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ATD Blog

4 Onboarding Best Practices: How Sales Readiness Tools Help

Thursday, September 23, 2021
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Sixty-two percent of companies say they’re ineffective at onboarding new sales reps, according to Sales Management Association. But if every company onboards new hires, why is it so hard?

Poor onboarding can happen for a few reasons:

• Reps take too long to ramp up.
• Onboarding is done on the job, with reps practicing on buyers.
• Sales managers guess whether new reps are prepared to sell.

There are many ways to get your onboarding on the right track, but one thing that can support it across the board is sales readiness technology.

Sales readiness technology allows sales enablement departments to create content, deliver training, and conduct coaching virtually instead of relying on costly, time-consuming in-person training sessions. It also empowers reps to ramp up in a measured fashion and learn efficiently. Sales readiness technology combined with these four best practices can improve your onboarding:

1. Offer Multiple Learning Methods

Traditional onboarding methods, such as in-person sessions and the old “firehose” approach, aren’t enough for today’s sales forces, and in some cases, they are ineffective.

Reps today want to learn in different ways—whether it’s via video, microlearning, or a mix of formats. Sales readiness technology allows you to do all of that and more. For example, you can set up an onboarding curriculum with some courses as videos and others as PowerPoints with voiceovers while mixing in attachments, quizzes, and other multimedia elements.

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Offering multiple learning methods and formats makes onboarding more engaging, and it can also help training materials stick and appeal to the learning preferences of your new reps.

2. Design Courses and Curriculums Focused on Key Sales Activities

When a new rep comes on board, it can be overwhelming. There’s a lot to learn in a short period of time, such as product and company information, key messaging, competitive differentiators, and sales methodology to name just a few.

Sales readiness technology can help you organize all the information new reps need to know in courses and curriculums that can be compiled by due date, completion criteria, and more so that reps stay on track. You can also set it up so reps complete one series of training courses and coaching activities at a time, with the end goal of mastering the key skills needed to complete a given sales activity.

For example, new reps might use sales readiness technology to access the curriculum that will help them learn how to conduct discovery. Upon logging in, they’ll see a series of training courses and video coaching assessments that need to be completed to earn the certification for discovery. Once they complete and pass all courses and assessments, they will be certified and ready to take their first discovery calls.

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3. Empower Reps and Managers to Monitor Progress

Another challenge of onboarding is ensuring reps stay on track with their training and take enough time to ramp up before interacting with buyers.

Sales readiness technology allows reps and managers to monitor progress throughout all onboarding activities. Reps can see how many courses and coaching activities they’ve completed and what’s coming next. Managers can view the progress of all their new team members to see who’s on track and who may be falling behind.

Being able to monitor progress adds a level of accountability for new reps and managers when it comes to keeping the onboarding process moving and certifying that all skills and knowledge have been mastered.

4. Assess Readiness With Quizzes, Coaching, and More

How can sales managers know if their new reps absorb the information, understand it, and can apply it properly when they start selling?

What it comes down to is assessing (instead of guessing) reps’ readiness. Sales readiness technology allows you to add an assessment component into onboarding, so you’ll not only know whether reps have completed their training, but you can validate that they’ve mastered it.

About the Author

April Synyard is a marketing manager at Brainshark.