Once you hired the best people for the respective role, you also want to make sure that you ease them into your company in the most efficient way possible. The first weeks and months during the onboarding process are crucial for your sales reps when it comes to their retention, performance, long-term success, and productivity. That is why you want to ensure your sales onboarding process helps them get settled in quickly whilst feeling guided and motivated.
At Audvice, we just expanded our sales team, and whilst we deep-dived into the ins and out’s of onboarding and setting up the right processes, we thought this might also be of use to you:
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#1 Share best practices during onboarding
What better way to learn than from the people who know best?
If you have a team with already experienced sales reps, you can have your new sales team member shadow a more senior rep for some time. Let them be present when your experienced salespeople interact with customers, give demos, or close deals.
If you have the resources and the right people for it, you can also assign them a mentor from the sales department who can guide them through their first calls and encourage them to take responsibility immediately. You don’t want your new sales reps to spend too much time taking notes and sitting in the back, as they will become more hesitant to get started as time passes.
But you need to be careful when it comes to mentoring or having your salespeople shadowed, as it is a question of both availability and resources, as well as competence. Your best-selling team member might not be the right person to guide your new sales reps through the first phases of their onboarding process, as they might not be the most patient or skillful in teaching others.
Audvice helps you to share best practices and gained information from your most experienced employees in a scalable yet personal way. With Audvice, you can create onboarding material in the form of playlists, leveraging the power of voice.
You record these playlists once, preferably by a team member with the most experienced in the subject you want to share with your new hires, and share them multiple times with whoever you want. Another benefit is that your current staff can continue to focus on daily business and does not have to take too much time to onboard the newbies because they basically self-train.
Let us list a few playlists that you could have your experienced sales reps record, to include in your onboarding process:
How to win your first customer
Salesforce Guide
Sales Playbook
What Your Sales Pitch Should Cover
Competitor Analysis Introduction
Pricing 1x1
After the new employees listened to those, they will already have specific questions, which will help to make onboarding meetings much more fruitful and on point.
#2 Onboarding is all about practicing
A strategy that aligns with assigning your new sales reps experienced mentors is letting them practice right from the start. When it comes to that, it is important to find the right balance between taking responsibility and making sure you don’t overwhelm them. Of course, you don’t want them to converse with your most important current or potential clients immediately, so you need to involve them in adequate tasks. Provide them with a safe place to test their skills.
Practice alone is good, but they won’t know if they are doing it right if they don’t get feedback on their performance. If you hire multiple sales reps at the same time, you can let them practice and give each other feedback collectively, alongside one another. But it is also super important for them to get feedback from more experienced team members. This, again, is also a question of the availability and resources of your team members, as they probably already have enough on their plate.
Audvice is an enablement tool that helps your new sales reps to practice and get personal feedback from their peers and superiors. But in contrast to long onboarding calls or lengthy e-mails, audvice enables training as a part of your sales onboarding process while still leaving enough time for your team to focus on their regular tasks.
For example, you can get your new sales reps to record a short playlist with their sales pitch. They can then share this playlist with an experienced sales team member in your audio library for them to listen to it at their own pace. After listening, they can record a short feedback playlist and provide the new reps with valuable and personalized feedback.
#3 Help them to understand the big picture
To sell successfully, you want your new sales reps to understand the big picture, and not only the sales side of things. Whilst you want them to understand the product they are selling, but also the mission behind it. In order to ensure that, it helped us to give them different perspectives within the company, from product development to marketing to especially customer service.
Help them to really understand your company’s history, leadership, offerings, values, mission, key differentiating points, and customers.
Once they have a full overview, they will not only be able to answer any question that is thrown at them, but they will also feel more comfortable when talking to customers, as they know everything they need to.
Audvice can help you to introduce your company to your new sales reps in an asynchronous way, by sharing playlists with them, which they can listen to at their own pace, even while doing laundry, taking their dog on a walk, or commuting.
Here are a few examples:
Welcome To Our Company
Competitor Analysis Introduction
Intro To Our Department
Company History
Brand Guidelines
Social Media Strategy
FAQs by Customers
You want to set your new sales reps up for success with a structured and personalized onboarding strategy?
Audvice helps you to make the whole process more scalable, and more efficient, without losing the personal touch and the emotional context.
Get started for free today!