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9 Steps to Decrease the Ramp Time for Your Next Sales Hire
winningbydesign.com
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To help get a sales rep up to scratch from an industry perspective, you need to leverage other resources within your business. “Don’t just rely on the sales manager to onboard a new hire. Encourage the product managers, technical leads and leadership team to participate in the process.” Step 3 – Know your product
Sales is a great job, purely because you get to run your own business (within a business). So the next part of the onboarding process is about building out a business plan and backing it up with sales math. “You’ve got a finite number to hit at the end of the month, the quarter, or the year, and you can map out a path to achieve that number by looking at the metrics that enable you to close that business.” Being new to a business, a new hire probably won’t immediately have that data at hand. But there are a bunch of people who are probably already being successful from a sales perspective. The sales manager’s role is to guide a new hire with the sort of leading activities that can help them be successful as quickly as possible.
Step 1 – Understand your customers “The first step is to help a new hire understand your customers. If they can walk a mile in their shoes, they can actually start to have the empathy they need to succeed as a salesperson.” Companies like HubSpot actually take this a step further. They have all their sales reps go and create inbound marketing campaigns (which is what their software helps businesses do). So their understanding of the customer goes a long way beyond just having book smarts about them. They then also have real hands-on experience of what it’s like to work with the marketing campaigns their customers do.
Before even thinking about “training” and all of those other things that contribute to a new hire onboarding process, you’ve got to get the basics right. “There’s so many instances where I see a SaaS leader bringing on a new salesperson, and they don’t even have a computer set up for their first day. They don’t have desk space. They don’t have network access. They don’t have training materials to read. Instead, they are sitting around being totally unproductive.” The reason this happens is usually just flat out laziness, or people just being disorganised. So there is absolutely no reason why a new team member shouldn’t hit the ground running with a desk, a computer, access to their email, and any other tools or paperwork they need. They need these things to even be remotely productive.
You shouldn’t be sending your reps out into the wild without first having them practice amongst themselves, and then to a manager or an executive in the business, to see how they perform under pressure. “Your goal is to get all of these high impact moments in alignment with your sales process, appropriate for your business, and at a level that will help a new hire close deals.” Step 9 – Model successful behaviour
Step 8 – Roleplay “Effective sales roleplays are more than just phone calls… They are also about emails, voicemails, product demonstrations and anything else your rep will do in the role from a customer-facing perspective.” You shouldn’t be sending your reps out into the wild without first having them practice amongst themselves, and then to a manager or an executive in the business, to see how they perform under pressure.
Step 5 – Understand your territory “When someone starts a new sales role, they are typically given a geographic territory where they’ll be focusing their energy. Or, they may get given leads from a particular segment of the market.” This is a really important part in the onboarding process, because once someone knows what their sales territory is going to be it gives them a lens to absorb future learnings through. About the product, and about the sales process.