I was surprised because every sales department I go into seems to have little to no defined sales training process and the training that is being done is not doing enough to prepare new hires for their task. So, barring the thousand dollar sales training manual collecting dust on a shelf in your office somewhere, where is all this money going?
One of the things that businesses need to do to achieve sales training success is to build systems they can easily follow and actually follow them. If you want to improve how you bring new sales reps onboard, here are some tips:
Create a Sales Training Program
There are plenty of training programs out there that you can buy for your reps – seminars, manuals, videos, etc. – but those aren’t the ones I’m talking about. In order to be truly effective, you need to create a program specific to your business. The training process needs to fit into your team’s workflow and the knowledge and skills you provide them need to be specific to your products and clients.
While this isn’t a hard and fast rule, a recent study by Harvard Business Review found that the optimal hours of training were 29 for training-driven reps and 17 for incentive-driven reps. Give your reps the skills they need, but avoid overtraining them.
Cover all the Bases
During training, don’t forget to get into the real specifics of your products or services. Obviously, you want to start a new rep with the essentials, but if that’s all you show them, they may start to rely on only the products they were most heavily trained on and ignore the rest. Using a CPQ solution can help by providing selling suggestions to make sure they are making use of some of the less-known offerings.
Guided Selling
A CPQ solution can also help guide your new reps through the pricing and quoting stage of the sales process – which can often be the most novel and complicated part to learn. By using software that guides them through this process they can start creating error-free quotes without knowing the entire price list or waiting until the end of their training. On average, it takes 6 to 12 months for a new sales rep to start generating revenue – any way you can get them in the driver’s seat faster is a win for your organization.
Closely Monitor and Mentor
A good sales onboarding process is going to require some personal contact from a sales manager or other person in a mentor role. Set aside some time every week to go over their training and milestones and address any concerns.
Of course, these sessions will be much more productive if you actually have something to say. Using a tool that provides you enhanced sales process insights will give you metrics to share with your trainees to help show them ways to improve and the next best actions they should be taking.
As I said earlier, creating sales processes are great, but only if you and your trainees follow those processes. By integrating training materials into the tools your team actually uses you’ll enable all your new hires to succeed.
