Successfully onboarding new sales staff will help make your company more agile in times when you need to quickly ramp up sales efforts. Poor onboarding on the other hand can increase turnover and cost your organisation a significant amount of money in the long term. Below you will find a short guide on how to make your sales staff onboarding process successful.
Utilize e-learning
It is likely that your organization is already using e-learning to train employees. Setting up an e-learning program for new hires is a very efficient and cost-effective solution for sales training. This training program can encompass almost anything a new hire needs to know. Make sure however that you make a distinction between essential training and nice to have training that is less of a priority during the initial employee onboarding process, in order to avoid overwhelming your new hires with an information overload.
Assign a Mentor
Even when hiring someone with a lot of experience and putting them through an extensive e-learning program, there will always still be questions popping up. For example, about specific company procedures, how you should deal with common customer questions, or client concerns / complaints. The best way to handle these questions is by assigning your new hire an experienced mentor from within the sales team who will help them get on their feet. Set up an open dialogue between the new hire and mentor and make it clear that they can come to them with any questions.
Start Them Off Slow
Don’t try to assess your new hire’s skills immediately by assigning them the most difficult to sell products or services right off the bat. Everyone needs some time to get into it when starting a new job, so instead of making it hard for them, start them off with some easy sales tasks to help boost their confidence. Once their confidence goes up, you will notice that performance will start to skyrocket.
Organise a Weekly Meeting
As the CEO or Sales Manager, you should schedule a weekly 5-10 minute meeting or call (depending on how large your organization is and how much time you have) with new hires just to check on how things are going. There doesn’t need to be an agenda for these short sessions, but just let it be an informal chat. Ask how everything is going and whether there is anything you can do to help them out.
Following this guide will significantly improve your new sales reps’ chances of success within your organization and, in turn, help your organization sell more and be more competitive.
Related Pages
e-Learning as part of effective onboarding solutions and staff induction.