The Forecast I Couldn’t Defend

Every revenue leader has sat in this meeting.

The plan calls for more headcount. Finance asks the obvious question: when these new sellers start, how much will they produce, and when?

As a chief revenue officer, I answered that question more times than I can count. And every time, I knew the honest answer was: I don’t know yet.

The answer we all give

The standard response is a ramp curve.

• Month one: zero.
• Month three: some fraction of quota.
• Month six: fully productive.

It looks precise in a spreadsheet. But it isn’t a forecast. It’s an assumption, applied to every hire as if they were identical, and it stays an assumption until pipeline and closed revenue arrive months later to confirm or contradict it.

By the time the data shows up, the quarter is already gone.

What I actually needed

I didn’t need a better curve. I needed a way to see, early, whether each new hire was on the path to being productive.

That meant answering questions like:

• Can this person run a discovery call on their own yet?
• Do they understand the product well enough to handle the objections we see every week?
• Has their manager actually seen them do it, or are we assuming?
• Who is falling behind, and is it the person, the plan, or the coaching?

The tools I had couldn’t answer any of them. The LMS told me who finished a module. The CRM told me what happened after it was too late to change it. Everything in between lived in managers’ heads and in one-on-ones nobody wrote down.

Training completion is not a leading indicator

The most common proxy for readiness is completion: did the new hire finish the onboarding plan? It’s easy to measure, which is exactly why it gets reported.

But I’ve watched plenty of reps finish every course and still struggle in front of a customer, and plenty of others skip half the content and outperform. Completion tells you someone was busy. It doesn’t tell you they’re ready.

Leaders commit to growth targets when they hire people, then wait months to find out whether those people are ready to deliver.

Why we started RampRight

RampRight began with that gap. The idea is simple: define what ready looks like for a role, collect evidence that people are getting there, and give leaders a view of progress while there is still time to do something about it.

Define readiness explicitly

Not “90 days, roughly,” but the specific things someone has to be able to do, and the checkpoints along the way.

Look at evidence, not activity

Manager validations, real work, and demonstrated skills count for more than hours spent in a course.

Surface risk early

If someone is behind at week three, that is when the manager needs to know, not at the end of the quarter.

This is the first in a series of posts on what we’re learning as we build. Next month, RJ will dig into the difference between completing training and being able to do the job.