Three years out
A sales team that isn't ready to make sales; engineers with nothing to engineer (as nothing is sold), or are novices "in a learning curve" about "our technologies"
As explained by the chief lumpiness officer:
So I mean again it's difficult, but because it's such a technical sale, if you look at the people we've added over the last, you know two years, earlier on we added four or five sales people.
Generally, it's difficult for salespeople to get much in the way of revenue in the first year. They usually get some small orders and the second year they start hitting their stride and the third year we would expect them to be operating just like a traditional area sales manager.
So, it does take a couple of years to get them up to where we would want them to be.
We generally add engineers when we see in the pipeline that future growth is coming more imminently.
Engineers also take some time to get up to speed again, you know, to understand our technologies and be able to do projects for us.
You know there is definitely a learning curve there, not as long as there is with the salespeople.
You know that's why when you look at over the last 18 months, the salespeople were hired generally 12 to 18 months ago, but in the last 12 months, it's been mostly engineers because we see that pipeline building.