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Every week a new rep is not selling at full speed is gross profit you gave up and payroll you paid anyway. Every rep who quits before the end of their first year takes that whole investment with them. Most field sales teams have never put a number on either.
Put your own numbers in and you will get one. It runs entirely in your browser, nothing is stored, and there is no email gate.
These starting values are placeholders, not benchmarks. Replace every one of them with your own.
Everyone you onboard in a year, including seasonal crew.
From first day to selling like a tenured rep.
What a ramping rep produces compared with a tenured one, averaged across the ramp.
Share of your hires gone within a year.
At full productivity. Sits, demos or in-home appointments.
Share of appointments that become signed jobs.
Contract value of a typical signed job.
What you keep after materials, labour and commission.
Base, taxes, phone, vehicle, leads and manager overhead. Not commission.
What ramp and churn cost you a year
$746,400
Gross profit given up plus payroll carried while 20 reps ramp for 8 weeks each.
Cost to ramp one rep
$37,320
gross profit given up plus payroll carried
Ramp investment lost to churn
$221,760
8 of 20 gone inside a year
Worth of cutting ramp by one week
$69,300
across every rep you hire this year
Worth of keeping one more rep
$27,720
one fewer leaver inside 12 months
Cutting one week off ramp is worth about $3,465 per rep hired. Any training spend below that number pays for itself if it moves ramp by a single week, before you count anything it does for churn or close rate.
Payroll is counted in the cost of the ramp period, because you pay a full wage against partial output. It is deliberately left out of the last two figures above: shortening a ramp or keeping a rep does not change what you spend on wages, only how much output you get for them, so including it there would flatter the numbers.
A deliberately simple model otherwise. It assumes flat average output across the ramp rather than a rising curve, and it ignores recruiting, interviewing and equipment, so if anything it understates the total.
The output most worth acting on is not the big one at the top. It is the line for cutting one week off ramp, because that is the only figure here that behaves like a budget.
Divide it by the number of reps you hire and you have a per rep ceiling. Anything you can spend below that ceiling pays for itself if it moves ramp by a single week, and that is before you count what it does to close rate or to how many reps are still there in October. Most teams discover the ceiling is considerably higher than what they are currently spending, which reframes the question from whether to invest in ramp to why they have not already.
Two honest caveats. The model assumes flat average output through the ramp rather than a rising curve, which is a simplification. And it excludes recruiting, interviewing and equipment entirely. Both of those mean the real number is higher than what you see here, not lower.
The reason ramp takes as long as it does is rarely product knowledge. It is that a rep learns to handle objections on live doors, one painful conversation at a time, and there are only so many doors in a week. We went through the mechanics in why new sales reps ramp too slowly and what a structured alternative looks like in the complete sales rep onboarding guide.
If you are sizing a budget rather than a ramp, what sales training actually costs per rep breaks down the four layers of cost, including the one that never appears on an invoice.
Take the gross profit a tenured rep generates in a week, subtract what a ramping rep generates, and multiply the gap by the number of ramp weeks. Then add the payroll you carry through that period. That total is what one rep's ramp costs before you count recruiting.
At minimum, the entire ramp investment you already made in them, because it leaves with the rep. If someone quits at month five of an eight week ramp plus a few productive weeks, you funded the learning and a competitor or nobody gets the return.
It varies enormously by vertical, ticket size and how structured the onboarding is, and there is no reliable public benchmark for door to door specifically. Rather than trusting an average, measure your own: track weeks from first day to the point a rep hits tenured close rate.
The calculator gives you a ceiling rather than a rule. Work out what cutting one week off ramp is worth per rep hired, and any training spend below that number pays for itself on ramp alone, before counting effects on close rate or retention.
Because ramp is a fixed investment and a seasonal rep has fewer productive weeks to repay it. A rep who takes eight weeks to ramp and works a five month season spends roughly forty percent of their tenure below full productivity.
No. It covers foregone gross profit and payroll carried during ramp only. Advertising, interviewing time, background checks and equipment are all real and all excluded, so treat the output as a floor rather than a full figure.
No. Everything runs in your browser, nothing is transmitted or stored, and there is no signup. Close the tab and the numbers are gone.
Ramp shortens when a rep gets their first hundred objections somewhere other than a customer's doorstep. ColdOpen puts a rep in a live voice conversation with an AI buyer in your vertical and scores how they handled it, so the repetitions happen before the appointments rather than instead of them.