Sales Rep Onboarding Models: Insights from Top Companies

Sales onboarding refers to coaching and training newly-recruited sales representatives. A great sales onboarding is a key element in increasing revenue and making an immense difference. Being a key component of any new sales rep’s hiring stage, sometimes a disconnect between the number of enterprises who understand sales onboarding is crucial, and those who work it out well is noticed.

According to research, 62% of the organizations think they aren’t efficient at sales onboarding, even if it is considered a topmost priority for sales leadership. In addition, just 12% of employees sense their organization is good at sales onboarding.

It’s plain that merely having a sales onboarding procedure is not enough to retain good sales reps. Dive in to know about the common sales onboarding practices and transform them into best practices as they promise nothing but success for your sales team.

Creating the best performers with prodigious sales onboarding

When it comes to sales onboarding, there are three objectives:

To enhance and expedite productivity, get new sales reps.
Through training and coaching, develop the highest possible productivity.
Retain the best performers long-term.

Several organizations bog down in a rut of usual practices that produce average results. And these common and hackneyed practices are the way of least resistance in the sales boarding process. They are built on what is familiar and what is easy.

Enhancing the sales onboarding practices will allow you to build robust teams and generate higher sales for the company. Let’s now batting around three of the best ways that can help you transform the sales onboarding process.

1. Track the right metrics:

Sales leadership, to plan efficiently, requires visibility into the onboarding procedure. Tracking sales onboarding metrics enables readily identifying the low, middle, and top performers. The information can be used to:

Offer further training and onboarding when required.
Stay confident in the talent across the sales teams created by you.
Make precise sales forecasts and plan sales strategies.

2. Make onboarding a continuous training process:

Sales reps need refreshers and have more to know and learn, even though they have touched their peak productivity levels. Organizations must offer continuous resources and programs to ensure sales reps can maintain high-performance levels. They must include crucial, new information and affirm basic training points. Even the best sales reps can benefit from continuous training to keep their knowledge sharp and enhance their skills.

3. Information served in different engaging ways:

You can’t learn through boring, rut techniques. Individuals are at the peak of their learning skills when the information is presented in different ways. Thus, sales onboarding must include different learning formats such as self-guided classes, classroom settings, and e-learning. This helps keep newly hired sales reps engaged throughout the learning and upskilling process. In addition, presenting information in varied ways also offers more effective training by lining up onboarding subjects with the proper learning format. For instance, videos are great for giving a demo for sales conversions such as negotiation or elevator pitches, while classrooms are preferred for overall fundamental knowledge.

4. Customize onboarding to different jobs and experience levels:

Customize the onboarding programs to varied experiences and different roles of each employee, wherever possible. Consider the following questions:

What is the typical experience level of a sales rep?
What are the crucial things one needs to know in a particular role to succeed?
How can you create proper onboarding content for a specific level?

There would be content that must be included in all the onboarding processes. However, beyond that, onboarding programs and processes created and designed for various employee groups allow you to develop more optimal experiences and set the employees for success.

Impact of sales onboarding on your revenue and growth

The majority of the companies are oriented chiefly around growth and revenue. Provided that an organization’s sales team is typically the greatest driver of revenue, enterprises require productive and efficient sales onboarding programs to see terrific growth.

Consider your sales representatives in three performance levels:

Low performers fighting to hit quota.
Middle performers get fairly close to quota but always fail to hit their goals.
Top performers who continuously hit and surpass quota.

In a nutshell,

Any organization would want to recruit and retain top-performing sales reps. That’s obvious. This troupe will clinch the most deals and drive the highest revenue. Top-level performers bring in five times more revenue and ten times more revenue than poor performers, on average, compared to middle performers. We walked you through the best sales onboarding practices that can help an organization create top performers with productive sales onboarding. Utilize the strategies to see a positive shift in your sales and revenue.