed revenue. What gets specified now decides work that lands well after the quarter it happens in | Full run rate. Look for genuine movement, and count anything already at tender when they arrived as inherited |
The specification column is the one I see misread. That person can be doing everything right and have nothing you can invoice, because the project they influenced today gets built well after the quarter they influenced it in. I plan for that lag, and I have no published figure to put on it.
What does day 60 actually test?
Whether they are engaged, whether they have a plan, and whether they are working as part of the team.
I put the weight on day 60, because there is still time to act on what it tells you. The questions are about how the person is working.
- Where do they think they are, and does that match where you think they are?
- How are they feeling about it? Ask directly.
- Do they have a plan to hit what they have been asked to hit, and can they explain it?
- Are they engaged, or have they gone quiet?
- Are they working well with the rest of the team, and does the team say the same?
When the answers here are honest and good, I stop worrying about the numbers this early. If someone is disengaged at day 60, that is the thing to deal with, and you want to know why now.
How long does a building products rep really take to ramp?
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.
That is the standard I plan to, not a market measurement. It varies by role, and what I am confident about is the shape: a trade-facing BDM gets moving faster, because they can be out on the road and canvassing almost immediately. A specification manager takes considerably longer, because the work compounds and the outcome arrives late.
Two practical consequences. Judge the early months on inputs and pipeline quality. And build the commission plan to match, because a plan that pays only on closed revenue pays a specification hire nothing for doing exactly the right work. How to structure that properly is a separate conversation, and worth having before the offer goes out.
Probation and ramp are not the same thing. Probation is an employment period with its own rules. Ramp is how long capability and pipeline take to build. Treating one as a deadline for the other is a mistake, and it pushes managers into decisions at three months that I would want made at six.
What do you do when it is off track?
Run the diagnostic before you reach for the replacement conversation.
If you are at day 60 or day 90 and worried, work through it in this order.
- Check what was actually delivered. Was the department rotation done, or skipped because everyone was busy? Did the product training happen? Was the area handed over properly, or did the previous person leave and take everything with them? Be honest about the brief too, because the decision about what experience the role genuinely needed was made before any of this started.
- Sit in on a pipeline review. Can they explain their area and their live projects, or are they reciting activity? That distinction shows whether the person can explain real pipeline progress.
- Check the attitude. Are they still engaged and asking questions?
- Then decide. If the inputs were thin, reset the onboarding. If the inputs were solid, the engagement has gone and the pipeline is genuinely empty, the harder conversation is fair.
The failure pattern worth naming is the 90-day cliff: a hire judged on closed revenue at a date that arrives before the job could have produced any, in a role where it was never going to. Losing someone that way costs you the hire and the ramp, and you start the clock again.
If you want a second read on whether a plan is realistic for the role you are filling, talk through the plan with me. The new starter's side of the same 90 days is on the paired page.