Your effectiveness in onboarding new sales hires will have a direct impact on the overall sales results of your sales organization. This video is a sales training webinar we hosted that outlines some practical changes to improve how you onboard new sales hires.
Impacts of Not Onboarding New Sales Hires Properly
New sales hire onboarding probably does not get enough attention in most sales organizations. Not only will getting sales newbies up and running better increase your overall sales results, but it can also have a direct impact on your level of sales staff turnover.
Sales staff turnover can often be instigated by poor performance. Either salespeople don’t sell enough and leave voluntarily because they aren’t making the income they want, or they are let go because they are not meeting expectations.
Whatever the case, sales staff turnover is extremely costly. The higher the turnover, the more expenses are spent on recruiting, hiring, and sales training. What you will not see on financial reports are all of the deals and customers that are lost when open sales positions are being filled.
Core Concepts to Keep in Mind When Onboarding New Sales Hires
Here are key things to keep in mind when you structure your sales onboarding program.
Compartmentalize
You likely have a lot of information to share with your sales new hires. Start by compartmentalizing all of the content you want to provide.
You likely have content for areas like product info, company info, internal processes, and sales methodology. Organize your content into categories that will be easy to distribute and consume when onboarding new sales hires.
Schedule
Of course, every sales onboarding program will have some sort of schedule. However, one way to build a more successful program is to have a schedule that is more spread out in terms of covering a larger amount of time.
The human brain is a sponge and it can only absorb so much information at one period of time. If you spread out your training sessions, you will improve the ability of your sales new hires to absorb the information that you are trying to share.
Teach What to Say and Ask
One area where many sales onboarding programs have a gap is not teaching the sales new hires what to say and ask. Most programs will teach about products being sold, but will not include what to say in terms of sales pitch and probing questions.
By clarifying what talk tracks and questions the salesperson could use, you can shorten new hire ramp-up time and overall sales performance.
Provide a Sales Playbook
One way to provide clarity around what to say and ask is to actually provide a sales playbook. This could include call scripts, email templates, voicemail scripts, objection responses, etc.
Role-Play
One of the most powerful things to incorporate is sales role-playing exercises where newbies can practice real-world selling scenarios.
We hope this helps you with onboarding new sales hires!