Getting our new hire sales onboarding programs to dramatically improve the ramp time of our teams and to deliver meaningful revenue impact is a journey. It’s even more challenging today with remote teams who need 100% virtual onboarding programs. You can read this blog on creating a 30/60/90 sales onboarding plan to understand the fundamentals of onboarding. Here are some advanced concepts.
#1: Map Sales Process Activities to Coaching Exercises
Create activity-based exercises to reinforce your sales process and buyer’s journey. For example, create learning with coaching exercises that are mapped to sales process stages. List out the activities per stage. Build exercises around them. If asking questions is critical to a great first call discovery, then have your new hires write out their questions and get feedback from their peers and managers as a sample exercise. Guide them. Have them show you they grasp what good looks like. Other “learn by doing” sales process exercises include:
- Writing intro prospecting emails
- Writing out first call agendas
- Sharing recap meeting summaries
- Drawing out a power org chart
These are all great “front of the funnel” exercises. I see many people training new hires on “back of the funnel” activities way too soon. Get feedback from your managers on the activities that matter most in the first 30/60/90 days of a new hire’s journey. These are great exercises to do with remote teams to boost productivity. It gets them practicing your sales motion faster.
#2: Make Learning Content More Graphical and Engaging
Update your training and content in your library to be more graphical. Now that our teams are remote, we want to find ways to build community and connect people human-to-human. Pictures and videos and faces helps. For example, put executive faces on executive welcome videos and put awesome product manager faces front and center on your product training and product playbooks. The faces will drive up engagement and make people feel more connected sooner. Turn your training and content Library into a graphical people directory.
#3: Curate Top Performers Win Stories
Get top performers recording win stories. You can use our Story Recorder to help you scale capturing and sharing the stories. Our teams are remote and we need to creatively capture knowledge and win stories to boost new hire productivity. Once you capture some videos, curate the win stories into top performer deal win playlists. Why not get your new hires binging on video win stories just like Netflix shows? Everyone wants to learn from the best. Click to watch this great story highlighting all the benefits of deal win stories from Michelle Schmuhl at Transnational.
#4: Get Your Teams Call Shadowing
Get peer mentoring and call shadowing to be a core part of your onboarding 30 60 90 plans. Create assignment for your new hires to do in their onboarding journey.
- Get your new hires building relationships and reaching out to their peers to join live calls.
- Then, after joining calls, have them share lessons learned about the call in the Call Shadowing Huddle. It’s important to see if your new hires are picking up the sales motion as early as you can.
- Then, their manager will get the call summary recap notification, along with the coaching to do. I love this because, as a manager, I can quickly tell if someone’s on track by the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of their call recap submissions.
#5: One Size Fits All Doesn’t Work
Create onboarding paths, by role, to reinforce and personalize learning and activity coaching by role. We know one size fits all doesn’t work and we should have a 30 60 90 sales onboarding path for each one of our roles. Quota carrying sales people should be onboarded differently than customer success teams and differently than sales development.
We encourage you to invest fifteen minutes to listen and learn from the onboarding success story shared by James Simpson from RingCentral. He walks us through how RingCentral realized a dramatic boost in new business bookings by reducing time to ramp by 60%. RingCentral employs many of the tips outlined in this blog. Click to watch.
