I recently caught up with a friend who joined a HealthTech company as a sales rep.
As we talked about his onboarding, he shared that he felt the onboarding was completely disjoined. With their complex products, there was so much information that it was difficult to retain it all.
And after onboarding he was expected to sell but didn’t feel fully ready.
I've seen this play out dozens of times at scaling healthcare companies.
You've raised funds or gotten approval from leadership, so you are hiring aggressively to hit revenue targets.
But there's no infrastructure to support new sales hires, especially when you're selling complex medical technology.
Here's what it's costing you:
Sales reps take 6-9 months to ramp instead of 3 months, so you miss the quotas.
They can’t confidently articulate your product's value, so you're losing deals.
When they leave within the first year, you're burning $100K+ on recruiting and starting all over.
This isn't a hiring problem. It's a training infrastructure problem.
Why Sales Onboarding Breaks Down
Here's what happens at scaling healthcare companies:
The Information Firehose: Reps learn company culture, product features, clinical workflows, competitive positioning, and selling techniques, all in 2-4 weeks. They retain maybe 20% of it.
No Clear Roadmap: Everything feels equally urgent. No structure for what they need to know now vs. 2 months from now vs. 6 months from now.
Sink-or-Swim: After onboarding, reps are on their own. No coaching. No reinforcement. No path to mastery.
Unprepared reps who take too long to ramp, miss quota, and slow your growth.
A Sales Training Journey
I help clients answer these questions:
How long do reps have to complete onboarding?
What should they be able to do immediately to be successful? (First call? First demo?)
What do they need to know now vs. 2 months from now vs. 6 months from now?
Do they need hands-on practice (role plays, shadowing) in addition to self-paced learning?
What's the right mix of product training vs. sales skills vs. market training?
Working through these questions prevents the firehose and creates a roadmap to success.
Just like you create a customer journey, you need a sales training journey that guides reps from "first day" to "fully productive."
At Intuitive Surgical, I built product training for sales reps selling robotic surgical systems, a complex technology requiring reps to speak credibly to surgeons, administrators, and C-suite executives.
By integrating product knowledge with sales skills development through hands-on practice and ongoing coaching, reps ramped faster and closed deals confidently.
Is Your Sales Onboarding Slowing Your Growth?
I help Series B+ healthcare companies build sales training infrastructure that gets reps productive faster and drives predictable revenue growth.
In January, I'm offering free 30-minute strategy calls this month to talk about your 2026 strategy.
We'll discuss:
Where your sales onboarding is slowing revenue growth
The #1 gap keeping reps from ramping faster
One high-impact change you can make this quarter
Here's to sales teams that ramp fast and hit quota,
Manasi
Want bite-sized tips sent to your inbox each week? Join my newsletter for strategic insights on building training programs that drive product adoption.
