The success of fresh hires depends on how well organized and structured your sales onboarding process is. Bringing in new people into a well-established team can be daunting for existing members, new employees, and your business at large. How can you be sure that they’ll be a good fit? What information do they require to succeed? And can you be sure that the new hires won’t affect your sales figures?
While there is no magical way to ensure the exponential productivity of a sales team despite changing team members, you can set the new sales representatives up for success with a well-implemented onboarding strategy, all without increasing your training costs.
This, in turn, should help you ensure continued business growth as a successful onboarding process addresses many concerns efficiently while boosting new hires’ productivity by 25%.
Organizational leaders need to address some key issues for optimal success when developing a solid sales onboarding plan. First, it is essential to plan a standardized onboarding process covering critical areas like knowledge, alignment, and reinforcement.
Addressing the need for knowledge within the onboarding process
It is imperative to address your sales reps’ need for knowledge when they join a new team, irrespective of their experience, as it helps them perform and engage with their sales leads effectively.
Without the specific and contextual knowledge about the products and services they offer, it can be challenging to convert leads into customers. This is where a feature-rich training software becomes a differentiator as it instructs the users according to their unique learning needs. Therefore, finding appropriate sales training software for users (sales reps) is key to effective digital transition and adoption.
Potential sales opportunities often give sales representatives little time to gauge specific details about buyer personas they interact with. Sales representatives who understand their customer’s pain points and know them well are 28 percent more likely to seal the deal. With sales enablement tools and battle carts at their fingertips, your sales onboarding processes become much more productive and efficient.
Focus on alignment for software sales reps
Onboarding sales teams work best when they work together. But if members have different goals, the processes won’t be as effective; therefore, communicating goals consistently ensures that all sales teams and representatives are on the same page.
Moreover, comprehensive sales enablement software allows your trainers to find and edit the training sessions, cutting down onboarding time significantly.
Furthermore, managers can seamlessly collaborate and communicate system changes to the entire department in one go. This keeps sales teams up to date and allows them to get their hands on important information even faster, without the need for unnecessary time-consuming meetings.
Having the right onboarding system in place also enables company leaders to set clear expectations for the sales representatives and develop suitable training to meet those objectives.
Optimize training for retention and reinforcement
Optimized training involves modifying the existing learning material and making it accessible throughout an employee’s journey. But, editing this content can be challenging, especially in a digital setting, as the databases aren’t often centralized.
You can easily edit the training resources in a centralized location when upgrading your sales reps’ onboarding processes. As a result, it helps your trainers and managers optimize and reinforce new material quickly.
These features are useful to conduct proper training sessions and are specifically helpful to update training content in case skills gaps become apparent, or issues arise.
Sales representatives can only retain a certain amount of info at a given time. Having that information appear in the workflow decreases the time searching for cues/reminders. The trainees only need to sift through the data they require, allowing them to learn naturally and easily become more productive and effective at their tasks.
Wrapping up
There are many benefits to deploying the right sales onboarding platform and upgrading it accordingly. For example, organizations report improved morale, a boost in revenue, and reduced employee turnover as some of the advantages of an optimized onboarding process.
However, the right training program doesn’t stop at mere process training or software training during the first few days but is a valuable companion that sales reps depend on for their routine work.
Your sales reps can build relationships with clients, address customer needs, and spend most of their time selling. That’s a win-win situation for all parties involved.
At Sales Search International, we are in the business of knowing our clients’ needs, their sales cultures, where they are in the market—and where they want to be. Through expert software sales recruiting, we provide access to the passionate software salespeople who are a vehicle for business development.