What a rep costs before the first order
Take the median wage and the average ramp together. At $72,080 a year1 and 6.2 months to full productivity2, you pay roughly $37,000 in base salary alone before the hire is fully up to speed — before commission, payroll tax, benefits, a laptop, a CRM seat or a data subscription. And at a 48% quota attainment rate2, the odds of that ramp paying back are close to a coin toss.
None of that is the rep’s fault. Most of the ramp is not learning to sell. It is building a pipeline from nothing: finding the buyers, finding the right person inside each one, and getting a first reply. That is the part Atlas does.
When hiring a rep is the right call
When you already have more qualified conversations than you can take. When your deals are long, technical and relationship-led and need one named person across months. When you need someone on site at fit-outs and showrooms. In all three, the rep is not the bottleneck — buyers are, or will be.
When Atlas is
When nobody is systematically in front of your trade buyers yet. When you cannot carry six months of salary on a channel that does not exist. When you want to know the channel works before you build headcount on it.
The answer most brands land on: both, in order
Atlas fills the calendar; your rep closes. That is how Lampatron reached $1.3M and a $280K peak month with one sales rep, and how Lampadom went from $0 to $4.2M in B2B with two. The reps never prospected. They took the calls.