Six months in, you already know. The pipeline is thin, the forecast keeps slipping, and the conversations you are having with your manager about this rep have already started to repeat themselves.
The decision to move on is the easy part. The harder question is what those six months actually cost you, because most businesses never work it out properly, and the ones that do change how they hire.
Four lines. All of them from your own data.
Line one: Salary paid for output that never arrived.
Start with the obvious one, and be honest about the timeline.
A sales hire who is not working out or rarely exited at month three. Ramp gives cover. Pipeline takes time to mature. Managers give the benefit of the doubt, then give it again. In most sales teams, the gap between "something is wrong" and "they have left" runs to six months or more.
So the figure is not one month's salary. It is basic pay across the full period, plus employer National Insurance, plus benefits, plus any guaranteed commission during ramp, plus the notice period you pay out at the end of it.
If you want a neutral external benchmark rather than your own payroll, the Office for National Statistics publishes median gross annual pay by occupation in the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. Worth noting: the current release is the 2025 provisional data, published 23rd October 2025. The 2026 edition is due this October, so anything you build now should be refreshed then.
Line two: The quota nobody owned.
This is the line most businesses leave off the spreadsheet, and it is almost always the biggest one.
A territory with a name against it is not the same as a territory being worked. While an underperforming rep holds the patch, three things happen at once. Target accounts go untouched. Inbound leads get handled badly. And nobody else is allowed near any of it, because on paper it's covered.
Take the annual quota for that seat. Divide by twelve. Multiply by the number of months between the hire starting and a replacement reaching full productivity, including the vacancy period and the new hire's ramp. Subtract whatever the original hire actually costs.
That is real revenue, and it is gone.
A territory with a name against it is not the same as a territory being worked.
Line three: The second ramp.
You now run the search again. Advertising, screening time, interview panels, agency fee if you use one, onboarding, CRM setup, product training, and the ramp curve for the second time.
Everything you spent on getting the first person to their desk, you spend again. The difference is that this time you are doing it under pressure, with a gap in the numbers, which is exactly the condition under which hiring standards slip and the cycle repeats.
Line four: The one you cannot invoice.
Harder to price, impossible to ignore.
Accounts worked badly by someone who was never going to make it. Prospects who now associate your brand with a poor conversation and will not take the next call. A manager who spent six months coaching instead of selling or leading. And a team that watched the whole thing play out and drew its own conclusions about what the bar actually is here.
Why the sums are getting sharper.
There is a timing issue worth flagging. From January 1st 2027, the qualifying period for unfair dismissal protection drops from two years to six months under the Employment Rights Act 2025, and the cap on compensatory awards is removed altogether. The change applies immediately to anyone who already has six months' service on that date, which means any hire you make today is already inside it.
For sales in particular, that matters. Six months is roughly the point at which a new rep's numbers start to mean anything. The old approach of hiring on instinct and letting probation sort it out if running out of road.
The answer is not to hire more slowly. It is to be right more often.
What this means for your sales team.
- Run the four lines on your last hire who did not work out. Use your own payroll and CRM figures, not a benchmark from somewhere else.
- Decide what the number justifies spending on selection. It is usually far more than businesses assume.
- Ask for evidence, not enthusiasm. Quota attainment in a comparable sale, deal sizes, cyber length, and references who can confirm the numbers rather than the personality.
- Review your probation and performance process before January, while there is still time to change it.
Where Oscar fits.
We place sales professionals across the UK and US, and we are judged on whether they stay and perform, not how quickly we can fill an inbox
If your last sales hire cost you more than you would like to admit, the next conversation is worth having.
