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If your new AEs seem to take longer to get productive than they used to, it's not your imagination. Five years of benchmark data point the same way: ramp times keep getting longer, and the share of reps hitting quota keeps shrinking.
Here's what the research says, where it falls short, and what it means for how you plan capacity, hiring, and territories.
Ramp times are up almost two months since 2020
The Bridge Group has tracked AE ramp time for more than a decade. Its numbers show a steady climb:
- 2020: 4.3 months
- 2022: 5.3 months
- 2024: 5.7 months
- 2026: 6.2 months, the longest in the study's history
Bridge Group links the increase to more complex deals and larger buying committees. Companies are also hiring more experienced reps: the experience required at hire rose from 2.7 years in 2022 to 3.7 years in 2026. Even with more seasoned hires, it takes longer to get them to full productivity.
SDRs are the exception. Bridge Group's 2025 SDR report puts average SDR ramp at 3.0 months, the lowest since 2010.
Ramp time depends heavily on segment
A single average hides big differences by segment. Public research rarely breaks ramp time out by segment, but practitioner benchmarks usually land in these ranges:
- SMB AEs: about 3–5 months
- Mid-market AEs: about 4–7 months
- Enterprise AEs: about 9–12 months or longer
The pattern follows the sales cycle. SMB reps close smaller deals faster, so they get more chances to learn each month. Mid-market and enterprise reps need longer to build pipeline and work it through to close before their results reflect what they can actually do.
Only about half of reps hit quota
Quota attainment has dropped alongside the longer ramps:
- Bridge Group found 66% of AEs hit quota in 2022, 51% in 2024, and 48% in 2026.
- RepVue's Cloud Sales Index, which draws on reps' self-reported data, has put average attainment at around 43% through 2025.
- Ebsta and Pavilion, analyzing 4.2 million opportunities across 530 companies, found only 28% of reps met quota in 2023, and 76% of sellers missed quota in the first half of 2025.
The spread between these numbers comes mostly from how each one is measured. Leadership surveys tend to report higher attainment than numbers taken straight from CRM opportunity data. Either way, roughly half of reps or fewer are hitting their number.
The gap between segments is smaller than you might expect. RepVue's data shows SMB sellers with the smallest deals near the bottom, at roughly 41%, and mid-market sellers near the top, at about 42–45%. Attainment is tough everywhere.
What this means for sales leaders
Plan capacity on today's ramp times, not the ones you remember. If your model still assumes reps are fully productive in four months, it's probably overstating new-hire capacity by a quarter or more. That gap becomes missed number later in the year.
Ramp each segment separately. One blended ramp assumption across SMB, mid-market, and enterprise hires will be wrong for all three. Build ramp schedules that match each segment's sales cycle.
Give new reps books they can actually work. A new rep can only ramp as fast as their accounts let them. If they inherit a book of stale, poorly fit, or over-worked accounts, it will take them longer to build pipeline, and longer to reach quota. Fair, well-designed territories are one of the few ramp levers fully under your control.
Measure your own cohorts. Public benchmarks are a useful sanity check, but they mostly come from venture-backed SaaS companies and define ramp in different ways. Some measure time to first deal, others time to consistent quota attainment. Track time to sustained productivity for each hiring cohort and segment, and plan from your own numbers.
About the data
This post draws on The Bridge Group's AE and SDR research (2020–2026), RepVue's Cloud Sales Index (2023–2025), the Ebsta x Pavilion B2B sales benchmarks (2024 and 2025), and practitioner benchmarks for segment-level ramp ranges. Samples skew toward North American B2B SaaS companies.
