War-game a sales ramp plan before quota curves, enablement paths, and coaching rules harden into how every new hire gets scored.
Sales ramp plans fail when the draft invents pipeline speed enablement never funded, when attainment dual-counts the same deal as ramping and as fully quota, when managers still promise custom soft landing in private Slack, and when revops cannot show which ramps actually cleared under the published path. A neat ramp flowchart is not evidence.
Lock one ramp design
State the proposed quota curve and enablement milestones, which roles and regions it covers, who owns coaching audit and exception relief, what success looks like after two cohorts of ramp attainment and time-to-first-deal, and the kill criteria if shadow relief or fairness disputes past a named threshold. Attach the current ramp distribution, sample coaching logs, enablement completion rates, and the measured path from start date to full quota. If sales, enablement, and finance disagree on whether the plan buys predictability or just deferred relief fights, reconcile before seating.
Name the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new, and the hold criteria if any role still lacks a named owner or a verified coaching path.
Who should attack it
- New hire. Fear that "standard ramp" still means a quiet full-quota clock below the published curve.
- Enablement. Milestone math that looks clean while coaching cohorts cannot be listed.
- Sales managers. Talk tracks that invent relief the plan never wrote.
- Finance. Comp language that still hosts retired ramp rates.
- Skeptic. The claim that looks strongest and is least sourced.
Optional legal seat if offer-letter ramp language binds the form. Same pack for every seat.
Run the passes
Feed Pingpong the ramp draft and exhibits. First pass steelmans the quota curve. Later passes attack from the seats above. Final pass turns surviving objections into clearer milestones, a published relief path, or a hold. Delete invented "reps already know how ramp works" claims and dual-counted attainment rates.
Force a day-after narrative: what happens if a new hire screenshots mismatched ramp terms, if managers still teach unwritten relief, or if finance cannot list the open exception cohort. If those stories are stronger than your mitigation plan, fix the package before you publish it. Separate a sales ramp plan from a sales compensation plan or a quota plan so each decision stays testable.
Ask every seat to mark which coaching steps are optional in practice. Optional enablement audits become skipped within a month if nobody names the owner and the time box. Related: war-game a sales methodology change, pretend you are the enablement lead, pretend you are the head of sales, and the war-game decisions hub. Process: how to run a Pingpong.