The time between a new salesperson’s start date and achievement of full productivity represents the opportunity cost of a company’s onboarding process.
In our sales consulting work, we reviewed this topic with 736 new hires across 12 industries. They gave us five simple steps to implement in your sales training.
1. Orientation: Start new hires on Friday, not Monday.
Our study showed over two-thirds of new hires expressed dissatisfaction with their first day because their manager was too busy to give them the required attention. The disgruntled participants said their first day meetings were cut short, they ended up getting pawned off on others, and left day one feeling disengaged.
2. Guide: Ensure you sequence "doing" and "knowing" activities in a fashion that lines up with how the job will unfold.
The new hires told us that a detailed onboarding plan that separated "doing" versus "knowing" made their first six months more impactful. Below is an online to serve as a checklist to review your onboarding framework:
- Onboarding Activities ("Doing") that ensure new hires are performing the correct activities at desired rates and provide an experiential foundation
- Learning Requirements ("Knowing") that Provides a knowledge foundation on key topics required for success. Use collegiate concept to divide the content (ie, 101 Foundation Understanding, 201 Advanced Understanding, 301 How to Apply).
3. Mentorship: Provide new hires with a dedicated peer mentor — somebody excelling in their role who can be a guide.
New hires told us about not having a sounding board to lean on other than their boss. Many felt that they were “passed around” by the veterans because nobody wanted to take the time to help. Everybody needs a friend other than their boss. The advantage to this is twofold:
- For the mentor, this is an opportunity for ‘A’ players that may be future managers to get involved in managerial activities.
- For the mentee, this is fast way to assimilate into the new culture and learn great habits from your best employees.
4. Structure: Ensure onboarding plans include structured training
Too often new hire training lacks. milestones and follow-up. The participants that ramped the fastest were involved in structured training in their Onboarding Plan. Below is an example:
- Training Activity: Competitive intelligence
- Objective: Understand the value prop of each competitor and mitigation strategy
- Duration: Three days
- Verification: New hire will be able to list out each competitor in their territory, the value prop, strengths and weaknesses, and three references where their company has successfully defeated the competitor
5. Simplify: Lay out the onboarding plan in a simple format so new hires can bucket all their activities.
The new hires that struggled to hit their ramp felt their training was complicated.Here is an example outline of pre-ramp accountability training:
- Company: Mission, purpose, history, organization structure, policies, HR, regulatory, environmental and other related topics.
- Offering: Product, service, solution, components, value proposition, design, attributes, key clients, business partners, 3rd party thought leadership, use cases, etc.
- Competition: Their offerings, key clients, value propositions, partners, and positioning (how we are different, and how we beat the competitors).
- Process:
- Corporate Processes
- Mastering the complete set of steps from first call to contact, account planning, objection handling, role-playing, etc.
- Sales Process
- All processes internal to sales and any cross-functional processes. This includes talent management (interviewing), sales engineering (demos), customer support, sales operations, marketing (SLA for lead follow-up, field-driven events), and sales management (QBRs, pipeline review, coaching, deal desk).
- Corporate Processes
- Systems: Includes but not limited to CRM, forecasting, knowledge management, and other corporate support systems.
Further actions
Perform a new hire audit focused on talent management best practices.
- Have a senior sales rep spend 30 minutes with a new hire using the 5 steps above.
- Rate each on a 1-3 scale of below, meets, and exceeds expectations.
- The peer-to-peer approach has proven to create the best environment to get honest feedback.
- Come back to your new hires and close any gaps.
