Your onboarding process is a critical component in the overall success of your sellers. Here’s how to create a program that onboards new reps with ease, excellence, and speed.

Summary

The work isn’t done once a new seller joins your team — the work is only starting. Companies need a strong onboarding and sales enablement program that engages new sellers and equips them with the knowledge needed to hit the ground running. Let’s explore how your organization can build an onboarding process that’s both efficient and helpful to your sales reps.

Let’s take a close look at how these benefits come to be.
 

• Improve productivity: When a seller spends less time asking questions or digging for important resources, they can reach their full potential with ease.
• Drive satisfaction: An onboarding program is a new hire’s first experience with your organization’s learning and development culture, which is an important factor in employee satisfaction. Therefore, a hassle-free onboarding experience is often reflective of a larger, positive company culture.
• Decrease turnover: Lower turnover rates are all about confidence in your brand and your company. An organization with a solid onboarding process may make new hires feel more secure in their position and the company as a whole.

Challenges to delivering effective onboarding

Although an effective onboarding program is critical to seller experience, some organizations still struggle to hit the mark.  In fact, 88% of leaders believe that their organization struggles with onboarding.Some of the most common obstacles to delivering a solid onboarding program include:
 

1. Access to the right sales enablement materials: Sellers need easy and ongoing access to their training and sales enablement materials. Make sure new hires know where the most pertinent information is stored, as well as additional resources that may come in handy.
2. Lack of milestones to gauge progress: Despite the well-known benefits of goal-making, 60% of companies don’t set short-term goals for new hires. Giving performance reviews – even small ones – can reassure sellers that they are on the right track
3. Compressed time frame: The first few months in a new role can be stressful for a new hire. Sales training plans should allow adequate time for your seller to learn the ropes instead of cramming onboarding into a few weeks. The fact is, employees who experience longer onboarding programs gain full proficiency 34% faster than those with shorter programs, so create a roadmap that extends beyond a seller’s first 30 or 60 days on the job.
4. Inconsistent experience from rep to rep: Sometimes, even the best sales onboarding plans can have flaws. These can boil down to simple things like different methods of delivery by trainers and enablement leaders, or the time of year when a hire is brought on.
5. Inadequate coaching and feedback: As a sales enablement manager or leader, it’s up to you to ensure that each of your sellers receives the support they need wherever they are in their skills journey. What applies to one seller may not apply to the rest. Utilize the resources at your disposal to give feedback where it will be most effective.
   
   
    

Sales onboarding best practices

While companies can face a number of challenges with onboarding new sales reps, there are a ton of great tips to help the process run smoothly. 

• Streamline the process: Keep your training materials sorted, indexed, and easy to find. The faster a new hire can get a question answered, the better.
• Assess and measure sales readiness over time: As discussed, goal-setting is one of the strongest facets of a great training plan. Give your new hires small goals to achieve so  the bigger ones don’t seem quite so daunting.
• Deliver engaging training: Binders full of reading material don’t make for a great  new hire sales training experience. Instead, encourage employees to interact with content, apply newly learned knowledge, and problem solve in practice exercises.
• Encourage relationship building: Mentoring and shadowing are some of the oldest tricks in the book, and for good reason! Letting your new employees learn from more experienced sales reps grants access to hard-earned wisdom and builds the foundation of a strong professional connection.
• Provide coaching: Your sellers are only as good as the support they receive. Offering coaching and ongoing training can push your sales numbers higher than ever.

Why you should consider using a sales enablement platform for onboarding

Despite the benefits, many organizations still don’t have a formal onboarding program. The most common reason is a lack of time. With an economy moving at a pace unheard of just a decade ago, it’s hard to carve out time to bring every new hire up to speed. 

What are sales enablement tools?

In order to overcome this obstacle, more companies are implementing an onboarding tool or sales enablement platform. These tools make  it easier to turn important knowledge into lessons, assignments, and assessments that new hires can complete over time. It also streamlines the onboarding process by automating tasks so that leaders don’t have to manually push out training content when a new seller is ready. This type of system has actually been shown to boost retention rate by as much as 16%.

If you’ve started a new job in the last few years, you might recall that a lot of the information you were given was irrelevant to your role or simply too much to remember. You’re not alone in this feeling. In fact, almost 80% of sales training is forgotten by most reps within the first few months on the job. So, how can an organization make training stick?

This is one of the many perks of  investing in sales onboarding software. A one-stop digital location for your company’s policies, procedures, and materials makes for easy onboarding and happier employees. A dedicated sales onboarding tool also tracks the progress your new sellers make during their onboarding journey with assessments and feedback assessments. 

Ramp new hires faster with Seismic

When you’re ready to upgrade your sales onboarding process, turn to Seismic. Customers like Lower ramp new sales reps 5x faster by creating onboarding at scale with Seismic’s learning and coaching software. Interested in learning more? See how your organization can improve speed to competency and reach goals more quickly with Seismic with this quick video.