If you are a Founder-CEO looking at your sales forecast, you are likely staring at a lie. You see "Headcount: 4" and assume "Capacity: 4." But if those reps were hired in the last six months, your actual capacity is closer to 1.5.
Ramp time is the silent killer of Series B growth. It is the invisible latency between signing an offer letter and banking a check. And in 2026, that latency is getting worse, not better.
New data indicates the average B2B sales ramp time has ballooned to 5.7 months—a 32% increase since 2020. For a rep with a $120,000 base salary, that is nearly $60,000 in direct cash burn before they are consistently covering their own cost, let alone contributing to EBITDA. When you factor in recruiting fees, training costs, and burden, the fully loaded cost of a "ramping" rep often exceeds $100,000 before they close their third deal.
For founders like "Scaling Sarah," this metric is particularly frustrating. You (the founder) didn't need a ramp period. You knew the product, the pain, and the pitch from Day 1. You assume a smart hire should figure it out in 60 days.
They won't. Without the decades of context you carry in your head—tribal knowledge that hasn't been documented—new reps are flying blind. They aren't just learning your product; they are trying to decode your intuition. This gap between Founder Speed and Rep Reality is where missed quarters happen.
To fix this, we must move from "gut feel" expectations to hard benchmarks.
Ramp time is not a flat number; it is a function of deal complexity, buyer persona, and sales cycle length. A rep selling a $5,000 transactional tool should ramp in weeks; a rep selling a $250,000 digital transformation package needs quarters.
According to the latest data from The Bridge Group and other industry benchmarks, here is where your team should land.
How do you define "Ramped"? Stop using feelings. Unpredictable sales forecasting often stems from undefined ramp stages. A rep is ramped when they hit:
Until then, they are a liability, not an asset.
You cannot change the market, but you can change your physics. The difference between a 9-month ramp and a 5-month ramp isn't the quality of the rep—it's the quality of the system.
Your "genius" is unscalable. Stop selling your genius and start selling your system. If your onboarding consists of "shadowing me for two weeks," you are failing. Shadowing transmits bad habits and survivor bias. You need Playbooks: specific, script-level documentation on objection handling, discovery questions, and demo flows.
Do not let a rep touch a lead until they have passed a "Gate." A Gate is a role-play certification where they must pitch you (or a manager) and score above a 90%. If they fail, they study and re-test. It is cheaper to keep them in training for an extra week than to let them burn 50 leads learning on the job.
Ramp is not linear; it's exponential. The fastest way to ramp is to force early wins. Manufacture the "First Five" deals. Hand them smaller, warmer, or easier accounts to close in their first 60 days. The confidence momentum from early checks creates a psychological ramp that training alone cannot match.
If you wait for closed-won revenue to measure ramp, you will be waiting 6 months to find out you made a bad hire. Measure activity velocity: Are they making as many calls as a veteran? Are they setting as many meetings? If the activity ramp is flat, the revenue ramp will never happen.
A 5.7-month average is not a permission slip to accept mediocrity. It is a benchmark to beat. In a capital-constrained environment, the company that ramps reps fastest wins on unit economics. Systems, not heroics, will get you there.
