Your company is growing and that’s amazing. But let’s be honest, sometimes the hardest part of expanding is finding the time to get everyone up to speed. You have marketing collateral all over the place, CRMs that have existing clients and potential leads and most importantly a company message that you have dialed in and speaks exactly to the business you’ve become. Yeah you want these new people onboard but who’s got time to do it, right?
It’s imperative that they understand your company’s mission, what’s expected of them, and what kind of help and support they can expect from the company. All of this doesn’t happen in an instant. The onboarding process can range from a few days to months, so it’s so important to standardize the process and make every minute count.
“Great employee onboarding can improve employee retention by 82%”
https://www.saplinghr.com/blog/10-employee-onboarding-statistics-you-must-know-in-2019
Onboarding Standardization
Giving everyone the same type of training gives them the opportunity to absorb your company information and how they retain information. No person is the same, but you’ve obviously invested time and energy vetting these people and know that they’re going to be a great new ambassador for your brand. Designing the standardized process needs to be viable for the long-term hire. Setting your team members up for success is crucial to the retention of employees.
In addition to everything above, let’s not forget about the standardization for a CRM. Client relationships are how business is maintained and won, but implementing the CRM that best suits your company can be the biggest task. Use a CRM that works with your goals and your required client information and for the new hires. Make sure they are well-versed on the ins and outs of the platform and what is needed to add a customer. Customers can’t sit in the top of the funnel forever, work the relationship and either move them to the close or get them out of the funnel completely.
Mentorship
Great advice from Nick Kane at Janek Performance Group “There’s perhaps no better way to ensure a strong transition than having greenhorn sales reps mentored by tenured reps”. Partnering the new with the veteran for sales calls, product demonstrations and overall customer interactions helps the newbie gain insight into the company as a whole. How do you speak about the features? The benefits? A veteran is the best instructor to get the job done. Along with the mentoring, the new hire could also be a resource for teaching an old dog new tricks. Sales are competitive, we all know that. It’s integral that you pair personalities and sales styles in the mentorship program to enhance that process. The mentor is also a great sounding board for when the new hire can be released into the wild and can make sales on their own.
Expectations Expedite the Process
Transparency is key. Setting realistic performance-based expectations can get the new hire out and selling quicker. Take for example, the expectations of your sales goals to increase by 10% over the next two quarters, let the new hire know that it’s going to take grit and experience to attain those goals. And take nothing less. Be realistic and set them up for success, not failure. Your goals might be unrealistic and audacious, or they might be real and doable. Hold the new hire to the same expectations you hold yourself and other team members to. Of course you want them to go out and “kill it” but understand that not only does it take time, but it takes the growth of a client network to get the numbers expected.
Arm your Team Members
Each veteran salesperson has the way they sell and that works for them. Some just talk and get the job done; they’ve been blessed with the gift of gab. Others might excel at presenting material and giving a visual representation of a product and its features. And even others are data-driven. Hardcore numbers sometimes really drive the sale home. No matter who you employ or who you’ve just hired, it’s critical to give them all of the right collateral to get a customer across the finish line. The days of random powerpoints, floating USB drives or unorganized cloud storage platforms are done. You can’t expect your sales teams to create content or spend time looking for something that might have been emailed a couple of months ago.
A custom branded business mobile app solution like Command.App® can bring all of their sales materials under one solution. There’s no longer a need to search for content or tell the potential customer, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” With a mobile app solution, your team members can use the devices they already use to call, track and manage customer relationships so there is no tech investment. Most importantly, the gap between sales and marketing is now bridged. Marketing can have the confidence to know that the content they are creating is available for everyone in their organization. And sales now has all of the information and tools to close the sale. Changing and updating content is as easy as upload and deploy, boom, everyone now has the most updated content in the palm of their hand. Additionally, it gives the new reps the opportunity to quickly get up-to-date with all of your product offerings and now are getting “coached-up” to the successes that the veterans already have in their arsenal.
Continuous Measurement and Growth
You can never master the art of selling. It’s impossible. But you can continue to learn and grow. Set goals and milestones that allow for that growth measurement. Sales cycles vary like the weather, one day it can be an easy close and the next could be a road of 6 months before the sale. Measuring the history of various sales cycles, what went right and what could have gone better helps accelerate the growth of each individual and the company.
- Some recommendations include documenting everything in the first 5 sales cycles of new hires.
- Dividing new hires into groups that can compare against one another and find similarities in sales cycles.
- Along with measuring the growth of individuals, continue to change and enhance the on-boarding process to adjust to times of the year and different industries.
To review, these 5 steps can make the process smoother, more efficient and staff retention rates much higher.
- OnBoarding Standardization
- Mentorship
- Expectations Expedite the Process
- Arm your Team Members
- Continuous Measurement and Growth
Onboard your new employees easily and get your new sales force selling quicker. Contact us today.