Territory and time

7.1 Account tiering when you have no data

Section 3 gave you the first 50. As the territory grows, tier on three axes rather than one: fit (how closely they match the closed-won pattern), accessibility (can you actually reach a decision-maker? a perfect-fit organisation with no route in is worth less this quarter than a decent-fit one where you know someone), and timing (a trigger, a budget cycle, a contract end date, a deadline).

Score each 1–3 and multiply. Crude, and far better than gut feel — which reliably over-weights the largest and most famous names in the patch: the ones every competitor is chasing, with the longest procurement and the least urgency. Re-tier monthly, or the exercise becomes a list of stale opinions within a quarter.

7.2 Calendar architecture

Your calendar is your business plan. A workable week for a full-cycle rep in ramp:

Three principles hold it together. Prospecting is booked as an appointment and does not move for internal meetings. Same time every day — willpower is not a scheduling system; habit is. And prepare the block before the block: research done during your prospecting hour is not prospecting.

Voice from the field

"Only salespeople that dedicate blocks of time on their calendar for prospecting activity consistently succeed at acquiring new business."
— Mike Weinberg, New Sales. Simplified. (2012)

7.3 The discipline that separates reps who ramp from reps who drown

• The non-negotiable block. One prospecting block that never moves for anything short of a customer emergency. Reps who protect one outperform reps who intend to protect three.
• The end-of-day close-down. Fifteen minutes: CRM current, every live opportunity with a booked next step, tomorrow's first block prepared. Nothing carried in your head overnight.
• The Friday hygiene hour. Every open opportunity gets one honest question — what specifically happens next, and on what date? Anything without an answer moves back a stage or out of the forecast. This hour is why some reps' numbers are believed.
• The weekly count. Meetings booked, opportunities created, opportunities progressed: three numbers, written down every Friday in the same place. In ramp they are the only evidence that exists before revenue does.

7.4 The trap of activity theatre

Activity theatre is doing things that look like selling and cannot produce a customer. It is the characteristic failure of anxious, well-intentioned new reps, and it is dangerous precisely because it feels like hard work and generates reportable numbers. The common forms:

• Research as avoidance — ninety minutes on one annual report before sending a single message.
• Volume without thought — two hundred untargeted emails, because the dashboard counts emails.
• List-building forever — the perpetually improved spreadsheet that never becomes an outreach.
• Internal busyness — every optional meeting, maximum visibility in Slack. Especially seductive, because it earns social approval while your pipeline empties.
• Pipeline padding — deals kept in the forecast because removing them makes the number look bad. The most expensive form, because it corrupts the one asset you're building: the trustworthiness of your numbers.

Two tests. The £50 test: would I bet £50 that this hour moves a specific named buyer one step closer to a decision? The Friday test: can I name what changed for a customer because of my work this week? If the honest answer is "I was busy", you were in the theatre. The antidote isn't more hours — it's the weekly count above, three numbers you cannot fake.

8. When it's going badly

Sometimes it genuinely is going badly. The useful skill is diagnosing it early, honestly and without catastrophising — and knowing what the UK employment framework actually says, so fear doesn't fill the gap.

8.1 The honest signals, with thresholds

8.2 Diagnose before you treat

Almost every ramp failure is one of four things, and the fix for each is different:

1. Activity — not enough of the thing; the weekly count tells you honestly. Fix: calendar architecture, and a fortnight of ruthlessly protected blocks before concluding anything else.
2. Targeting — enough activity, wrong organisations or wrong people. Symptom: decent reply rates but no meetings, or meetings with people who can't act. Fix: return to the closed-won pattern, re-tier, and contact the level above where you're comfortable.
3. Message — right people, wrong words. Symptom: sequences complete, no replies at all. Fix: rewrite around one specific problem in the buyer's vocabulary, taken verbatim from a customer call.
4. Craft — meetings happen and die. Symptom: pleasant calls, no next steps. Fix: recordings, one skill at a time, with someone senior listening.

Work them in that order: each is cheaper to test than the next, and a rep who declares a message problem while actually having an activity problem will rewrite emails for a month and improve nothing.

8.3 What to actually do, in order

1. Say it out loud, early, to your manager — diagnosis and plan, not confession: "I have no qualified pipeline at day 40. My read is targeting rather than activity; here's the evidence and what I want to change — can you sanity-check it?" A rep who raises this at day 40 is being managed; a rep whose manager raises it at day 70 is being assessed.
2. Change one variable at a time, for two weeks. Changing everything at once teaches you nothing.
3. Get a second opinion from a top rep — two calls listened to, or your sequence read. Fifteen minutes from someone currently winning beats a week of self-diagnosis.
4. Increase the input while you fix the process, and write the plan down. A visible, dated plan converts anxiety into evidence of self-management — and if a formal process ever starts, your written record of self-directed corrective action is the most useful document you own.

8.4 How UK capability procedures actually work

This is the part people imagine most inaccurately, so here is the framework as it stands in the UK in 2026. General information about how the process works, not legal advice; take advice on your own circumstances.

Capability, and the Acas Code. Underperformance is normally a capability matter — trying and not succeeding — rather than misconduct. Some employers run a distinct capability procedure, others handle performance through the disciplinary one. Either way, Acas guidance is that a fair procedure must be followed and that dismissal is a last resort, after adequate support and after alternatives such as changed duties or a different role have been considered. The Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures explicitly covers poor performance; it isn't law in itself, but tribunals must take it into account and can adjust compensation by up to 25% where either side unreasonably failed to follow it. In practice it expects a written explanation of the problem, advance notice of any meeting, the right to be accompanied, a genuine opportunity to improve with clear targets and a review period, warnings before dismissal in most capability cases, and a right of appeal. (Acas published a revised draft Code for consultation on 30 July 2026; the existing Code applies until a new one is approved by Parliament.)

Where the PIP fits. A Performance Improvement Plan is not a legal instrument; it is the tool inside the capability procedure that sets targets, support and timeline — typically four to twelve weeks with defined review points. A properly written PIP states what must improve, by how much, by when, what support you'll get, and what happens if the targets aren't met. If yours doesn't state all five, ask in writing: a vague PIP is unfair to you and weak for the employer.

Qualifying service, and the change coming. As things stand in 2026, ordinary unfair dismissal claims require two years' continuous service. The Employment Rights Act 2025 (Royal Assent 18 December 2025) cuts that to six months from 1 January 2027 and removes the compensation cap, with employees who already have six months' service on that date protected immediately. So for most first-year sales hires today, ordinary unfair dismissal protection has not yet arrived — and from January 2027 the landscape changes substantially. Qualifying service applies to ordinary unfair dismissal only: discrimination claims under the Equality Act, whistleblowing detriment and automatically unfair dismissals exist from day one, whatever your probation says.

Notice and settlement. Statutory minimum notice (section 86, Employment Rights Act 1996): after one month's service, at least a week from the employer where service is under two years, then a week per year up to twelve. Your contract may give more, never less. Separately, employers sometimes propose a settlement agreement rather than run a procedure; section 111A makes such pre-termination negotiations inadmissible in an ordinary unfair dismissal claim — the "protected conversation" — though that protection doesn't cover discrimination or automatically unfair dismissal claims and can be lost if either side behaves improperly. You're entitled to independent advice, and the employer normally contributes to the cost.

Probation. Probationary periods (commonly three to six months) are contractual, not statutory: they shorten notice and simplify internal process, and remove no day-one protections. Note that a first sales role's probation frequently ends before the ramp does. Name that mismatch early — ask what evidence will be used to confirm probation, given that revenue may not yet exist.

Field note

Most sales exits never reach a formal capability procedure. Far more common is the quiet version: the territory is "rebalanced", the best accounts move to a colleague, the coaching stops, and the rep is invited to consider whether the role is right for them. That isn't necessarily bad faith — managers often delay formal process because they hope the rep recovers — but it means the earliest signal of trouble is behavioural rather than procedural. Attention withdrawn is the tell: when your manager stops asking about your pipeline, the conversation has already started without you. Restart it yourself, in writing, with a diagnosis and a dated plan, before anyone else frames it.

8.5 Deciding it's the role, not you

Some seats cannot be ramped into. The structural signals: nobody is hitting quota (sustained low team attainment means the quota, territory or product-market fit is the problem, not you — ask what proportion hit target last year, as you would at interview); serial churn in the same seat (you're the third person in eighteen months); the territory changed after you joined, resized or reassigned without renegotiation; the pipeline promised at interview doesn't exist — you were told 50% marketing-sourced and you're getting nothing; manager churn, which means no consistent coaching and no continuous record of your progress; and the product can't be sold to the buyers you've been given — you lose the same way, for the same reason, every time, and nobody internally will discuss it.

None is proof alone. Two or more, persisting after you've raised them properly, is enough to start looking — quietly, professionally, while continuing to do the job well. A short stint explained calmly ("the territory was restructured and the seat wasn't viable; here's what I did about it and what I learned") is survivable in a sales CV. Two short stints with no explanation are not.

Before concluding, apply one honest test: have I done the things in this module? Protected the blocks, worked a real 50-account list, run sequences to completion, reviewed my own recordings, asked for specific coaching, raised the problem early in writing. If not, you haven't yet run the experiment that would tell you whose problem it is.