Tactics for Quickly Onboarding New Sales Talent

Identifying the onboarding challenge

Recognizing the problem is the initial step toward a solution. Onboarding new sales team members takes a lot of information sharing. Information around best practices, in-depth product knowledge (that is most likely changing often), honing pitching skills needs to make its way to new sales reps.

Finding the primary blockers to this happening is key. Ask your team what might have slowed their own onboarding process, try to understand the pains you have as a Sales Leader when onboarding new hires and start from there. 

Want to see what this might look like in practice? We’ve got a real life example in one of our customers, a marketing insights organization, whose CRO identified the impact that slow onboarding was having on sales.

The tale of a Chief Revenue Officer fed up with slow onboarding

At this organization, the Chief Revenue Officer had many challenges when it came to onboarding new hires into the sales team quickly and smoothly:

• Getting them up to speed with complex subject matters
• Wading through outdated materials to find the most up to date information to share
• He became a walking FAQ in between meetings, meaning no time for valuable focused work
• New hires doing admin tasks and shadowing sales while onboarding rather than getting hands on early
• Getting seasoned reps from 90% efficiency to 99% felt impossible
• Overall, onboarding was very manual

After partnering with Hive Learning, he revamped the organization’s onboarding strategy.

Here’s how any organization with a sales team can replicate this success:

1. Speed Up Learning with Customized Training

They initiated a custom-tailored onboarding program that offered immediate feedback and training designed around the company’s specific business needs and products.

Additionally, all the information from onboarding training was available in Hive Learning’s Sales Sidekick, so the team were able to access information without having to leave their desk or wait for a senior team member to finish a meeting to ask their questions.

It’s important to avoid giving generic or outdated training as reps will spend most of their time trying to fill in the gaps. In this case, a customized approach got sales reps selling up to 6 weeks earlier. 

2. Keep Sales Materials Current and Accessible

A main blocker for sales reps getting selling is access to key information, and simply knowing what they don’t know. 

The CRO and his team were able to upload relevant documentation, such as most recent sales decks, best practices, battlecards and product information, to Hive Learning – and the best part – as soon as it changed, they could update it easily and any questions would be answered with relevant information. 

Adopting this approach

To achieve similar results, consider the following actions:

1. Evaluate and refresh your onboarding content to ensure it’s current and reflects the latest sales techniques and product features.
2. Develop an interactive training program that offers feedback in real-time and accommodates different learning speeds and styles.
3. Automate as much of the onboarding process as possible with technology, allowing sales leaders to concentrate on strategy and personal coaching.
4. Establish a centralized hub for all sales materials, making it easier to distribute updates quickly and uniformly.
5. Measure the effectiveness of your onboarding process by tracking new hire progress and the impact of training interventions.

In the fiercely competitive realm of sales, a streamlined onboarding program isn’t just beneficial—it’s critical. By drawing from experiences from other sales leaders and executing a well-thought-out onboarding plan, you can ensure your new sales talent is primed for success sooner, reducing the burden on your leadership team. The aim is a smooth and quick integration of new talent, keeping your sales engine humming at peak performance.