What Should Sales Leaders Do To Successfully Onboard New Sales Reps?

No matter how talented your newly hired sales reps are, you cannot expect your rockstar reps to succeed in the absence of a good onboarding plan. So, what is exactly an onboarding plan?  

What is employee onboarding? In simple words, it is the process of training a new member in the team and making them understand everything about the organization. A common onboarding process includes practices such as making the rep review the employee handbook, attend orientation meetings etc.

Nevertheless, the onboarding should include training and engagement elements to acclimate the new entrants to their responsibilities in this work environment.

Various research suggest onboarding new sales rep using better methods because:

1. Using a standardized onboarding process will encourage approximately 60% employees to stay in the organization for three years and more. Not to mention that hiring new employees is also costlier than retaining the older ones.
2. A successful onboarding process can boost the productivity of new hire up to 25%.

Implementation of a fool-proof onboarding process will achieve three objectives – it will acclimate the new hires, it shall increase employee engagement, and helps in retaining the employees in the organization.

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After putting forth the importance of an onboarding process, let us walk you through some expert-approved tips to onboard new sales reps. 

1. Lay down a standardized process

The better processes you have, the best you perform. Same applies to your onboarding thing as well. Before you start hiring reps, you need to lay down a standardized process that helps to streamline everything.

Onboarding isn’t a one-day process, it is an ongoing one. So, prepare your team accordingly.

2. Note down everything

Your new sales rockstar will not have 100% knowledge of what they are going to be presented with. It is better you have some resources such as company leaflets and acclimate them with the culture.

Developing such sales process documents will save your time and you will not require any room for trial-and-error.

3. Set forth the expectations

When you have your new sales reps right with you, explain everything clearly and pump in as much information as you can about the company, the customers they are going to handle and the common objections they might face.

The next thing you are supposed to do is to set the basic expectations. Guide and encourage them to push their boundaries and show results. Conduct interactive sessions about explaining the company culture, the overarching mission, the corporate goals and so on. The more they know, the better they will perform.

4. Take your own time

Onboarding must not be pushed; it should be cultivated over time. Rushing this process will neither help the organization nor the sales reps. It is okay if a few reps take more time to understand everything. Allow them the required time, and assign responsibilities later.

5. Optimize the onboarding

Onboarding is ongoing. Although we stated in the first point that you need to standardize the entire process, but the process should be optimized over time. It is quite unlikely that you pick up the perfect process right out of the gate.

Continually analyze your process, be open for feedback and improve as and when you can.

Creating and implementing a good and well-balanced onboarding process from scratch is no cake-walk.

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Let us have a quick look at some good tools and their prominent features.

1. Trello

Trello helps with:

• A virtual notice board to pin the names of the new reps.
• It delegates tasks to reps easily, sets deadlines and keeps the priority tasks at the top.
• The platform helps to understand the new hire about the company projects and processes.

2. Slack and Chief Onboarding

With its easy-to-use interface, it keeps you connected with your team always. Essentially, an internal social network, Slack helps to:

• Create group chats, share documents and send direct messages to peers.
• Create project channels where new hires can learn the new names, team structures etc.
• Conduct in-person meetings between trainees and supervisors, saving time of the sales team.

3. Whatfix

The best tool for sale reps to understand the company’s product. Further, Whatfix can help:

• To train new hires about the product and offer the supervisors a quick overview of the product over time.
• Supervisors can share the link of the product on the cloud to be studied by everyone.

4. Mindtickle

It is an all-inclusive sales readiness platform and onboarding is one of the features it offers. Mindtickle helps with:

• Training sales reps like pros.
• Arm the reps with the required skills they need to know.
• Keep the reps on-target and productive during selling.

Final Thoughts

There you have it – the onboarding process, its importance, some tips and the top tools that help to do it all successfully.

Implement everything carefully and you will achieve your sales goals sooner rather than later!