Improving Sales Team Hiring & Retention [Webinar Recording]
Improving Sales Team Hiring & Retention
[Webinar Recording]
Sales Training
10 Virtual Sales Tips Guaranteed to Add Faster Revenue [Webinar Recording]
10 Virtual Sales Tips Guaranteed to Add Faster Revenue
[Webinar Recording]
#GirlsClub: A Program for Rising Female Sales Leaders
If you’re familiar with Factor 8 or #GirlsClub, you may know that I founded both companies, but you may not know how they are intertwined.
Here it is: Factor 8 eLearning and live training classes are repeatedly ranked as the #1 and #2 favorites of #GirlsClub participants!
Of this, I’m tremendously proud. To have the “required management skills” come out on top with a program that includes Mentors, famous guest speakers, intimate interviews, speaking opportunities, and more… tells me we’re doing something right over here.
While we’re on the subject of good news, a few more “#GC” stats I hope you’ll help me celebrate:
- To date, we’ve had over 1400 active participants from 700+ companies in 750+ cities and 25+ countries
- Over 85% of the women who started the program graduated and certified
- About 40% started as managers (the other 60% aspiring managers) and over 60% ended as managers – for our last cohort, 24 promotions and counting in under 6 months!
- Over 13,000 learning “shots” consumed in The Sales Bar over 6 months (AKA pieces of content)
- The average test score was 95%
- There were 8 awards given
Our mission is to change the face of sales leadership by helping more women earn leadership positions.
So how’s #GirlsClub different from the training you already know from Factor 8?
- We train in cohorts across various companies, industries, and even countries.
- It’s all 100% virtual and the content isn’t customized for any particular company.
- We assign the participants (called “Protégés”) to work with their leaders on activities, customization, and application – bottom-up instead of top-down.
- We add a curriculum around confidence-building & risk-taking.
- Each Protégé gets a Mentor (most are other females, but our male mentors are also super popular).
- We do “spotlight” opportunities like LinkedIn takeovers, blog posts, speaking engagements, and more.
Conversely, with Factor 8 programs, your sales team is your cohort. It allows for more customization and deeper dives into situations and needs, customized curriculum and activities, and hands-on coaching for managers and reps. Factor 8 programs usually last a year and can also include certification (with a bit more stringent requirements for demonstrating skills).
We also don’t include all the confidence-building and community portions of #GirlsClub in The Sales Bar for Factor 8 clients. In short:
Factor 8’s goal is to move the number and change lives.
#GirlsClub’s goal is to build confidence and change lives.
We don’t mean to disclude the guys (in fact we award our favorite “Ally” male supporter each year). But I chose to keep #GC women-dominated to create a safe space.
Studies show women won’t speak up in male-dominated environments nor will they take a risk until they feel 100% confident. So we talk about that stuff. We ask female role models about discrimination, wearing beachwear on company award trips, and yes, even sexual harassment (folks, nearly EVERY woman has had a story). Yuck.
There is a day in the future when my two companies will blend more and I don’t confuse people with my double persona. But for now, what we’re doing with #GirlsClub is really working and I’m not messing with it.
Get it now and want to help or get involved?
#1. Identify female talent and encourage them to get into management. They won’t feel ready. Send them to us. Applications open each Fall and our new cohorts start in April. Learn more at: https://wearegirlsclub.com/apply/
#2. Sign up to Mentor (1 hour/month & 6-month commitment) + free access to the entire program and community. Contact us to learn more about being a Mentor: https://wearegirlsclub.com/contact-us/
5 Sales Manager Tips for Onboarding New BDRs
Great news. You’ve got proof of concept, found your ICP, and gotten some funding. Now it’s time to build out your BDR team.
Bad news. Once you win the war for talent, the real work of sales training begins. Since most SaaS startups aren’t hiring classes of 15 reps and a trainer, you get the task of onboarding one or two at a time. And then again. And again. And again.
Here are some sales manager tips to save your sanity when onboarding new BDRs:
- Start a Google Doc now with everything they’ll need to know. Brainstorm in the following categories:
- Industry acumen
- Product knowledge – feature, function, benefit
- Customer knowledge
- Ideal customer situations
- Business acumen
- Competitor acumen
- System logins and skills
- Company info – who’s who, relevant background, etc.
- Company processes, procedures, etc.
- Customer FAQ
- Demos
- Testimonials and case studies
- Questions to uncover ideal customer situations and challenges
- Call recordings to hear good, bad, and ugly calls
- Phone sales skills like leaving good voicemails, intros, uncovering contacts, and delivering value props on the phone
- Wherever possible, start hyperlinking to internal and external sites, videos, and resources so reps can self-serve for the info. Why go back and re-find that email 20 times?
- Now identify what you can outsource. Trust me, if you try to hire, train, coach, and lead the team you will either explode or mess a few of these up in a serious way.
- Buy the system training if your vendor offers it or go find free forums and videos to link to.
- Sales skills are another area. Your job is to coach them, not teach them from scratch. Outsource the heavy lifting and stick to leading the team and coaching the delivery. The Sales Bar has hundreds of phone sales resources for new BDRs and Managers. They’ll also want some basic LinkedIn skills. I like Vengreso or Frontline.
- Find internal experts. Use your CEO, product geeks, and past customers and get them to do a video or recorded webinar to teach key points. Keep them short and on track with some guidelines during your request; these folks typically aren’t natural trainers! And if they do it live, get it recorded, I promise they won’t be available every time. Where you can’t record, set up a lunch or coffee chat vs. a formal presentation. Get your new rep to record it, plus their notes!
- Start a schedule and get your document in chronological order with about 6 hours of learning work/day to start. Make the schedule about 2 weeks long and ramp the training time down while call time goes up. So by the end of the second week, they may be doing 1-2 hours of training/day and 6 hours of work. Show that training doesn’t stop and they have some assignments every month! Bonus: show a path to the next level in their career, even if it’s just a footnote. In addition to the learning, your schedule should include:
- Call shadowing with you or other reps. Bonus: have them score it using your coaching form. Side note: get a coaching form
- Calls to past customers to hear their stories and happy outcomes
- Research on their own – e.g. top features of competitors
- Outbound calling – even if it’s just to capture contacts, qualify accounts, data cleanse, etc.
- LOTS of time with you where they bring their questions, you talk shop, build a relationship, and make your newbie feel important
- Hook them up with a buddy/mentor. Reps who build strong friendships at work are happier and stay longer according to Gallup. With the average lifespan of a BDR under 18 months, it’s worth the effort. Pay for their first lunch and ask them to get together weekly for the rep’s first month. If it doesn’t stick after that, you’ve at least planted some seeds. Bonus: they’ll come to you less often for their questions when they have a buddy.
This approach will help your reps be more independent while saving you at least twenty hours per rep. Each hire can help make the document better and old hires can support the new.
Make updating the document and improving it part of their work assignment so it stays current and off your to-do list.
May this also help you resist the temptation to hand your new rep a script and wish them good luck on the phone. Millennials are searching for career development and time with their boss at work, and they make their employment decisions based on this. Spend a few bucks, give them some structure, buy them some training, and you’ll see the payoff in their faster success and tenure!
Want some help onboarding new BDRs?
We’ve got your back! Contact us today to learn how you can incorporate sales training into your new BDR onboarding process to speed ramp time and improve retention.
How to Create A Sales Team Development Plan and Budget
Professional development opportunities are a major factor in the decision to change jobs. That’s according to numerous research papers, including our recent Sales Team Retention survey. So if you want to improve employee satisfaction and stave off attrition, then a sales team development plan must be a top priority.
By giving your reps a roadmap to build their skills and advance their careers, you give them a compelling reason to stay in your organization. Read on for actionable tips to build the perfect development plan for your sales team.
Why is sales team development critical?
Sales team development is more important than ever. Ambition found that 98% of sales reps would stay with a company forever if they were given ongoing development opportunities.
What’s more, companies that invest in sales team development put themselves at a significant competitive advantage by retaining talent. Losing a salesperson costs an average of $115,000.
Your sales team is only as good as the people on that team. By investing in their development, both as individuals and as a group, you can improve their ability to meet quotas and move the needle.
How to build a sales team development plan
Sales development doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of a lot of intentional strategy and effort and requires a commitment of resources from the organization.
As such, it’s important to have a clear plan to get you from Point A to Point B. A cohesive development plan includes role definitions, resources, expectations, and timelines. Here are some steps you can take to develop your own.
1. Establish a sales development budget
On average, 1–3% of the total annual budget should be earmarked for development. Small to medium businesses are spending more than $77,000 annually on outsourced sales training and development. Large companies spend more than five times as much.
If you under or over-spend on sales development, that will create bigger problems down the road. Over-spending without generating results will cause you to lose buy-in among executive stakeholders. Under-spending is unlikely to generate positive results.
By understanding your needs, you can set a realistic budget that suits your goals and needs and, more importantly, moves the needle in the right direction.
Download our Sales Training Budget Guide to help you determine how much to budget for development.
2. Reallocate unused resources
There’s no point in spending money on tools and resources that no one uses. A great way to invest in development without increasing costs is to look for resources that you aren’t using. Rather than waste those dollars, use them to grow and improve your team.
3. Identify high-impact opportunities
Most companies have limited budgets. This is especially true in today’s economic climate.
The key to an effective sales team development plan is knowing where to spend the most time and money. After all, you want your limited resources to go where they’ll have the greatest impact.
This is where having high-quality managers makes all the difference. When you support your managers and empower them to make decisions around resource allocation, they can effectively support your sales reps at every stage of onboarding and production.
Effective managers understand the best delivery methods for training and development. Live in-person and virtual training sessions are both great options for team training. For companies that are local, live training sessions are refreshing in today’s remote-heavy work environment. Getting reps face-to-face for in-person training is worth the cost of the return. For remote companies or spread-out teams, virtual sessions are a great alternative to in-person meetings. For best results avoid pre-recorded training videos. When participants are able to meet in person or join a live virtual session, they feel more engaged and collaborative, which promotes learning.
4. Prioritize your tools and tech stack
Not all tools and technologies are created equal. For example, many sales teams have a digital resource library—a big expense content bank that no one uses. It’s important, then, to look at your current resources and decide which are actually empowering your team to do their jobs better.
Instead of thinking of technologies by their product class (e.g. “asset management platform”) think of them based on the problems they solve for your organization (e.g. storehouse of information to educate our reps).
When you break out the mold, you may find other more creative solutions to the problem (e.g. interactive, live training sessions vs. pre-recorded talking-head videos).
5. Make use of free resources
While it’s important to invest resources in sales development, there’s a wide range of free courses, webinars, and training available online. In an interactive group setting, these resources can be a valuable tool—and they don’t require additional buy-in from budget holders!
However, it’s not enough to simply throw these free resources at a rep without any context or structure. Prepare discussion questions and exercises to test skills during webinars and presentations.
When reps take part in live discussions and practice the skills they’re learning, they’re more likely to retain and apply them when they hit the floor.
6. Think outside the classroom
Training and lecturing are two different things. Lecturing is telling someone how to do something, while training is actually showing them.
Take new hires out of the classroom so they can see skills being put to use in real-life scenarios and how to put them into action themselves.
7. Focus on moving the needle
Hiring and training salespeople is an investment. To get the best return on that investment, you can’t treat it as a one-and-done. Skill retention requires applied learning and repetition.
Don’t waste your investment by neglecting follow-up sessions, coaching, and feedback. Good coaching builds on the skills learned in training and helps reps understand where they are and where they need to be.
8. Leverage gamification
Gamifying information is an easy way to improve retention and increase problem-solving. New hires who are challenged to solve problems and demonstrate skills outside of the pressure of the sales floor feel safer trying new things. Contests, competitions, and similar tactics help reps use skills in dynamic ways.
Who needs a sales development plan?
You may be wondering: do you even need a sales development plan?
The answer is YES if you want to:
- Meet quota consistently
- Retain your team over the long haul
- Improve morale
- Grow and scale your business
Regardless of size, every sales department needs certain skills and information to be successful. A comprehensive sales development plan lays the foundation for your team to build and adopt these skills.
Reach out to learn more about our customizable virtual sales training programs and get the best out of people.
Working on your sales team development plan and budget?
Contact us today to learn about our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps (and managers).
Human-Centered Communication [Digital Book]
Human-Centered Communication
[Digital Book]
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.
I’m in Sales [Live Event Recording]
I’m in Sales!
[Live Event Recording]
How to Make Negotiation Your Superpower [Webinar Recording]
Meet the Panelists
David Leinweber
CEO | Ascent Cloud
David Leinweber serves as CEO of Ascent Cloud, an industry-leading provider of sales enablement and performance management SaaS solutions. He brings over a decade of experience in enterprise software with a proven track record of driving long-term growth. Throughout his career, David has helped to drive innovation and growth at several software companies, working in product, marketing, and leadership roles.
Prior to Ascent Cloud, David served as CEO of LevelEleven, a leading Performance Management SaaS solution that empowers leaders to motivate, engage, and coach their teams more effectively. Before that, he held key positions at New World Systems and Accenture. David holds an MBA from the University of Michigan as well as a bachelor’s degree in economics and history from Vanderbilt University.
Nicole Anasenes
CFO | Member of Board, Audit Committee | ANSYS
Nicole has spent her 20+ year career in tech building and transforming businesses. She most recently served as the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Squarespace, a fast-growing software platform that empowers millions of people to share their stories and create an impactful, stylish online presence. During her tenure, she drove operational and organizational transformation to support Squarespace’s explosive growth.
Her current board roles include ANSYS, a simulation software company who is a leader in helping all companies accelerate R&D innovation, and AnitaB.org, a world-class non-profit, focused on driving intersectional gender equity in tech.
Michelle Benfer
VP, Sales | Hubspot
Michelle has sold and led sales teams at some of the biggest names in media and technology including Conde Nast, Meredith Corp, AOL (now Oath) & LogMeIn Inc. She is passionate about fostering diverse and inclusive sales teams and a culture of high-performance. Michelle lives outside of Boston with her two daughters and her beloved pup, Rosie.
Amy Volas
Founder & CEO | Avenue Talent Partners
With more than $100MM in revenue sold and named one of Sales Hacker’s Most Dynamic Women In Sales, Amy Volas is a sales fanatic turned entrepreneur. She was bitten by the startup bug many moons ago and couldn’t imagine spending her time anywhere else. She created Avenue Talent Partners to help with the tremendous task of growing startups through some of their most valuable assets – sales leaders and enterprise salespeople.
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