How to Create a Better Sales Onboarding Process

Adapting and onboarding new sales managers is not a one-day affair. Typically, companies spend a lot of resources on this because it is essential to train new sales reps to get them up to speed.

Have you ever calculated how much time and money you spend onboarding an employee? After all, your existing employees can also be involved in training a new sales manager.

On average, the onboarding process for a new employee takes up to three months. During these 90 days, the Sales specialist learns information about the company, builds relationships within the team, and gains experience from other sales managers.

In this article, we will look at how to improve and speed up the onboarding process at your company. And at the end of the article, we'll share a free bonus.

What is Sales Onboarding?

Let’s stand on the same page about the onboarding definition. It is the lengthy process of getting an employee acclimated to a new workplace and a traditional way of introducing a sales manager to the company, teaching him the specifics of working with customers.

Usually, the sales rep learns about the company's products, mission, and goals, analyzes competitors, listens to calls from other sales managers, reads correspondence, and more.

This process varies from company to company. But getting ahead of the curve, we should note that automating this process allows you to reduce the time and money spent significantly. Notably, if the specification of your company is hiring many new employees.

As a team leader, you should approach the onboarding process responsibly. That's why we recommend that you carefully read our article and implement the advice in your company.

Benefits of an Effective Sales Onboarding Process

The more successful and faster a new employee goes through the onboarding process, the quicker they will make money for your company. That's why it's important to pay enough attention to improving onboarding efficiency. We have collected several advantages of effective onboarding, which can be a good reason to improve the process in your company.

1. With effective onboarding, you can quickly get your sales manager up and running. You save time, money, and the team's efforts.

2. As a team leader, you start benefiting faster because the less time an employee takes to adapt, the quicker they can move on to their core responsibilities. It allows you to achieve your goals even quicker.

3. The better and more effective onboarding is, the more chances are that the sales rep will be satisfied and decide to stay with your company. It happens so that a poorly thought-out onboarding process can cause the company to lose a potentially great employee. Show your interest and give the employee the attention they deserve by making onboarding more effective.

4. A well-trained employee will achieve good results on tasks more quickly. As a team leader, it is up to you to determine how fast the sales manager will benefit the company. It will also affect his motivation to work.

As you can see, effective onboarding is a helpful tool for getting good results from a new employee. And only if you put enough time and effort into creating an onboarding plan can you get many benefits.

5 Sales Onboarding Best Practices

A new sales rep usually goes through a quick training session during the first week. The mentor shows some examples of call scenarios, company goals, and interaction rules. This format can lead to sales reps absorbing up to 30% of the information. Many reps can’t remember that much data at once.

So, we've put together five practices to help you make the onboarding process more efficient without too much effort.

1. Have an Onboarding Schedule

The sales manager needs to know what to expect from their workload for the onboarding period. The program will also include meetings with you as team leader. Set a time to listen to calls from more experienced managers.

You can use the 30-60-90 plan template for comfort. It is a structured plan for the effective onboarding of salespeople. With its help, you can consider all the significant points for adaptation and smoothly move from training to implementing knowledge in practice. We'll talk about the plan a little further.

2. Set a Friendly Tone

As in any industry, human relationships are highly valued in sales. For onboarding to be successful and retained, the team leader must show a friendly tone of communication. You must offer a friendly and warm manner during onboarding. It is not the most apparent practice, as some teams prefer a business-like communication style.

Lack of a student-teacher relationship, as in school, is the key to a better perception of information. Put this advice into practice, and you will be surprised how much the new employee's perception of data will change.

3. Focus on Performance Expectations

It's significant to show a new sales rep what you expect. Success metrics can help you do this. Establish measurable results during onboarding. It could be one deal closed, ten contacts made, or five product demonstrations.

Such expectations will help you set the pace of onboarding and show your expectations of the new employee. So, it will be easier for you to track their performance and efficiency.

4. Use Training Templates

Create an onboarding template. It will be helpful for your next sales rep hires. You will be able to keep all the information in one place, and the employee will have access to it when needed.

Use sales training platforms to create a template for your company’s onboarding process. The template will allow you to automate the onboarding because you will no longer have to organize it again and again. The template will enable you not to forget anything.

5. Organize Activities in a Logical Sequence

For onboarding to be as effective as possible, use a logical plan. The employee should know the next steps and why they are precisely that.

We offer you the scheme.

Learn → Implement → Optimize

This sequence is a logical one for new employee onboarding.

First, give the sales rep time to learn. Then help them implement what they've learned into practice. And eventually, the salesperson will come to analyze their actions and optimize their work tasks.

Sales Onboarding Next Steps

After the new sales rep has completed the onboarding process, you should schedule a debriefing meeting. Go back to performance metrics and analyze which sales rep achieved and which ones did not, and for what reason. This analysis will help the employee become more autonomous in their work and understand the reason for their mistakes.

Then it's time to set new goals for the professional development of the sales representative in the company. But we'll tell you about that later :)

Conclusion

Well, we've talked about a few ways to make onboarding at your company more effective.

As promised, it's time for a free bonus!

We give an access 30-60-90 Day Sales Plan Template that you can use for onboarding sales reps. Download it at the link below and complete it with success metrics.