Sales onboarding and ramp up
Most founders think about the cost of hiring a salesperson in terms of the salary. That is the wrong number to be looking at.
If you are paying a salesperson a hundred thousand dollars a year, the actual cost to your business is closer to a hundred and twenty thousand once you factor in superannuation, annual leave, tools, and on-costs. Then consider what that person needs to generate to justify their seat. At a twenty percent margin, you need six hundred thousand dollars in sales in year one just to break even on the hire. That is before you have spent a single dollar getting them ready to sell.
The average cost of onboarding a new salesperson in Australia is just under ten thousand dollars, and the average duration is thirty-eight days. Thirty-eight days of product training, industry context, and sales process before they pick up the phone. Not before they close a deal. Before they make a call.
That number should give any founder pause. But the onboarding cost is not actually the problem. The problem is what happens before the thirty-eight days starts.
The Infrastructure Most Businesses Have Not Built
Bringing a salesperson into a business that is not ready for them is one of the most expensive mistakes in the sales outsourcing and in-house hiring conversation. And it happens constantly.
Think about what your new hire walks into on day one. Do you have a clear sales strategy, a documented sales process, and a roadmap they can follow? Or are they expected to work that out as they go? Because if the answer is the latter, you have not hired a salesperson. You have hired someone to build your sales function from scratch at a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year, and the clock is already running.
Do you know your value propositions, your key buyer personas, and what genuinely differentiates you in the market? Can you hand that to a new rep on day one, or is that also something they need to figure out then build? The best salespeople in the world cannot sell what they cannot articulate. If the positioning is unclear internally, it will be incoherent externally.
Who is buying from you, what are they buying, and why? Not in a general sense, but specifically. Which customer profiles convert fastest, spend the most, and stay the longest? Which ones are time wasters who will never buy regardless of how much effort goes in? If you cannot answer those questions before your new rep starts, they will spend their first several months finding out the hard way. On your dollar.
The Tools, the Data, and the Starting Line
A salesperson without the right infrastructure is not underperforming. They are working without equipment.
Do you have a CRM with qualified leads and enquiries ready to work, or does your new hire start from zero? There is a significant difference between handing someone a pipeline of warm, qualified prospects and telling them to go find their own. The first scenario produces revenue inside ninety days. The second produces frustration inside thirty and a resignation inside six months. Meanwhile you’re pulling your hair out because you hired a rep that ‘can’t sell’, and your rep is pulling their hair out wasting time with rubbish leads and ten thousand no’s.
Do you have pitch battlecards, marketing decks, and email templates? Do you have several thousand highly qualified prospect mobile numbers and email address details ready to go, or does the rep need to build the list themselves? Have you already done the work of qualifying out the junk, the wrong-fit companies, and the time wasters? Or does your new salesperson arrive to find that the first six weeks of their role is database hygiene and cold prospecting from scratch?
These are not hypothetical questions. They are the difference between a salesperson who ramps in three months and one who takes nine, or never gets there at all.
The Management Problem Nobody Budgets For
There is another cost that rarely appears in the hiring calculation. Time.
Who is doing the product training? Who is answering the questions when the rep is in front of a prospect and needs support? Who is reviewing the pipeline, coaching on deals, holding the rep accountable to activity and outcomes? If the answer is you, the founder, then you need to be honest about what that costs. Every hour you spend managing a salesperson is an hour you are not spending on the business.
A sales manual is not a luxury. A documented sales playbook is not something you build after the hire. These are the foundations that determine whether your investment in a salesperson produces a return or produces a very expensive lesson.
This is precisely why so many founders come to us. Not because they cannot afford a salesperson, but because they have hired one, or two, or three, and the results have not matched the investment. The problem is almost never the salesperson. It is the infrastructure they were handed, or more accurately, not handed.
What This Means for the Hire or Outsource Decision
Outsourced sales and fractional sales management are not the right answer for every business. But they make particular sense when the infrastructure is not in place, because a good outsourced sales team brings that infrastructure with them. The sales strategy, the CRM setup, the prospect lists, the sales playbook, the pipeline management, the coaching, the reporting. The thirty-eight days of onboarding become a much shorter runway because the foundations already exist.
The question is not really whether to hire in-house or outsource your sales. The question is whether your business is ready to get a return on a salesperson at all. If the answer is not yet, the most expensive thing you can do is hire one anyway and hope they figure it out.
If you are thinking through this decision and want an honest read on where your business sits, that is exactly the kind of conversation we have at Outsold. You can also read more about how we think about sales process, sales enablement, and building revenue operations that actually work at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
Jamie May is the Managing Director of Outsold, an Australian founder-led sales agency specialising in outsourced sales teams, fractional sales management, and B2B lead generation across Sydney, Melbourne, and nationally.
