Sales Enablement Secrets: Actionable Sales Training Tips, Trends, and Advice [Webinar Recording]
Sales Enablement Secrets: Actionable Sales Training Tips, Trends, and Advice
[Video Recording]
Onboarding
The Truth About ChatGPT: 10 Things Sales & Enablement Leaders Need To Know & Try [Webinar Recording]
The Truth About ChatGPT: 10 Things Sales & Enablement Leaders Need To Know & Try
[Webinar Recording]
8 Components of a World-Class New Sales Hire Onboarding Program
Been thinking that revenue targets would be easier to crush if your new hires would ramp up to speed more quickly? You’re spot-on, my friend.
WATCH: Onboarding Sales Reps: 10 Hacks To Improve Training + Ramp Time
Best-in-class onboarding (or new hire training) programs go well beyond the standard “Welcome to the company” orientation and dive into actual job training. But most programs stop after introducing reps to their new systems and products. This leaves reps on their own to figure out things like:
- What do I do first?
- How do I get people to call me back?
- What do I say if they ask me X?
The result? Long ramp times, while they use experience to supplement what they could have been taught.
There will always be a ramp period. Our goal is to shorten it. Awesome new hire programs have been proven to cut new hire ramp-to-target in half (Training Magazine).
What is the right ramp time? Sorry for this, but it depends – on the talent you’re hiring, your training program, and the complexity of your offering and sales cycle. But here are a few basic benchmarks:
- Top business development (BDR, SDR) programs ramp reps before three months.
- Account managers between three and six months.
- If your deals aren’t over $200K, your sales cycle is over 6 months, and it’s taking your reps 6+ months to hit quota, your program probably needs some help.
I’ve been building and benchmarking new hire programs for the past fifteen years, and there are very few who don’t need help. Why?
Most onboarding programs need help because trainers don’t get sales, and sellers don’t usually get training – it’s a sandbox thing.
A great program is a killer combination of both worlds. Incidentally, a great program can also shrink your rep attrition. Keep them longer, ramp them faster = this is worth your investment, sales leaders!
READ: How to Hire and Retain Top Sales Reps and Managers
Here are eight signs of a world-class rep onboarding program (that you should steal immediately!)
1. Training is a process, not an event.
Think of it as “Just-in-time training.” 100% classroom time is 1-2 weeks and then decreases gradually to once a month.
For example, a new hire is in full-time training for 2 weeks, but by week 4 they’re in class 2 hours a day, and in week six 1 hour a day. By week 8 it’s one hour a week and by month three (and for the rest of their tenure!) they’re in training once a month.
This makes it critical to focus their first two weeks only on what they’ll need in month one on the phone. Why? They’ll have no idea what they don’t know yet. That means you’ll graduate a team of super-confident sellers who can’t wait to get on the phones. Perfect.
2. Use call recordings.
This is my favorite tip. My theory on ramp time is that it will always be present because it isn’t the “what to do/say” that takes a long time to get. It’s the “when do I do it/say it” that takes experience to really nail. So shorten that by letting reps listen to call recordings. Nope, the recordings don’t have to be their own, and they shouldn’t all be great calls. Just typical. It’s like reviewing game tapes before the big game – breaking down what the other team (customer) is doing and when they should have used the right play (skill).
3. Includes 6 critical components
All six critical components of the program are included and mixed together:
1. Systems & Tools – CRM, Intranet, Lead Management, AI, etc.
2. Product/Service – be sure it’s “how to sell it” and not “the full history of it”
3. Sales – how to sell our products over the phone (not generic sales 101 field training!)
4. Process – how leads and orders get processed + rep and customers’ top 10 questions
5. Acumen – business acumen, industry acumen, and customer acumen – critical!
6. Manager integration – nope, lunch on day one isn’t enough. Get them more involved.
4. GET ON THE PHONES! (ASAP).
If you can create an exercise where reps are calling current, potential, or even past customers by day two, do it! They can qualify leads, gather success stories, call cold leads – whatever! The right hires are itching to start calling, and the wrong hires will show reluctance and wash out. You’re welcome.
READ: Tips for Virtually Onboarding New Sales Reps
5. Less than 30% is e-learning.
Sorry large organizations, I know it’s so tempting! But classroom-based training (in-person or virtual) is still the most effective for a reason: You can’t practice selling with a computer! Also, how engaging is your new hire’s experience when they’re clicking forward 200 times a day? Painful.
6. Rigor.
In my experience, a good 25% of every new hire class should not graduate training (yes, please be sure you’re hiring in groups, not “onesie-twosie”). When you really trust your training department, you’ll count on them to de-facto manage reps during training and coach them out the door if they won’t make it. Start, stop, and break times should be like real life on the floor, and weekly tests let them know how they’re doing.
7. Training mimics the floor.
Quick hit ways to do this:
a. You have a systems sandbox for training (a monthly updated mirror image of all systems)
b. Phones and systems in the classroom for better role plays
c. Dummy accounts or even real (low scoring) accounts for practice
d. Call coaching or quality forms approved by sales leadership used for role plays/testing
e. Scenario-based testing (because when is a real client going to say, “A. send me a quote…B. schedule a call back…”?)
8. Don’t let HR teach reps how to sell.
There’s a difference between regular company training and sales training. Aberdeen recently reported that 85% of best-in-class sales teams use a professional sales curriculum or trainer. What is good sales training? (read more about that here)
Overwhelmed? Here are a few easy ways to start:
- Get to know your training ASAP. Pick your best sales leader and charge them with shortening ramp. Attend training, learn about good training, and partner and assist your trainer with the curriculum.
- Get the reports. Sales numbers won’t show you class-by-class ramp times unless you specifically build them. Believe me, it’s worth it.
- Close the loop. Are you reporting the top three skill gaps on the floor to training on a monthly or quarterly basis? Do you have the call coaching and rep meeting cadence in place to provide this?
- Get some help. Spend the money to bring in a professional sales training leader, someone to fix your program or a great sales training curriculum. When reps ramp faster and stay longer, you’ll wish you budgeted for this three years ago!
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Improving Sales Team Hiring & Retention [Webinar Recording]
Improving Sales Team Hiring & Retention
[Webinar Recording]
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]
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.
Onboarding Sales Reps: 10 Hacks to Improve Training + Ramp Time [“Sales Shot” Workshop]
Onboarding Sales Reps: 10 Hacks to Improve Training + Ramp Time
[“Sales Shot” Workshop]
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.
Tips for Virtually Onboarding New Sales Reps
In July, our Executive Open Bar topic was Remote Training Best Practices. This was a high-demand topic for obvious reasons with so many workforces now at home.
If you’re new to the “Open Bar,” this is a Leader-only sharing forum where friends of Factor 8 talk about what’s working, what’s not, and share challenges and best practices.
*Sorry you missed the discussion. Watch our webinar on virtual training best practices to learn what great virtual sales training looks like.
During this session, I got to put on the expert vs. facilitator hat on as most of our participants were Sales Leaders and not one on the call had a learning department helping with remote learning.
Say What!?
It’s a sad truth, but one we hear a lot. Sales Leaders are doubling as Enablement Leaders and their Sales Managers as Trainers. So let’s start here:
If you have more than 25 people onboard, it’s time to start investing in an internal enablement department. And if you have 25 salespeople, you’ll need a dedicated sales trainer or coordinator and a budget of at least $1500 / rep per year.
Sales Leaders need new hire and ongoing learning for their sales reps and their sales managers. Their jobs are too busy to hire, train, coach, and manage these teams.
OK, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, here are some tips we shared to help these busy folks:
1. Make New Hire Onboarding as Self-Paced as Possible.
A very common mistake is for leaders to assume we own 100% of the learning. We try to download everything a newbie needs in multiple video sessions and drive ourselves crazy with post-it note reminders of stuff to add between meetings. Here’s the deal: you’re working too hard and they won’t retain it.
Instead, try making a list of what a newbie needs to know and turn it into a research assignment. Have them use the website, intranet sites, knowledge centers, teammates, etc. to fill in your blanks and bring you questions for the rest. In fact, could their assignment be to create a presentation of this relevant information you could use next time? (See point 3)
Now your video hour together can be an interesting story you share, Q&A and you quizzing them on what they learned.
Expert tip: beware of boiling the ocean. Do they need to know the whole history of your product set or the three key differentiators?
2. Capture for Posterity.
Another common mistake is “Groundhog’s Day” with newbies. If you’re hiring one or two employees every few weeks or months, you may feel like you’re starting over every time. Once you’ve made your new hire assignment like above, capture a blank page as a Google doc or save it to a new hire drive so you’re set for next time. Take ten minutes now to write out instructions to go with each assignment – even save them in order like day 1, day 2, etc. Your future self will thank you.
3. Use Free Bandwidth.
Because most people retain more information by DOING vs. reading or listening to you explain something, take advantage of their bandwidth. After researching relevant company history, what if they create a five-slide PPT and present it to the rest of the newbies (and save it in Drive for the next hires). Rather than just researching your top five products, perhaps they could make a video introducing them to the market. Each assignment is a better-fit learning activity AND a future resource.
4. Make Freebies Better.
There are lots of free guru videos, live streams, webinars, etc., out there. Yeah, you’ll have to listen to some product pitches along the way, but we’re looking for free training, right? So here’s how you make what’s out there better:
- If you attended and liked it, download / upload the video replay to your new hire training folder.
- Make a list of gurus you align to. There are lots of self-proclaimed experts out there, and helping your peeps align with your culture can be as simple as telling them a few folks to follow (and who to avoid).
- Surround the free events with pre and post-meetings. You can’t expect folks to attend a live webinar and then leave with changed behaviors or habits. In fact, your team will think it’s all optional unless you work with them afterward on what to apply, how to apply it, actual examples, and some role plays. Make it even better by setting expectations before the session and coaching on the key skills afterward.
5. Outsource What You Can.
Of COURSE, they love you, their fearless leader… but you’ll do well to mix it up. What internal experts can you leverage to teach topics? And what can be instantly outsourced to expert vendors?
Hint: There are five major areas where reps need training. Only two and a half are eligible for outsourcing:
- Product. What are your products and services, when and why do customers need them, how are you different from the competition? Use product leaders, marketing folks, other reps, case studies, testimonials, customer training videos, and customer success…
- Process. Think, “How a bill becomes a law.” What do reps need to know about getting orders processed, customers served, their timecards approved… you know, it’s how to get S#$* done at your company. Use operations leaders, support departments, other reps, the intranet, and the super-tenured folks who’ve been around forever.
- Systems. Don’t assume reps know how to use your tech stack. The average rep uses over 7 tools, do yourself a favor and buy the training from your vendor vs. teaching reps every step yourself. You’ll thank yourself later when you don’t have every person using the system in different ways. Best practice is when you have a professional training team that is utilizing a practice or sandbox system and incorporating timed system drills (e.g. end of day one, look up these customers in under five minutes, and end of day five we’re adding customers in under 2 minutes…)
- Acumen. Customer, business, industry. The big 3 used to be assumed when we hired a college degree. No such luck anymore. Your reps need to understand your industry, your customers’ industries, trends, terminology, acronyms, and basic business. Want them to talk ROI with the CEO… got to teach it first. Try using videos using your own internal experts. Some vendors can help here as well (Factor 8 teaches basic business acumen and has developed custom industry acumen courses for clients to use for all posterity.)
- Sales. I know, you hired for sales experience. Haven’t met a rep yet who can walk in ready to execute your sales process with your customers and your industry… have you? Even tenured reps need updates, brush-ups, reminders, best practices and help translating their sales experience to your situation. For example, did they ever sell virtually? Were they prospecting or managing existing accounts? A BDR skill set is vastly different from an AE and Account Manager skill set (check out how our certifications target different skills and outcomes). This is one you can outsource. I know a great company 😉
If you found this blog helpful and you HAVE or ARE the training department, watch our session on what good virtual sales training. The world has progressed FAR beyond the video and narrated PowerPoint, aim higher with us and let’s help eLearning suck no more.
Tips for Successful Sales Rep Onboarding
When I was in corporate America leading training organizations, my “white whale” was onboarding. I built programs, I improved programs, I chased the ever-elusive perfect new hire training experience. Pretty dorky, I guess. But MAN what a challenge.
I measured success by ramp time. Even that requires a special report of rep success by hiring cohorts (go ask for this now, it takes a while to build). And like the old game show “Name that Tune,” I challenged myself to get each group to quota in slightly fewer weeks.
I found great success, usually to the tune of about 50-100% decrease in unproductive time – or twice as fast to quota. I did it for an outsourced IBM hardware program hiring hundreds/year, for international launches of virtual SAP teams selling software, and even for small groups of reps selling waste management services (yes, I can tell you a lot about dumpsters now).
There are many keys to success – it’s a complex animal, isn’t it? Here are a few of my favorites:
- Institute rigor. Most trainers and reps approach new hire training as a break time. Reps get lazy and trainers “fill time.” Instead, think of the final 2-3-week step of the job interview. I’m talking daily tests, on-time starts, and class stack-rankings. It fosters an achievement culture.
- Self-guidance speeds learning over hand-holding. When onboarding a remote team, the go-to move is hours of Zoom calls with experts spewing data (sadly, this is called “teaching.”). Instead, put your newbies in charge of finding information, drawing conclusions, and completing tasks. You can use recordings of past “training” + your intranet and website to complete a quiz that invites decisions or conclusions and mirrors what the customer may ask. For example, after listening to your product person give the history of your solution set, they answer questions about product features of the most recent product and how it’s different from your competitor’s solution.
- Include all key areas. Most programs go heavy on systems and products. But that is a fraction of the picture. Reps and Managers need knowledge and skills in:
- Business, industry, & customer acumen: this gives us conversation confidence
- Sales skills. Even if you hired for experience, they’ll need to flex new muscles with your services in your industry in your sales motion (e.g. the online demo, virtual selling vs. face-to-face presentations) This is the easiest to outsource.
- Process. Remember Schoolhouse Rock? How a Bill Becomes a Law? Reps and especially managers need to know how a prospect becomes a renewal – the steps and departments and people involved in the business of your business.
- Product. Make this better by teaching them how to SELL it, not it’s full history.
- Systems. Make this better with scavenger hunts and timed drills. Can they talk and order entry and multi-task at once? It’s a key success factor.
- Just in time training. Resist the temptation to deliver training for the whole job upfront. They’ll only retain about 10% of what they don’t apply immediately. And frankly, you’ll scare them more than you’ll help them. Focus onboarding on what they need their first month on the job. Drill it to build confidence and let them loose. They’ll come back for the rest. Confidence is the name of the game for new reps, so let them graduate not knowing what they don’t know.
- Synthesis. Now that you know the five categories, mix them up and drive scenarios where they use them together. The key is to mimic the job. Have them use the CRM to look up customer data, in a sales role-play where the customer is talking about a product. You know, a typical call. Bonus: have them play along while listening to real recorded calls. Tip: if you’re assigning a single-thread task, re-think how to add a layer or how to add an assignment and/or rigor to it. Don’t just attend a session, write a report, create a video, answer ten questions. You get it.
- Application. Remember, the goal isn’t a perfect quiz score, the goal should be a well-executed call. What we know and what we can do under pressure are different. Consider using a call coaching or QA form as your final test and have their manager play the customer and give them their grade.
- Voice of the customer is key. Use recorded calls, case studies, even joint interviews of customers to get a feel for your ICP and why they chose you. Recorded calls are my favorite. Play the pause game where you listen to a sales call and pause every 5-10 seconds. Ask, “What is the customer thinking” and “What would you do next?” It’s the best way to get reps into the mind of the customer – making them better sellers.
- Keep managers at about 20%. Here’s a double-edged sword. YES, we want managers involved in new hire training but they SHOULD. NOT. OWN. IT. Your managers are the busiest people in your company and by putting new hire onboarding on their plate, you’re asking that the rest of their team receive no more coaching. Managers should do a daily check-in, a few role-play tests, and expectation-setting meetings. Hire a trainer or a coach to manage the rest. Training is a professional skill and done right will triple the retention of your trainees.
BONUS: Get on the phones as soon as possible! Find the low-probability deals, the lost accounts, or data-cleansing lead projects to get reps outbounding and talking to prospects ASAP. They’ll learn more from their mistakes, they’ll find their fail points and fears and be able to address them.
Is training part of your sales rep onboarding plan? It should be!
Download our Overview Brochure to learn more about our virtual and inside sales training programs for both sales reps and sales managers.