10 Actionable Tips for Creating Your Sales Team Development Plan + Budget [“Sales Shot” Workshop]
10 Actionable Tips for Creating Your Sales Team Development Plan + Budget
[“Sales Shot” Workshop]
Sales Leaders
Factor 8 Named a Selling Power 2022 Top Virtual Sales Training Company
Factor 8 is pleased to announce it has been included on Selling Power’s Top Virtual Sales Training Companies in 2022 list.
“Since our start in 2008, we’ve been training virtual sales. It was uncommon even 5 years ago for sales leaders to embrace selling software, technology, and pharmaceuticals over the phone! I’m inspired by the industry’s shift to virtual selling in the past decade and look forward to continuing our progress for the next ten years. Factor 8 believes fully in the power of inside/virtual teams and our responsibility to train sellers and managers to maximize this legitimate, and daresay dominant, channel. Thank you Selling Power for this prestigious designation,” says Factor 8 Founder & President Lauren Bailey.
Factor 8’s winning application highlighted the incredible success of its virtual sales training programs and its ability to adapt to its customer’s needs in the constantly evolving corporate landscape. With many years of experience in virtual sales, Factor 8 quickly became a strategic partner to various B2B and B2C companies, helping their sales teams adjust to and excel in virtual and hybrid selling environments.
According to Selling Power publisher and CEO Gerhard Gschwandtner, “Research shows that sales training has dramatically shifted from live to virtual. Selling Power magazine has identified the Top Virtual Sales Training companies in the market. Each one of the companies included delivers best-in-class, virtual training solutions that consistently drive-up sales. Their efforts and expertise helped their clients reach and exceed sales goals during an increasingly challenging economy.”
All companies on the list submitted a comprehensive application that included a detailed listing of their offerings for both training and retention, delivery methods, and their response to changing market conditions.
The main criteria used when comparing applicants and selecting the companies to include on this year’s list were:
- Strategies to keep participants engaged
- The scope and breadth of virtual sales training offerings
- Methodologies for supporting participant retention
- Innovation in offerings and/or delivery as a response to customer needs or changes in the marketplace
- Strength of client satisfaction and general client feedback
To evaluate client satisfaction, the Selling Power team surveyed and considered feedback from more than 270 clients of the applicants. Here is a brief selection of comments from their clients:
- “Simply put, they provide superior training and development for our team. From our entry-level folks to our most experienced team members, everyone gains knowledge from their sessions.”
- “Fabulous training. Engaging, passionate, and always willing to go the extra mile. Their investment in our team has been amazing.”
- “First Class organization that stands behind their training services.”
- “Great overall experience and concepts outlined to address the key sales success areas we are targeting. Their team has maintained a high level of service, and we appreciate the partnership.”
- “Great company, great people, great results!”
Selling Power magazine editors say CROs, sales VPs, and sales enablement leaders can leverage this list to find the right sales training partner to deliver best-in-class virtual sales training.
See Selling Power’s Top Virtual Sales Training Companies in 2022 list at: https://bit.ly/3NtA2Cw
About Factor 8
Factor 8 is an award-winning sales rep and management training company focused 100% on helping sales teams sell in a virtual world. They are a team of expert sales leaders who quit the daily grind so they could spend their time developing people. Together, they’ve solved the big problem: Sales Reps and Managers are not gaining the skills they need to quickly feel confident and successful long-term. That means they ramp slowly and leave quickly.
They’ve made the calls, done the demos, managed the teams, and forecasted the deals. They have a better way to ensure teams hit higher revenue goals faster. https://factor8.com/
About Selling Power
In addition to Selling Power, the leading digital magazine for sales managers and sales VPs since 1981, Personal Selling Power, Inc., produces the Sales Management Digest and Daily Boost of Positivity online newsletters, as well as videos featuring interviews with top executives. Selling Power is a regular media sponsor of the Sales 3.0 Conference, which is attended by a total of more than 4,500 sales leaders each year. www.sellingpower.com
Looking to partner with a top virtual sales training company?
Contact us today to learn more about our virtual sales training programs
for sales reps and sales managers.
7 Hacks to Improve New Sales Rep Onboarding
When was the last time you learned something new as a sales leader? If you’re struggling to find an answer, that’s a problem.
In fact, the problem is with our entire system of onboarding. Too many organizations see learning as an event, not a career-long process. So once the onboarding phase is complete, training stops, and sales reps are expected to figure things out on their own.
But ask yourself this: how many salespeople know how to do their job perfectly and meet quotas consistently after a three-month training period?
Don’t worry. I’ll wait.
Of course, that expectation is silly. Maybe that’s why 62% of companies consider themselves ineffective at onboarding new sales hires.
No one—and I’m including myself—masters their job so quickly. We become proficient at sales, management, coaching, and leadership a little bit every day. Then one day, we wake up, and suddenly we’ve arrived!!! (That is until it’s time to upskill again.)
So if you’re relying on a single onboarding phase to create perfectly competent reps, you’re missing the point. The goal of onboarding should be not competence, but confidence—which will motivate them to keep learning over their whole career.
Not only that, but with salesperson turnover at 1.7X higher than other fields, building confidence and empowering your reps to continually improve is a powerful tool to aid in retention.
So how do you do onboarding the right way? Here are seven hacks that we’ve learned over our years of experience.
1. Focus on confidence, not competence
I alluded to this already, but too many sales onboarding initiatives start out with the wrong goal. When you try to get reps to a certain competence level within 60-90 days, they just end up drinking from the fire hose, and very little of that knowledge sticks.
So instead of the unrealistic goal of hitting quota within 90 days, make sales confidence your primary onboarding goal. Train the reps in a smaller number of high-impact topics, then send them out feeling like they’re ready to tackle the world.
THEN set up future training for them to continually upskill over the next months and years. If your reps are already confident, they’ll be anxious to improve themselves and will drink it all in!
2. Cover six primary competencies
Here are the six main competencies where you’ll have the most impact:
- Product. Not the history (no one cares—except maybe your investors). But how do you sell it? What problems does it solve? Emphasize benefits, not features.
- Systems. What resources do you have in place to support your reps? How do they access them? Where can they go with questions?
- Process. What are the top five questions a rep will get from customers, and how should they address them?
- Acumen. Reps need to know certain basic industry and business terminology to sell in their territory. What do they need to know to be effective on day one?
- Sales. You may think you’ve bought experience, but in today’s market, you can’t count on that. What basic sales competencies do reps need to have a solid grasp of?
- People. Who are the reps going to be working with on a day-to-day basis? Don’t just toss them over the wall—help them get to know their team.
3. Cut off the talking head
No one learns anything from a talking head (and those that do probably aren’t in sales). Salespeople learn by doing. So don’t just talk at them—get them engaged in the material and using it.
This is why it’s important to not only train your reps but also your managers. Managers are responsible for building a development culture in your organization. Your managers need to be trained on how to coach so they can help reps better develop their skills.
4. Hire reps in groups
If you want your salespeople to work as a team, hire them as a team. Training reps in groups is a great way to encourage more engagement with the material—and especially offline side discussions. Getting an entire cohort on board with the same material will only help everyone row in the same direction when they get onto the sales floor (or “virtual” sales floor).
5. Work with third-party professional trainers
According to Aberdeen, 45% of best-in-class sales organizations use third-party sales trainers. With good reason—if you’ve hired a cohort of 20-25 reps, a single sales manager just doesn’t have the bandwidth to coach and train them all, especially in a virtual world.
Professional sales trainers, on the other hand, will be able to get down in the mud with the reps, spending focused time on getting them up to speed and building their confidence. Remember: it’s important during onboarding to not only get the rep to process new information but encode it into their brains and bodies so they put it into practice.
(Psst! If you’re searching for inside sales training vendors, check out what you should be looking for here.)
6. Leverage the Voice of the Customer
Your reps are going to be working with customers eventually. So why not incorporate the Voice of the Customer into your training? One great tip is to have a library of pre-recorded, model sales calls that you can pull up and walk through new hires with. These calls should demonstrate top objections and (most importantly) how reps should respond to them.
7. Build a nest
If your goal is to build rep confidence, then it’s a good idea to have a safe place for them to go. (No, salespeople aren’t all tough as nails—we have a human side too!) Pairing reps with a designated nesting manager—usually a high-performing rep looking to move into management—can help them build confidence and skills. Keep in mind that a nesting manager is someone who’s purely developmental in focus. They’re not pulled in to save deals. They’re just about coaching people.
Final thoughts on improving training + ramp time
Never underestimate the importance of a strong onboarding program. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. If you want reps to have a solid, lasting relationship with your company, then onboarding is the perfect chance to start that relationship on the right foot.
And don’t be afraid to put some effort into it. Because if you do, you’ll definitely reap rewards down the road.
Ready to improve new sales rep onboarding?
We’ve got your back! Contact us today to learn how you can incorporate training into your sales rep onboarding process to speed ramp time and improve retention.
How to Hire and Retain Top Sales Reps and Managers
Help! I’m hiring salespeople, but where do I find them? Well, probably not in the stack of resumes from your recruiting department. Or maybe you already know that and hence the Google search bringing you here. Great sales talent is near impossible to find these days and will continue to be difficult in the coming years thanks to shifting employment rates, aging demographics, and increases in sales hiring. Your ideal candidate profile with a few years of experience in your industry and a college degree isn’t coming to you. So, what do you do?
Here are a few creative strategies and tactics to consider when hiring salespeople:
Get Ready to Win
It’s a seller’s market, not an employer’s market so every candidate you do happen to find will be comparing you to other potential offers. You are competing with other companies, so make sure now that your…
- Website reflects a great culture
- Glassdoor reviews are positive
- Employees and customers have posted good things
- Website reflects diversity (they won’t apply if they don’t see it)
- Your process moves 2x faster than it used to. If it takes you 4 weeks to hire, they’ll accept elsewhere
- Social presence is engaging, recent, and active
- Pay and benefits are at, or above, market rate
- Company social causes exist and are enticing
- Job descriptions aren’t wish lists. Keep them short to fill the funnel (key for females)
- Career growth and development opportunities are plentiful
More than ever, employees are shopping employers and the new generations care less about pay and more about career growth, development opportunities, and social causes. Ask yourself: How would they look to their followers if they joined your company? Will their friends think they went back to the dark ages? Or will they have FOMO because the company is totally GOAT?
(If you don’t know what either of these terms mean, it’s OK, I had to look up one of them too. But maybe get a 20-something in recruiting to do the social checks for you 😉)
Get More Candidates
OK, got this all delegated and you’re ready to win the battle? Now it’s time to fill the pipeline. Like any smart sales leader, you know better than to have just one source. Here are some great actions to try this year:
- Repurpose a sales headcount to shop LinkedIn for passive candidates
- Start a program at local colleges BEFORE they graduate or go to career fairs
- Partner with sales colleges to volunteer to speak or judge role plays
- Grant a massive bonus for referrals
- Comp (or measure) managers for finding their own talent
- Go talk to employees in service, marketing, product, delivery who might try sales
- Try community college or tech school career fairs (is a 4-year degree totally necessary?)
- Use social networks to post (e.g. is there a local mom’s group?)
- Try advertising a contest, scholarship, or other promotion for sellers/leaders and use it as a marketing funnel (it’s a lead list! Call it!)
- Find your favorite person each week (Restaurant server? Your kid’s teacher?) and recruit
If these seem like desperate measures, then I’ve hit the mark. This is not a time for passive recruiting. Anyone great at selling who isn’t employed already is probably not your hire.
Improve Your Selection
Got folks in the funnel but need help choosing a better fit?
Listen, I made some HORRIBLE hiring decisions my first year in every new position. Bet you have too. It’s critical to remember that your hiring process needs to be a documented and rigorous pipeline just like your sales funnel. Here are a few questions to help:
- Is the screening aligned to the job (e.g. phone screens for phone sales?)
- Do you have defined gates to pass to the next stage?
- Are you involving multiple decision-makers?
- Are you looking for experience and skill? Or behavior and aptitude (pick the latter)?
- Who’s doing the heaviest lifting and how can you put less on your managers?
- Do candidates have a great idea of what to expect? Could a job shadow help?
- Are your managers aligned on the definition of a good candidate?
- Can managers hire their own teams (trust me, don’t do it for them)
- Do your screening tools help you increase the pool vs. decrease (your resume screener or profile tool may be weeding out today’s definition of good)
- Have you trained managers on how to interview?
I know, overwhelming – especially with your rag-tag group of new and tenured managers (just guessing). I got your back on this one with our new Sales Bar eLearning course, “Hire Like a Rockstar”, that will help your entire team define good, create a rubric of criteria, and align interview questions + scoring to make consistently better hires. You’re welcome. 🙂
Keep the Talent You Find
Finally, we can’t address keeping your sales team afloat if there’s a hole in the boat. The best way to staff your team is to keep the ones you have. Remember, you make your number every month on the backs of your B players. Work like hell to keep your A, B, and C players coming to work and grow. Here’s what’s most important in this fight:
- Monthly sales training opportunities. That’s right, several hours a month is table stakes, and a pass to LinkedIn learning isn’t impressive anymore
- Monthly call coaching. Yes, monthly. Make sure your managers are trained on how to do call coaching well and are doing it consistently
- A documented career path with clarity on how and when they’ll move up
- Opportunities to move up within 18 months (average lifespan of a new rep)
- Access to leaders. Manager meetings, skip levels, feeling close to executives
- Company social causes. Volunteering together or a pet charity with hands-on opportunities
- Work/life balance. Kids these days (did I just type that?) are uber-focused on having a full life, less stress, and chances to be with family and friends
- Basic tech stack. They’re used to a great CRM, engagement tool, call recording, data sources, and more. If you’re using Excel spreadsheets, you’d better rock the rest of this list
- A mission to believe in. Listen, even if you sell floor wax, be sure every employee knows how they’re helping change the world
- A mentor and/or buddy. Having a great friend and/or confidant at work is a leading indicator of employee engagement.
They have choices, and as soon as they choose you, someone else is recruiting them.
Need to train newly hired sales reps or managers?
We’ve got your back! Contact us today to learn about our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps and managers.
Why Your Salespeople Are Quitting (and How to Retain Them)
Whether you believe in “The Great Resignation” or not, one thing is for sure, there has been a record number of people quitting their jobs in the past year.
It seems like every month this year we received more emails bouncing back and letting us know that “John is no longer with the company.” The more of these responses we got, the more we wondered what was the true cause of this unprecedented mass exodus (and if there is anything we can do to make it stop).
To get to the root of the issue, we surveyed thousands of sales professionals to find the true cause of attrition amongst sales teams and to learn what reps and managers want most from their employers. We received responses from every level of the corporate ladder, from individual contributors up to CEOs. Some of the responses were obvious, some were rather surprising.
Spoiler Alert: Higher compensation is NOT the golden ticket to fixing the retention problem.
In our data, we learned that 63% of reps and managers started a new job within the last year. Yikes, that’s a lot of job changes! Most leaders cited the #1 reason their employees leave was due to lack of competitive compensation. However, both reps and managers listed a lack of training and development as their #1 reason for departing. Looks like we, as leaders, need to make some adjustments to improve sales team retention.
The next surprising stat we found was about coaching. The manager responses state that over 86% of managers were regularly coaching their reps. While the rep responses showed the majority of reps desire MORE coaching than what they’re currently receiving. To us, this communicates that while there may be coaching happening, what’s really missing is quality coaching. Coaching is one of our favorite topics (and the one we have seen provide the greatest impact). Recently, we hunkered down and gave some insight on how to master call coaching and how both reps and managers can prepare for an upcoming call coaching session.
While there were certainly areas where reps and leaders didn’t align, there was one area where all salespeople saw eye-to-eye. At each rung of the corporate ladder, the survey responses told us that reps and managers both want and need more ongoing sales training and leaders agreed that their reps and managers need more training. Sounds like this might be an easy area of opportunity for retention!
Want more insight? Make sure you grab your free copy of our survey results below!
Want to know how to retain your salespeople?
Download our Sales Team Retention Infographic to learn why reps and managers are quitting and how leaders can better retain them.
The Ultimate Sales Rep + Manager Relationship [“Sales Shot” Workshop]
The Ultimate Sales Rep + Manager Relationship
[“Sales Shot” Workshop]
Improve the Rep Lifespan: 10 Ways You Can Help Retain Sales Reps
It’s more critical than ever to retain your sales reps. It takes months to fill the seat and even longer to ramp to quota, only to start over when reps leave.
In fact, the average lifespan of a BDR/SDR rep is down from over two years to just fourteen months according to this report from The Bridge Group.
Why is our lifespan shrinking? I have a few theories:
- Expectations are increasing. More tools + higher customer expectations and knowledge + the systematic approach to marketing and lead-passing means we have clearer and more demanding expectations of entry-level reps than we did two years ago.
- We’re adding tools at an alarming rate. The intent is to make the job easier, but we may be over-operationalizing – especially if we don’t have great hands-on training during onboarding.
- Customers are avoiding us. You probably don’t need an explanation here, but when we combine the customer journey stats (70% of research is done without sales) and phone answer rates (it takes 6+ calls to reach most of them), the sales job feels more fruitless on a daily basis.
- Desperate hires. The employee pool is shrinking and demand for inside sellers is growing. We may not be onboarding folks who are excited about careers in sales, but instead “testing the waters.”
- Role specialization. Although segmenting sellers according to the sales cycle makes good sense, it doesn’t help alleviate the boredom of outbound cold calling nor show the variety and spice that full-cycle selling used to. We’re starting reps in arguably the toughest gig and they’re opting out before getting to the fun of really serving customers for the majority of their days (e.g. in inbound, account management)
- Reps want more. More and more studies are telling us that reps seek development on the job and leave when it’s lacking. I’m not seeing studies saying we’re providing more. In fact, nearly 50% of companies surveyed by the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals said they have no ongoing development available. Ouch.
OK, now what do we do about it? Here are ten millennial, new to sales, rep-focused tips to help.
BREAK UP THE JOB
After x hours or days of outbound cold calling, give reps new assignments where they can learn new tasks and talk to customers. Try calling past customers for feedback, riding along on renewal calls, developing new case studies, building the social responsibility calendar, qualifying inbound forms, doing competitor research, and taking some inbound calls.
MINI CAREER PATHS
This idea isn’t new and it isn’t just because millennials love trophies. When you’re slogging through thousands of calls, you need something to shoot for and quick. If your first company promotion is after fourteen months, pull it in to keep them past their average new SDR expiration date.
FLEXIBILITY
Ten years ago we added free breakfast and a ping pong table and checked the engagement box. Now it’s table stakes. So what can you offer that doesn’t break the bank? How about earning flexible hours, early out on Fridays, or work-from-home days? Low cost with a massive reward (just implement with proper gates and oversight).
CONNECT PEOPLE AT ALL LEVELS
Remember the Gallup engagement studies from long ago? The largest percentage of actions leaders could take were focused on getting the employee connected – with other employees, their boss, and the company. Tie their job into the company mission and vision and help them feel important often. Create opportunities for people to make friends and work and spend time with them. Implement a mentoring program. Have a few work and non-work clubs available (and randomly attend some yourself!). Train managers on how to engage their teams and be people leaders over metrics managers.
INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT PLANS
Planning reps’ careers and training with a long-term focus takes nothing more than an hour of managers’ time and scratches the development itch for reps. Free, easy, winner!
BEWARE THE SURVEY
Yes, you should ask how they’re doing. But the bigger the company, the bigger and longer the process. Truth: when an employee shares an issue or a suggestion, they wonder a week later why it isn’t fixed. This makes it worse! If you have autonomy over your group, keep your input nimble and frequent. (I’m thinking of the 3-button smiley stations after you go through some TSA checkpoints!). Get the gauge, then meet with folks 1:1 or a small group to get feedback and input. Bonus: this gives them facetime with the leader (thank you engagement spike) and helps you set expectations about what’s feasible.
DEVELOPMENT BUDGET
Got a plan and zero resources outside of free webinars and books? Fix it. Budget a minimum of $1500 per rep a year to give yourself the room to develop and keep them. It’s the new ping pong table. Reps will go where the development is.
CHECK YOUR REWARD AND RECOGNITION
Two common errors are when the same reps win everything (the tenured folks with the big books of accounts according to your newbies) and our gamification boards celebrating the same garbage (dials and revenue). Build a strategy where all roles and all levels can feel like winners. Work on celebrating ratios and KPIs over activity metrics and even try newbie-friendly behavior rewards (these are subjective measures that celebrate new folks doing the right things, even though results aren’t in yet). My favorite is a first-base contest where reps are rewarded for getting the conversation (first base).
WORK ON YOUR MANAGERS
You may have robust rep training, but lackluster managers – perhaps newly promoted (I speak of what I know here!). Did your managers receive training on how to develop their teams? How to provide proper call coaching? Support rep career growth? You may be doing everything right but failing on the front lines in execution. Invest in a manager and engage 12 reps…
CLARITY IS QUEEN
The most frustrating thing for a sales employee is not knowing where they stand. Are your annual goals released on January 1 or March 31? Work on that. Does every rep know their monthly, even daily goals? There’s a worthy action item. Do they know what good sounds like on calls and how to win this month’s meeting or the annual trip? Working on this blocking and tackling can be easier and more effective than trying to open an on-site concierge or daycare (in every employee survey I’ve seen!)
All of these are easy, but only make your top priority list if you get serious about increasing your retention. Find your number and set a goal that your reps will stay 2, 4, or 6 months longer than the average. Your commission check will thank you.
Want to know how to better retain sales reps?
Download our Sales Team Retention Infographic to learn why reps and managers are quitting and how leaders can better retain them.
How to Scale Your Inside Sales Team
In the past decade, inside sales has been out-pacing field sales by a 10-15x ratio. Scalability is a challenge inside sales leaders will continue to face for years to come.
While I normally focus on building your process, today my job is to talk about the people angle. Although, a good half of my people suggestions are process suggestions! Allow me to highlight the top 3 common pitfalls we have all faced when trying to scale your inside sales team and a few outside resources that can help.
Pitfall #1: The success of a massive growth number will live or die in a rep’s ramp time.
Ramp time means something different to each company. It could be time to quota, paying for their overhead, or something unique to you. Whatever your ramp goal, you’ll be creating projections to hit a 1.5x, 3x or even 5x number and you’ll be doing it with a new headcount.
That means your success hinges on the ability of your headcount to:
- Be hired on time
- Be trained on time
- Hit goal on time
Really dig into your new hire training program, and start doing it six months before your first hiring wave. If you haven’t onboarded recently, check out our sales rep onboarding best practices. And if your offices are still remote, brush up on virtually onboarding new sales reps
Pro Tip: Hire a sales-focused training leader NOW. Most new hire training programs need a LOT of work, and the good ones can cut your ramp time by HALF.
Pitfall #2: We don’t change our hiring process.
Even if you previously onboarded an awesome team that is still with you today, your process likely needs a few tweaks before being pressure-tested during scaling. We usually see breakdowns in two key places:
- The pool isn’t as deep any longer. We are in a hiring crisis, folks. Many companies stole great talent when they were new on the scene, but now they’re competing for headcount like everyone else. So even if the number of candidates and job postings are similar, you may find the depth of talent more shallow.
- The hiring and onboarding process wasn’t built for volume and is probably too dependent on your managers (but the slew of new hires on the floor will need them more too!) At launch, these managers had all kinds of time to hire. If you triple your model (then double it for the shallow talent pool), think of how many hours per day they will be in interviews. Ouch!
Pro Tip: Pull hiring out of HR and to a recruiter – even if you need to re-appropriate a sales headcount. You need someone doing passive recruiting on the front end, AND who can handle a phone screen for sales. It’s the only way to free up your managers’ time. Make sure you tie the recruiter’s compensation to the RIGHT hires that align with your goals, instead of fighting a recruiting company’s goal of straight-up bodies. I’ve seen way too many new hire classes filled with “live bodies” by recruiters only to have to rehire a replacement class a month later. Sales leaders, make no mistake, the need to retrain or rehire is how your hiring goals will be perceived in a culture of scale.
Also, check your hiring process. It should look like your pipeline, with your managers involved only toward the final stages. Oh, and let them hire their own team, OK? (Managers, you can send your cash directly to the Factor 8 HQ for that tip).
Pitfall #3: Develop your managers, NOW.
I’m watching a friend’s floor triple in size right now. They’re crazy-successful and swimming in leads. They need a headcount to maximize the revenue. What they’re missing is strong leadership, definitions of what ‘good’ looks like, and consistency among the management team. And folks, it’s being held together with duct tape and rainbows right now. These managers are SO (say it like a teenage girl) green. Everyone runs different reports, they all manage a different sales process, there are seven disparate call methodologies, no one can forecast because pipelines are atrocious, teams are mixed and matched constantly (because managers are leaving the chaos!) and no two are managed the same. I’d say they’re all marching to a different beat, but no one remembered to hire the drummer.
Pro Tip: Hire a drummer…as long as that drummer is a series of documented processes (management cadence, performance improvement, sales handoffs, sales process to name a few). Then, TEACH your managers how to execute against them. You and I both know these guys were reps five minutes ago. They need training. They need help being better leaders (or you’ll quickly wind up back at #1 hiring even more bodies). Reps join companies and quit bosses right? New managers are going to FLAIL in a rapid-growth environment, and your reps will be confused, frustrated, and complain about a lack of development (which also happens to be the number one reason reps leave).
So, save yourself some time and a headache by updating your training program, and getting the professionals to help you with hiring, and developing those managers! I promise, the work now will be worth it once your sales floor is full (and stays that way!).
Want more information on how to scale your inside sales team?
Contact us today to request information on our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps (and managers).
Win Sooner. Earn Faster. Stay Longer. [Live Event Recording]
Win Sooner. Earn Faster. Stay Longer.
[Live Event Recording]