Two sales hires. Both fired within six months. ₹15L gone — salary, ramp, the deals that didn't get worked while they found their feet. The founder's read on it was simple: good salespeople are hard to find. A few questions in, a different story showed up.
My last 2 sales hires didn't work out. Both fired within 6 months. No traction. Burned ₹15L too.
Did you onboard them into the company, or into your way of selling?
Standard onboarding by HR. Met the team, learned the product, shadowed a few calls.
And then?
Then we gave them a target and let them go sell.
So you taught them what to sell. Did you share how you sell?
We trained them properly. HR handled culture, tools, and compliance. We thought "experienced" meant they'd figure out the motion.
You hired someone to sell, then made them invent the selling system themselves — while the clock ran.
Well, that's not what happened.
Six months of salary to watch a couple of strangers reverse-engineer what's already in your head. Then when they fail, you decide good salespeople are hard to find.
You hired someone to sell, then made them invent the selling system themselves — while the clock ran.
Ok, so how do I fix it?
Before the next hire starts, write the system down.
Hand them the system on day one. Not a quota and a laptop.
And if it isn't written down anywhere?
Then your new hire's real job for five months isn't selling. It's writing your playbook for you. At ₹1L a month.
What "the system" actually means
Not a slide deck. Not a CRM login. Four specific things, documented before day one:
Who to call first
ICP definition plus the trigger events that mean a buyer is actually ready — not just a firmographic filter.
What messaging already converts
Not what marketing thinks should work. What has actually produced replies and meetings, in the founder's own words if that's what's been working.
Which objections actually matter
The three or four that show up in almost every deal, and exactly how they get handled — not a generic objection-handling script.
What "good" looks like by week six
Specific activity and pipeline metrics, so both sides know within a month whether this is on track — not guessing until the quarter ends.
Faster ramp time for teams that hand a new hire a documented selling system on day one, instead of a target and a laptop — with meaningfully lower six-month attrition as the compounding effect.
Onboarding and ramp are not the same problem
HR-led onboarding — culture, tools, compliance, product — is necessary and usually done well. It's just answering a different question than the one that determines whether a hire survives their first two quarters. That second question is entirely about the selling motion, and in most founder-led companies, nobody has ever written it down because the founder has never had to explain it to themselves.
Hiring for that gap again — with a fifth AE, or a sixth — doesn't close it. It just moves the ₹1L-a-month tuition fee to someone new. If you're about to bring on a sales hire and want a second read on what they'd actually be walking into, this is exactly what a sales-ramp readiness check is built to catch before you sign anything.