Fresh sales recruits spend up to 10 weeks in training. Even then it may take up to a year for the new reps to be as productive as the experienced ones. A lot of investment and time goes into the process of onboarding, and therefore, it is one process that the company cannot afford to mess up.
Numerous training ours, dedicated coaching and readiness managers, and a lot of infrastructural facilities and equipment have to be engaged for sales onboarding, and if it fails to provide the desired results, it’ll all end up in big losses. However, even after providing the best onboarding facility and sales onboarding software, a company has to consider that there will be a few failures anyway. So onboarding is an investment that requires some time to return.
That’s why companies are in constant search of new methods that can make the onboarding program more cost-effective. One way to do this would be to accelerate the onboarding program. Accelerating the onboarding program will make your sales reps ready and productive faster than usual. However, unplanned acceleration could affect sales performance and cause more losses than ROI. Therefore, it is important to calibrate the onboarding process intelligently to make it as time-efficient as possible. This way, the overall time taken can be reduced significantly.
Here are few tips to tune your onboarding programs for maximum time efficiency.
1) Focus On The Entire Sales Cycle
Most onboarding programs take a step-by-step approach, familiarizing the reps with one stage of the sales cycle at a time. This is surely a great plan, breaking-down the lengthy topic for easier understanding. However, the reps also need to have some idea about what the end goal is. It allows them to understand the relevance of every stage more precisely.
So, while you focus on every stage of the sales cycle, it important that the onboarding managers also provide the full picture to the new reps. The entire sales cycle must be shown to the reps so that they can be well-familiar with the entire sales picture and the end goals of the process. This will give the sales reps a better idea about what to aim for, and how every stage of the sales cycle works, allowing the reps to grasp the process more easily.
2) Express What The Company Looks For
New sales reps often miscalculate the company’s requirements, and this elongates the onboarding process, making them take longer to be productive for the company. Therefore, the onboarding managers must provide sufficient information about what is considered as satisfactory performance and what is considered an exceptionally goods performance. The reps must be well-familiar with the company’s views on what is considered good and bad at every stage of the sales cycle.
Giving the reps examples and scenarios about good, bad, and exceptional performance will allow the reps to determine what they need in every stage of the sales cycle. It will also allow them to pinpoint reasons for failure. The reps can analyze every step and figure out where the result was not satisfactory and what changes must be made. Overall, the onboarding program can become far more effective and a lot less time-consuming when you provide the reps a good definition of excellence at every stage of the sales cycle.
3) Shadow and On-demand training
Shadowing experienced reps is a great way for new reps to understand how the process works. It gives them a good example of how experienced work looks like. Therefore your onboarding program must provide enough call showing hours to the reps; in fact as much as possible, because after all, on-floor productivity is what matters the most.
However, new reps may not be able to hold on to the experienced reps in terms of their speed and intelligent handling. On-demand learning can help you solve this problem as well. Offer sales reps recordings and practical sessions that can be accessed and played again and again. This will give your reps a complete understanding of how the experienced reps convert enquires to sales.
4) Sufficient Market Knowledge
The onboarding program must not treat new reps as children. They are well capable employees who can understand the market even from the first day of training. So the onboarding managers must give them enough market understanding without underestimating their capabilities. For maximum productivity, the sales reps must be well aware of market trends, buyer demands, ongoing marketing, and all other market-related information.
5) Digitalize
In this new era, a lot of sales activity is being handled remotely, and digitalization is present at every stage of the sales cycle. Similarly, the onboarding program must also incorporate digital learning tools and various sales onboarding software. Digital learning is highly engaging and interactive, allowing you to offer a lot more information in a lesser amount of time. Making intelligent use of technology is actually the key component when it comes to onboarding acceleration. It reduces the pressure on the reps, by making the learning process fun and giving the reps remote access to a lot of important information.
6) Professional Strategy
Sales Onboarding is a sensitive setup. So tweaking and experimenting with it does have the potential of causing losses. The best way to avoid such risks is to take professional assistance. Reliable professionals can analyze your existing setup and suggest new and innovative ways to accelerate the onboarding process without affecting its quality. Modern onboarding experts are well-aware of the technological requirements and therefore you can expect reliable modern solutions to improve the onboarding programs. Various modern solutions like micro-learning, social and gamified training are proving to be highly effective in onboarding acceleration.
So there are 6 tips to accelerate your onboarding process without impacting the quality. In fact, if you apply these steps precisely you can expect better performance and winning-skills in your new reps.
So take professional assistance and accelerate your onboarding process now and improve your ROI on onboarding.
