Sales Rep Training

sales team training

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How to Level Up Your Team with Sales Training

If you’ve been reading our blogs, I’m sure you know that I strongly advocate for developing your people. When I was a sales manager and director, this was my special sauce – and I got better results, engagement, and retention than my peers when I focused on sales team training. Then I went and started 2 companies to help other revenue leaders do the same.

Whether it’s team size, competing priorities, or simply a previous failure to plan, I encourage you to invest in your people. In fact, there’s never been a more important time than now to train your people (Hello, “Great Resignation”).

Need help? Keep reading…

Why NOW Is the Time for Sales Team Training

True story: 10 years ago I stood on my first keynote stage and showed a picture of a baby with a headset. I captioned it with, “The ability to train/retrain people will be a critical differentiator.”

Lots of people laughed at the picture, but I don’t think anyone really took note. Please forgive me for what’s about to happen…

I TOLD YOU SO!

OK, now that’s out of the way. Whew, better.

Why you ask? Because it’s next to impossible to find talent. For a good twenty years, the gold standard was:

  • College degree
  • 2 years of sales experience
  • Played a competitive sport

In today’s super-employment and talent-short economy, these people just don’t exist! A good 50% or more entry-level sales rep jobs are BDR/SDR jobs, and the average lifespan of this role is under eighteen months.

So as sales leaders around the world lament the talent shortage (and come together to jointly blame recruiting – poor folks), the smart ones are doing two things:

  1. Hiring new and creative talent sources
  2. Hanging on to the people they’ve got

And how do you do this, pray tell?

Hiring from New Talent Pools

My favorite new hire is a caregiver looking to reenter the workforce (i.e. working moms). These superheroes can multitask, get more done by noon than the rest of us do in 3 days, and frankly, they’re just grateful to talk to grown-ups.

More creative sources:

  1. Tradespeople – If you sell to mechanics, go hire a mechanic.
  2. Customer Success/Service – I’ve literally never recommended this before, but they know your product and will love a chance at commission. Just profile/test first for proactivity and persistence.
  3. English Majors – Maybe THEY can compose a decent email.
  4. Wait Staff – Hustle (period).
  5. Community College Students – Flexible schedules, coin-operated.

Take a hard look at your normal criteria and try to throw half out the window. Hire for behavior vs. skill and street smarts vs. experience.

The key to making this work? You’re going to need a robust sales training program. That’s right, new hire AND ongoing training, PLUS manager development (because these people will need coaching). Listen, even when I’ve trained teams with 2-10 years of experience, they still needed sales skills training. There are some appalling habits out there – not to mention new channels (virtual) and technologies (Zoom) necessitating the upskill.

 

sales training budget

 
How? Outsource what you can and budget for a trainer ASAP. Yes, you’ll need both a budget and an internal person – check out this blog to help create your sales training budget. Here’s why: some stuff HAS to be built.

Every good training program includes the following components:

  • Sales Skills – outsource – hey, I know a vendor (keep scrolling to contact us 😉)
  • Systems Skills – outsource from your vendor
  • Process Skills – only you know how to get stuff done at your company
  • Product/Service Skills – a trainer can translate boring product info and glossy marketing info
  • Acumen – business and industry – this can go halfsies

It can take up to a year for a strong training headcount to develop all that needs to be taught in onboarding – and then we’ve got ongoing training, manager development, and more. Trust me, you’ll be glad you outsourced for a few years and wish you’d hired twice the headcount by end of year. Here’s another important reason why…

If you’ve been relying on your managers to train their newbies, it’s time to stop. Why?

  1. They’re bad trainers (sorry)
  2. They should be coaching it, not training it
  3. They’re too busy (interviewing alone could be full-time)
How Sales Training and Development Helps You Keep People

The most important thing to remember here is: It’s a buyer’s market.

They literally have five other sales job options. Does the training they get play into their decision to stay? Hell yeah. Research by Forbes states that 87% of millennials want professional development and career growth opportunities (more so than a hefty paycheck!). They may also care more about social causes than their paycheck, but hey – good thing they will inherit the Earth!

If you’re losing people in the first 3 months, it’s a red flag your onboarding program isn’t working. (Six to nine months, I recommend you look at the manager, but that’s a different blog).

The next most important point to remember is: Nobody likes feeling like they stink.

If they feel successful, they will stay. I can’t tell you how many reps have told us they were getting ready to leave before our training, or that they’re feeling excited now to come to work tomorrow. There actually are skills to help them get a hold of more people, capture attention, and get callbacks. Give them the gift of actual selling time with prospects and they’ll keep coming to work.

Development can help you keep folks by aligning skills training to career paths. We both know that reps under 25 would like a promotion for two straight weeks of success and when we don’t feel like enabling that, we just go back to review point one, am I right? So build out micro-promotions with skills training. It will take your trainer a few months to get mapped out and aligned (or contact us to use our standard pre-built skill paths!), and Boom! You’re in business.

Great career paths include time on the job, skills, development, and results. You’ll see rep engagement and longevity increase simply by having and communicating the program. And remember, development is a reward to this generation! Kicking butt!? Congrats! You’ve earned a course to get even better! Crushing the job? Awesome, you’ve unlocked the BDR Level 2 or AE Level 1 career path!

Finally, a word from the guilty. Although I’ve built and delivered and preached thousands of training courses and programs, this is the first year I’m finally putting development into my own budget. Now that Factor 8 is over ten people – all with different jobs – I’ll solve this by simply giving folks a budget to find their own development. Could be a course, a conference, or a coach. Their choice. If your hands are tied every other way, get SOMETHING in the budget so it’s easier next year and the year after. Your future self will thank you.

Ready to invest in sales team training?

Contact us today to request information on our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps (and managers).


Why You Should Focus on Virtual Sales Training When You’re Not Selling

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Why You Should Focus on Virtual Sales Training When You’re Not Selling

I’ve loved hearing about leaders using this time of unreturned calls and stalled deals to sharpen the saw with their teams. Sure we’re all apprehensive, but so much is out of our control. These leading-from-the-front heads of sales are looking at their to-do list saying, “NOW I have the time I’ve been craving. What can we finally get to doing?”

Cleaning out the pipeline?

Managing dupes and updating CRM?

Building case studies?

(And my favorite) Train the team!

We so seldom come off the game field to the practice field, but I invite you all to join me here in the coming weeks.  

Now, how do you do it?

The goal here is team engagement, team learning, improvement, and team bonding. That means sending them a link to a (mostly) sales pitch webinar isn’t going to cut it. “Click, yawn, take the quiz, take it again” eLearning isn’t either. Don’t phone it in or give them housecleaning learning (you’ll finally pass the HR required learning!). Use this time to bond. Inspire. And practice for when it’s game time!

We’ve been training virtually for a few years now and we’ve learned a lot about what works.  Top tips:

Pick a topic and do it together.

Everyone attends. Meet fifteen minutes early and set expectations/goals for the training (what do you want to get out of it and why?)  Open a private chat channel during the training if it isn’t interactive. Then meet for 30 minutes after to collect best practices and insights. Even better, set goals for how we’ll try and apply the new goods in the coming weeks. Want an A+?  Issue a challenge (best-recorded call sent to me, cleanest pipe by Friday, best case study) and a contest!

Find interactive training. 

Most content houses and webinars are sadly one-way (and a little snoozy). Harsh but fair. Good training is interactive, short, fun and easy to apply to your job. Even online. When I set out to move Factor 8’s content online, I vowed never to have five slides go by without some sort of engagement (sort it, pick it, classify it, choose it). We used real calls and gave script samples for every class.  There should be activities to help apply on the job and a forum to share best practices (we call these Happy Hours). See what’s available to you from your company and associations, but preview first so you aren’t torturing the team instead of building them.

Blend team and on-your-own training.  

If you don’t have access to good virtual training, try a book club. Assign some reading on their own and have each person lead a discussion / chapter or section.  During the discussion be sure to cover how to apply concepts to your company/product/customers, give examples, and then an activity to go and do it. The best part of training is the application portion.  Leaders own this.

Talk about it.

Make sure your team knows your intent and strategy here.  Use the sports and playing field analogy if it helps, but resist the temptation to just assign and micromanage.  Each of my recommendations includes team discussion and sharing for a reason. Working together to build the best messaging and sharing wins along the way will bring you all together and make life much more fun.

If you don’t have access to good eLearning, Factor 8 wants to share a free class in The Sales Bar for you and your team. We know that now more than ever, you need training for your team. Interested? Email “I need training!” to info@factor8.com and we’ll hook you up. Or, hit me up directly if you have a special circumstance at lb@factor8.com

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inside sales lessons

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Three Inside Sales Lessons From A Six-Year-Old

Last week my son made his first sales call. For an inside sales thought leader, you have got to believe this was big in my house! My brave six-year-old D.J. read the school script to relatives & friends and got pledges for his APEX fundraiser.

READ: Sales Is A Confidence Sport

Watching a little human do this for the first time made ME nervous – and OH. SO. PROUD. It reminded me of a few truths we could all keep in mind when preparing new hires to take to the phones for the first time:

Don’t assume anyone can do this

ANY human will get nervous asking people for money over the phone. Let’s all keep this in mind when we ask for more dials and results. His brother BAILED after one call (and he’s the extrovert in the family!!).

Set up small wins early and celebrate BIG

The small wins he got (and we celebrated big time) energized him to make more calls. He was pulling aunties out of the woodwork! When we set up small wins early and celebrate BIG, they’ll be hooked.

Do a better job teaching rejection in new-hire training

When he got his first “no” he totally rolled with it and still wanted to make another call. Why? Because we set it up ahead of time that it would likely happen, why, and what to say. Special shout out to Uncle Shawn who agreed up front to say no to a six-year-old so we could teach this lesson (THAT wasn’t easy!). More “NO” in role plays and more help in why they happen and how to handle them.

Remember that just like a first grader, our new hires watch us to determine how to act. It’s good to show some nerves, to celebrate small wins, and to get right back up like a “no” doesn’t sting a little. I know that the next time I’m in class I’ll be a little less tough on the 23-year-old making their first calls.

By the way, my proudest moment was when he DITCHED THE SCRIPT and felt confident enough to use his own words. I can’t believe I didn’t record it! 

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8 Signs That Your Rep Onboarding Program Is Broken

Do you mind if I start with the obligatory story? I think it’s one you might recognize. It’s the one about a busy sales manager frustrated with the under-trained newbie reps she got as “graduates” from her training department.

But this story is about me. I was the “undertrained newbie” – and the boss. I was twenty-four, and was brought in from the outside to manage a team of 15 outbound B2B Reps in tech. I’m new. My team is new, and we’re all “graduates” of the company onboarding program and all 100% clueless. (Yes, of course we turned it around and were the number one team within a quarter – cue the Rocky music here – but this isn’t that story.)

This is the story of being frustrated that you can come out of a 2 or even 4 week program and still have absolutely no idea how to do your job.

Who do I call first?

What do I say?

Why isn’t anyone calling me back?

What’s the product SKU for an IBM Thinkpad again?

Sound familiar?

Brace for it–now I’m going to hit you with some stats.

  • One in five sales executives are satisfied with their Rep onboarding program (Sales Architects 2014).
  • Fifty percent of reps selling today need to be retrained (or removed) (Bain / CEB 2016)
  • Organizations spend an average of 3x more on rep tools than on rep development (Inside Sales.com 2016) and 25X on recruiting (Training Magazine)
  • Attrition can be cut in half by a good training program (Training Magazine)

So, are you an unwitting accomplice to rep abuse? Let’s find out. Here are some top signs that your new hire training might be broken:

1. The majority of your attrition occurs in the first five months.
They like the company, don’t mind the job, but they’re not ramping up fast enough to make money and they’re frustrated. Time to pull the ripcord.

2. It takes your business development reps over 3 months or your account managers over 6 months to ramp to target.
There will always be a ramp, but a great new hire training program can cut this in half (and significantly impact your attrition, too).

3. Average call length is about 1:30.
These are voicemails, every last one of them. If your reps can’t get people on the phone, keep them on the phone, and get calls back, they need better sales training.

4. Your program is under 4 days or over 4 weeks long.
The first is an orientation, the latter is a firehose. Get them on the phones after two weeks and bring them back for the rest of it! Check out my video on “Just in time” New Hire Training.

 

5. Your reps have no clear plan of attack for their lead list / book / and/or day.
Ask them how they decide who to call. If they say they start at the “A’s…” then you’re missing a cohesive sales strategy – or your training department isn’t training it.

6. You aren’t training any business, customer, or industry acumen.
Forrester taught us that over 60% of buyers found their sales rep added no value to the buying process. College isn’t teaching them how, and we have to.

7. You’re using the same training as the field.
I get it, you had to use something and your org is new. But it won’t work and frankly frustrates reps to try this old-school model in their new-school world.

8. HR is teaching your reps how to sell.
85% of the best-in-class use a professional sales trainer or curriculum. When’s the last time HR sold your product?

How’d you do? Some of these might take a custom report, but trust me: you’ll be glad you had it created. Your training department needs to be your partner like marketing is your partner – no, scratch that, recruiting is your partner…wait, I can do better…payroll is your partner.

In a recent model I completed with Microsoft, we found that they could add over $50 million back into revenue by cutting new hire sales ramp time down to best-in-class – and nearly double what they could save by cutting attrition to the same. If you focus and invest here, it will quickly be like having another 1/3 of your headcount to help you hit the number.

Ready to fix your oboarding program? Learn the components of a World Class onboarding program that you can steal immediately. Read the article here.

Want more? I did a quick video on what good sales training looks like. What are you going to change in your onboarding program?

This article originally appeared on SalesPop!

 

 

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Why Rep Ramp Time Lights Me Up (VIDEO)

In the twenty years I’ve been at this, I’ve found one singular topic that lights me up the fastest:

Rep ramp time.

I wish I could tell you that every client and every event focuses here with me, but the truth is they don’t. I’m a bit of an island on this one, but I think that’s only because we’re not all exactly sure just how much slow ramp is costing us (or could be saving us) – more on that in a second. According to the most recent research from my friend Trish and her team at The Bridge Group (full report here), the average ramp time for an Inside Sales rep is 4.4 months. Let’s be honest, Trish works with awesome tech companies, and they’ve been doing Inside Sales longer than anyone. If you’re a distribution company, an outsourcer, big box retail, or manufacturing, chances are you average 6 months until Reps start paying for themselves (or “six months ramp”). If your training department is less than 5 years old and/or reports up through HR instead of sales, chances are you’re north of 9 months. When you are spending 2-3 times the rep’s annual salary to onboard him, every extra week it takes to get him to start paying that back is a big deal. Especially when 1/3 to 1/2 of them will be gone within the year. So which costs more…attrition or ramp? Well this blog is about rep ramp time, so I hope you guessed it. Man I bet you were surprised. But wait till you hear how much more!

We modeled it for a little company called Microsoft.

They were hot about the cost of attrition with some outsourcers, so we ran a model comparing the cost of their industry-average attrition vs. best in class, and then compared that against their industry-average onboarding vs. best-in-class. It’s basically a magic wand question – If you could fix either, which saves you more?

Cutting the ramp time saved nearly DOUBLE than cutting attrition

(BONUS ALERT: help reps make money faster, you’re also going to impact attrition). The money is in the green seat. The what? The cost of having your customers worked by a rep ramping. The same book or leads worked by a tenured rep produces double or triple that of a green rep. Multiple that by the six months that your rep is green. Ouch. NOW assume that 20-50% of your floor is “green” due to attrition, and we’re talking big dollars. I don’t know your numbers (email me if you want to plug them into our model). But I’m betting big money that cutting your ramp time in half would be like adding an extra sales team to your numbers.

So, how do we do it? GET TO IT LB, right?

Well, I often like to blame your training team, but ramp time is a function of a lot of different groups: Are you recruiting the right candidates? Is your hiring process designed to identify the attributes that align with your most successful reps? Does your new hire training provide practical experience that mirrors what reps will see when they hit the floor? Here’s one trick that I think is CRUCIAL to cutting ramp time: Use Call Recordings! But not the way you think. They don’t even have to be those green Reps’ calls; any calls will do. When used right, recorded calls simulate experience. Months and months of it! It’s the reason all Factor 8 sales training uses call recordings and live floor time: simulate real experience. (Here’s the secret sauce folks)

Simulated experience is crucial because the key isn’t really about WHAT skill to apply. . . it’s about WHEN to apply it.

This is what takes so darn long to collect and thereby ramp.

So infuse it as often as possible using the Pause Game. Check out the video on how to do this:

(I think I filmed this one in my front courtyard, so enjoy the stupid plane overhead that just wouldn’t land!)
Personally, I’m a fan of hands on engagement from Sales leaders here. Have your Supervisors grab a bunch of recorded calls and pull your new hires into a room for a few rounds of The Pause Game. Then sign them up to do it every day during new hire training. The more real life situations you can expose new reps to, the faster they can build up their bank of experiences. That experience bank is what will get them ramped and producing faster. Man this was a long one. I’ll work on that. I hope this is helpful!

ACTION suggestions:

  • Forward this to your lead Manager / Supervisor and tell them to make it happen
  • Forward this to your New Hire Training Manager and tell them to make it happen
  • Ask both of them to invite you to the first one.
  • Email me if you want to plug in your own numbers or learn more ways to reduce your ramp
Here’s to you (and your ramp), LB

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