Six months is a figure most presales leaders will recognise, and it usually means six months before the engineer is trusted alone on a complex deal. What sets the length is rarely product knowledge. It is deal judgment, which is the part almost no team teaches on purpose.
Ask three leaders in the same organisation when an engineer is ramped and you will usually get three answers. Finished the onboarding plan. Can run a demo without help. Has closed something. Is someone an account executive asks for by name.
Those are different events, often months apart.
The practical definition, the one managers use without saying it out loud, is the point at which they stop reviewing the engineer’s deals before anybody else sees them. Everything before that is supervised work, whatever the onboarding tracker says.
Ramp ends when a manager stops checking. That date is in nobody’s system, which is why the number is so hard to improve.
Has an owner, a course, a lab and usually a certification. Progress is visible, failure is obvious, and the material is the same for everyone. Most teams are genuinely good at this and it is rarely what holds a new engineer back after the first two months.
Knowing which question actually matters, when an evaluation is testing the wrong thing, when enthusiasm is not going anywhere, and when to say so. Acquired by sitting near somebody who has it. No curriculum, no sequence, and no way to tell whether it is working until a deal goes wrong.
The second curve is the one that decides the ramp, and it is left almost entirely to absorption. Which means the speed of a new engineer depends heavily on who they happened to be seated beside, and on how many live deals came through in their first quarter.
Under two percent of sales engineers say their team runs deals the same way as each other. Fifty eight percent describe mostly personal variation, and twelve percent do not know how their colleagues work at all. Source: the Deal Flow Benchmark, an ongoing study by Dmitri Lee, Presales Navigation System. This is the most consistent result in the study.
A new engineer shadowing three colleagues is not learning the team’s method. They are watching three private methods and assembling a fourth. That takes longer than learning one, and the result is harder to coach, because the manager cannot tell which parts came from where.
It also explains why ramp time tends to be stubborn. Hiring better people and writing better onboarding documents both help with the first curve. Neither touches the second, because the second has no agreed content to document.
Name the event. A new engineer runs a complex deal and the manager does not review it first. Once that is written, everyone is working towards the same date rather than their own.
A closed deal can be worked by a new engineer without risk, and it has a verifiable outcome. That is a faster feedback loop than waiting for a live deal to resolve over two quarters.
The expensive part is not the teaching. It is that there is nothing settled to teach, so each new hire reconstructs a method from whoever is nearby.
In one engagement with a team of forty two sales engineers, new hire ramp moved from six months to three over eight months. Forecast accuracy across the same team moved from fifty two to eighty percent, and engineers reported getting back around five hours a week.
The ramp number was not the goal. It moved because the team agreed on one way of reading a deal, which meant a new engineer had a single method to learn instead of a floor full of them.
Six months is a figure most presales leaders will recognise, and it usually means six months before the engineer is trusted alone on a complex deal. The length is driven far less by product knowledge than by deal judgment, which is the part almost no team teaches deliberately.
By teaching the part that is currently left to absorption. Product knowledge already has a curriculum. Deal judgment is usually acquired by watching, which is slow and depends on who the new engineer happens to sit beside. One team of forty two engineers moved new hire ramp from six months to three.
Six anonymous questions, fifteen minutes, inside a meeting your team already holds. One of them asks how consistently the team runs deals, which is the number underneath your ramp time.