Hiring top SaaS sales talent is incredibly important in today’s hyper-competitive business landscape. But that’s only half the battle. You also need to retain them, as this is the real key to thriving long-term. Rather than leaving retention to chance, your best bet is to create a fleshed-out talent development plan that crystallizes the exact steps you’ll take to keep your SaaS salespeople engaged.
Below is the core process for creating a winning talent development plan.
Bake Mentorship Into Your Team Dynamic
Let’s say you recently hired a new sales rep with a proven track record and talent that’s off the charts. You know that if given enough time, they’ll thrive on your SaaS sales team. But what can you do to accelerate the process and throw gasoline on the proverbial talent development fire?
One of the best ways is to have a system where seasoned salespeople who know the ins and outs of your company can impart their wisdom and knowledge. In other words, mentorship.
Now, some degree of mentorship happens organically on a sales team. But you can expedite it by baking mentorship into your team dynamic and prioritizing it with new hires.
According to research, “97.6% of U.S. Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs,” with 91% proving to be effective.
As for the nuts and bolts of a mentorship program, there are five key steps involved.
You can learn more about the process through this in-depth guide.
Identify Skills Gaps
I think most of us can agree that internal hiring is usually a smart move if you have a focus on salesperson engagement and retention. For perspective, “Statistics show that when employees are promoted, they are 70% more likely to stay long-term. And 62% of employees who make lateral moves experience high retention rates with the company.”
But to be successful with internal hiring, you need to first pinpoint where you’re lacking and what specific skills gaps there are. Maybe, for example, your sales demos aren’t advancing enough leads to the next stage of the sales funnel. You could likely benefit from moving a promising sales rep up the ladder to become an account executive, where they could strive to refine sales demos.
The point here is that an integral part of talent development is figuring out exactly what skills demand your attention. This brings us to our next point.
Offer Individualized Skills Development Training for Skills Gaps
Once you know which skills need work and which positions need filling, you’ll want to do two things. First, figure out which salespeople are a good fit for development. And two, offer each salesperson individualized training to help them reach their peak potential.
Note that you probably won’t have the time to devote attention to every single salesperson in your SaaS company, especially if you’re a mid-sized or large business. In fact, I generally recommend using the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule here, where you focus on the most promising 20% of your team.
Then, once you get that initial 20% squared away and have improved their skills, you can move on to the next segment of your workforce.
When I say “individualized training,” I mean zeroing in on developing the necessary skills that are lacking by position, as well as the areas in which each rep could improve.
Some examples could include:
- Cold calling
- Delivering demos
- Handling rejection
- CRM mastery
- Deal negotiation
Here are some more ideas.
Be Sure to Provide Incentives
For reps with a natural drive, skills development in and of itself is enough to keep them motivated. Others, however, may need a little incentive to keep them on the progression path. And even the most type-A sort of personality still wouldn’t mind a little something something for their troubles.
That’s why we suggest providing incentives with your skills development training, as this can break down many barriers of resistance and give reps the fuel to keep pushing onward when they “hit the wall.”
Note that this doesn’t have to be anything over the top. In many cases, simply making it a point to acknowledge a salesperson’s wins and give them recognition is all it takes. Other ideas include creating a “skills development leaderboard,” where you highlight who’s stepped their game up and the specific areas they’ve developed.
Or if you want to spice it up, you can always offer financial incentives like gift cards or bonuses. Often, the small financial investment you put up for these incentives will pale in comparison to the increased revenue you’ll see from talent development.
Keep Iterating Your Talent Development Plan
Everything we’ve mentioned so far — mentorship, identifying skills gaps, individualized training, and incentives — is the core part of a talent development plan. But there’s one last step in the process, and that’s continually analyzing and refining your talent development plan to ensure it’s firing on all cylinders.
The best way to do this is to use AI or analytics to track the KPIs that are most instrumental to your sales team’s growth and evolution.
Say, for instance, the main purpose of mentorship is to accelerate new hire ramp time and help them reach their sales quotas quicker. You may want to measure the time it takes for them to reach full productivity or a specific sales benchmark.
Then, you could compare that against prior data to see if your efforts are paying off. If not, you would need to make some adjustments. And if they are paying off, you would want to see if there are any micro-improvements you could make to drive further progress.
Besides just looking at the numbers, also be sure to gather firsthand feedback from team members to see where talent development could be improved.
Development > Engagement > Retention > Success
Simply hiring great talent is a good start. But it’s not enough to flourish in the SaaS industry.
You need to think long-term and focus heavily on salesperson development and engagement, which not only helps them stay locked in and committed to their job but also sets the stage for retention and true success.
If you’re ready to turbocharge your SaaS sales recruiting and build an airtight recruitment funnel, schedule a demo with HireDNA today.