10 Tips To Onboard New Sales Hires Effectively
Recently, my daughter was looking for a sales job and asked me how she could know which employers offered her the best chance of success. I told her to only consider firms that offer great training, provide a salary and start new hires with active accounts. These seemed to me, after a lifetime in the field, to be ingredients that would maximize her chances for success.
Later, thinking about our chat, I wondered about a phenomenon I’ve seen throughout my four decades in sales: salespeople who succeed in one place but fail elsewhere. It’s an important puzzle to solve because failure can be devastating for the employee and damaging for the company; each failed new hire can cost more than $100,000, not including the lost growth opportunity.
What occurred to me is that whether a new hire succeeds or fails often comes down to onboarding, which can sometimes seem superfluous or straightforward, but actually is neither of those things.
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Here are 10 onboarding tips to help employers and new talent succeed:
1. Have a sales-specific onboarding program
It’s obvious, but it has to be said—don’t hire without a plan! Many companies have a plan for new hires, but it’s the same plan for all parts of the organization. Develop a thoughtfully constructed plan that’s specific to sales. Include key milestones and check-in points.
2. Ditch the haste
Don’t rush training. Too often, onboarding lasts a week or two when months or a year is better. When I was starting out, firms like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Electronic Data Systems were hugely successful at onboarding, offering a full year of training before sales quotas were assigned, earning reputations as destination employers.
3. Make your sales people experts
What is it that can be done with months of training? A salesperson with real expertise can guide clients to make confident purchasing decisions. So, hire experts with relevant knowledge and then give them the tools to become truly expert at your products and services. New staff should be prepared to burn the midnight oil until they come up to speed. Sales staff must be expert at what they are selling, understand the broader marketplace and the choices potential clients have.
4. Teach new hires your unique sales approach
Articulate your firm’s sales model (your approach to selling, from identifying prospects to closing deals.) Too often, everyone at the firm knows the model but forget to tell new employees. Have a well-thought-out sales model for every step from start to finish of the sales cycle and share it with new staff in a simple, almost paint-by-numbers way.
5. Offer ongoing sales skills training
Sales people need to continuously develop their professional sales skills so the buyer always receives an extraordinary experience. Sales skills constantly evolve, so continuously train your teams. Doctors and lawyers undertake continued education to stay in practice and salespeople should, too. When onboarding new hires, identify where they may benefit from a refresher course.
6. Engage in peer mentoring
Match each new hire with a successful salesperson to develop product knowledge, sales skills, and understanding customer challenges. Before pitching to a client, a mentor can role play so the new hire can try out their approach and make adjustments before being live with a client. Proactive mentoring beats retroactive learning.
7. Know your client personas
The most important sentence a new hire should be able to complete is, “Our clients buy when …” Teach new hires the various personas of clients and prospects so they understand what problems can be solved and what tactics work best in various situations.
8. Create thoughtful account lists
When assigning accounts don’t simply give new hires a broad geography or, worse, let them make their own list. Be thoughtful, perhaps assigning prospects with a certain need, or that have a particular persona, or firms that buy at a certain time. Work with new hires to develop a meaningful approach likely to produce success.
9. Plant new salespeople on fertile ground
Show confidence in new hires by planting them on fertile ground with good seeds, strong seedlings and mature plants. Then, help them manage that mix. Asking new salespeople to open a new territory is a recipe for failure. Instead, assign new staff existing customers with room to grow and the possibility of referrals. Sales managers need enough trust among their team to move accounts around among staff, despite the territorial nature of sales professionals. Assigning accounts in a balanced way is good for everyone.
10. Offer clear supporting materials
Don’t expect new staff to know where to find everything if you don’t tell them. If you have canned pre-written marketing materials, from social media posts to prospecting emails written by professionals, share those assets with new staff. Too often, new hires only find out about available resources after months of trying to make their own.
A comprehensive, considered onboarding process is vital for successful growth at any company and should be considered an investment rather than an expense. You might think that a year-long onboarding process sounds too expensive for your budget, but the reality is, if you can afford to fail, you can afford to invest in success.
It’s an investment that pays huge dividends because great onboarding attracts great employees: The cream of the crop wants to work at places where top executives have risen through the ranks from sales.
Originally published on Forbes by Randy Illig.