You hired them in January. They'll be confident by Christmas.

You've found a good salesperson. They're keen, they're good with customers, and they're ready to go. Then they meet your product range.

In most technical businesses, it takes up to 12 months before a new salesperson can confidently recommend the right product on their own. Not because they're slow, but because the knowledge they need isn't written down anywhere they can find it.

What the first year looks like

• Month 1: shadowing your most experienced person, listening to the questions they ask and trying to remember the answers.
• Month 4: handling the easy enquiries, still transferring anything tricky.
• Month 8: getting there, but still checking before they commit to a recommendation.
• Month 12: finally confident.

That's a year of salary for someone who can't yet do the whole job, and a year of your best person giving up part of their day to help.

Why it takes so long

Your product range isn't hard to learn because of the catalogue. It's hard because of everything that isn't in it: which questions to ask, which products don't go together, which one to choose when the customer's answer is "not sure", and the exceptions your best person has picked up over twenty years.

None of that is in the datasheets. It's in one or two people's heads, and the only way to get it out has been to sit next to them for a year.

The real cost isn't the training

Training a new starter is a normal part of growing a business. The problem is what it says about where your knowledge lives.

If it takes a year to learn, it lives in people. When a new starter moves on just as they get confident, you start again. When your most experienced person is busy, on leave or eventually retires, the business slows down or guesses. Every technical business has a Dave, and every new starter depends on him.

Confident from day one

The shortcut isn't more training. It's putting your best person's thinking into a tool your team can use while they learn.

A guided product selector asks the customer the same questions your expert would, in plain language, and recommends the product your expert would choose. A new starter can run it with a customer in front of them on their first day, and get the same answer your most experienced person would give.

They still learn the range. But they learn it by getting it right, not by guessing and checking. And your expert stops being the help desk for every new hire.

The knowledge stays in the business

Once it's captured, it doesn't leave when people do. New starters ramp up faster, your experienced people get their time back, and every customer gets the same good answer, whoever they speak to.

Start with the product range that new starters struggle with most. That's usually the one that generates the most transferred calls.

Hiring, or about to? Tell us which range your new starters find hardest and we'll show you what a selector for it would look like.