Improving Sales Team Hiring & Retention [Webinar Recording]
Improving Sales Team Hiring & Retention
[Webinar Recording]
Team Performance
10 Virtual Sales Tips Guaranteed to Add Faster Revenue [Webinar Recording]
10 Virtual Sales Tips Guaranteed to Add Faster Revenue
[Webinar Recording]
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.
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I’m in Sales [Live Event Recording]
I’m in Sales!
[Live Event Recording]
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.
20 Ways To Increase Sales Coaching Focus At Work [Cheat Sheet]
20 Ways To Increase Sales Coaching Focus At Work
[Cheat Sheet]
Virtual Selling Tips to Help Reps Win More Deals [Cheat Sheet]
Virtual Selling Tips to Help Reps Win More Deals
[Cheat Sheet]
Improving Sales for the Next Generation of Talent
I’m in Sales! I’m not a Growth Manager or a Chief Delightment Officer, or anything else that people say at networking events because they don’t want to admit they’re in sales. I’m proud to be in sales, but if statistics tell us anything, my chosen and beloved profession needs to change.
Every day, more jobs are being replaced by AI or being sent offshore. The jobs that are left are harder and faster than they were 10 years ago. The entry-level jobs need to ramp even sooner and convert deals that much quicker. If you’ve been at this for a while now, that probably sounds exciting. If you’re stepping into your first role, it’s probably terrifying.
We’re finding the job pool of sales reps features fewer experienced candidates, all while customers are becoming savvier and with higher expectations. The game has changed and we need to change along with it.
Remember when you first got into sales. How have you grown? What did you learn? Over the years you’ve gained experience, tooled up, and added to or adapted your tech stack. We need to change the way we are looking at entry-level sales and improve the first impression we are giving new employees.
Think about the sales calls you receive on any given day. The majority fall into two groups. It’s either a robocall or it’s a fresh-faced recent college (or high school) graduate in their very first sales role. These unseasoned front-line employees are being thrown to the wolves with nothing more than a phone and a script. It’s no wonder we lose A LOT of reps every year.
Overall, 50% of all graduates go into sales. That’s not just business school, that’s all schools across the country. In the first year alone, we will lose a staggering 40% of those new reps. This is not sustainable. At this point, we can’t recruit enough people to fill those front-line seats.
Leaders, it’s time to shift our thought process.
Right now, when a new employee walks in the door we give them a product demonstration, a Salesforce login, direct them to the phones, and say “Good luck, better hit that quota!” We’re not teaching them how to engage or converse. They’re simply memorizing scripts and pitches. WE are teaching the next generation to hate sales. Slowly and systematically, we are scaring away bright, brilliant, young people from the sales profession and if we want it to stop, we need to be better.
It’s going to take all of us, together, to make that happen. Here’s how…
We need to ditch the script. New sellers (and some existing sellers) need to be taught how to stop talking AT customers and instead engage with them. Sales is where the technology stops. It’s where one person has to talk to another person about their challenges or their needs. At its root, sales is about helping someone else. It’s about human connection. Right now, only 3% of customers trust salespeople. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but if we want to regain our customer’s trust we need to start by improving our conversations.
We need to make room for failure. I’m not saying that we let employees slide every time they miss quota. What I am saying is that instead of treating an employee like the black sheep, maybe we dive deeper. Treat that failure as an area of opportunity. Let’s help normalize failure and find the “why” behind it. Every missed deal can help your employees, especially the new ones, land future deals. All we have to do is encourage people to talk about it and then help them find the solution for next time.
We need to shift our focus to retention. According to a report from The Bridge Group, the average tenure of a sales rep is 1.5 years. The old me would have said, “That gives me 18 months to find someone else to fill that seat.” What if instead, we said, “I have 540 days to make them love sales, stay, and continue in their career.”
We’ve sold everything under the sun and WE LOVE IT. So, let’s make the next generation love it just as much as we do.
We can do this! Together, we can have sales reps proudly shouting “I’m in Sales!”
Want to improve the sales industry for your new sellers?
By training and developing your employees, they’ll perform better and stay longer.
Contact us today to learn about our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps and managers.