Modern sales organizations are always in the process of hiring, whether you need to replace team members or increase sales capacity. That’s why an effective sales onboarding process is crucial. The success of your team comes down to how quickly your new hires can pick up the necessary skills and become a productive part of your sales team.

With industry reports stating that the average new hire can take as long as nine months to ramp up, sales managers are always searching for strategies to improve their onboarding process and reduce training costs. Consider these tips!

HireDNA can help you identify training needs and ramp up your new hires more effectively. Talk to an expert.

4 Strategies To Improve Your Onboarding Process

As employee turnover rises, companies face the pressure to speed up their sales hiring and training process to maintain their revenue. According to a CSO Insight survey, 45% of sales leaders place reduction of the sales onboarding time as their topmost priority.

Here are four proven strategies to improve your sales onboarding process:

Invest In A Comprehensive Training Process

Onboarding isn’t something that can be completed within a week. Depending on your niche and business complexity, it may take several months before a new sales rep is ready to take on new clients alone.

By creating a comprehensive training program with daily, weekly and monthly checklists, organizations can remove the guesswork from the onboarding process, giving every sales manager a precise idea of how to ramp up a new hire.

As you improvise with each hire, you will gradually formulate an exhaustive training process that allows new salespeople to integrate with your organization seamlessly. This includes everything from incorporating them within your workplace culture to educating them about your products and finally helping them to understand your target audience.

This training process can be used for both new hires and existing salespeople. HireDNA can help you identify and resolve weaknesses and skill gaps limiting your sales results, then deliver comprehensive training to close those gaps. Learn more.

Modernize Your Communication Channels

Traditional onboarding tactics made frequent use of charts, books and other items that have been duly replaced by our smartphones and laptops. As managers continue to interact with an increasing number of millennials sales reps, the onboarding training channels should evolve to maintain a process that is effective and efficient.

Make use of explainer videos, online training modules and interactive case scenarios that allow sales reps to apply what they have learned in real-life settings. Additionally, organizations can provide relevant product guides and descriptions to new sales reps during their training period. This increases their interest, resulting in higher retention and an effective training process.

At HireDNA, we use Rapid Learning Institutes’ (RLI) Micro-Learning Platform , which features a library of training videos, modules, role play scenarios, quizzes and more—all of which can be customized to meet your unique training needs. Learn how we can help you reduce onboarding time by 50%! Learn more.

Enforce ‘Shadowing’ As A Focal Training Process

While newer communication channels are a must-have in any sales organization, they don’t negate the importance of some evergreen training methods, such as shadowing.

Consider encouraging new hires to shadow veteran salespeople as they go about their usual routine—prioritizing prospects, conducting customer outreach, giving demos, etc. This allows the new hire to pick up vital traits, and is a more hands-on way to introduce them to the company culture and related procedures.

The ideal mentor should be an experienced salesperson who has the capacity to teach the skills required to make it to the top level while also possessing the temperament to answer any questions the new hire may have. Organizations need to identify the right mentors as well as develop the right training regimen to optimize this technique even further.

Don’t Rush Your Training Process

Impending team quotas and organizational pressure can get to the best of sales managers, resulting in new hires being rushed to their workstations before going through the entire training process.

While you may be recruiting experienced sales professionals with a history of achieving their quotas, you must understand their prior experience is of a different workplace culture, dealing in different products or maybe a different industry altogether.

To become a valuable member of your organization, every new sales hire needs to receive adequate, personalized training that can allow them to integrate with your organization’s sales process. While rushing sales reps through the hiring process may look like a beneficial step in the short run, the long-term implications can be unsatisfied team members who might not want to continue. This is why it is important to allow sales reps to complete their training in due time.

Train Your Sales Reps More Effectively With HireDNA

As sales managers continue to ramp up new hires, they face challenges that hinder sales reps from learning effectively before being moved on to the next phase. At HireDNA, we utilize modern strategies and innovative tools to cut down on your training time by half.

Leverage a modern cloud-based micro-learning platform that provides custom mapped training content tailored to the skill gaps for each individual sales representative. With interactive learning, quizzes and real-world simulations and more, we make sure your new hires are ready to perform in no time.

Why Choose Us?

• Employees ramped up by HireDNA provide 33% more sales opportunities
• Our proven, data-backed methods increase top-line revenue by 25%
• Our innovative techniques cut down the training period by up to 50%

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