You’ve finally done it: you’ve found a star salesperson to join your already very successful sales team. And best of all, it wasn’t a painful process, since all of the applicant filtering was done automatically. The newbie even seemed eager, passionate, and driven in their interviews and wowed everyone with their interview responses. But you’ll need to set even the best of candidates up for success with a good sales onboarding program.
Certainly, there are plenty of templates to download and customize to onboard your salespeople. There are even calculators to determine ramp-up time based on the average length of a sale cycle.
But most of these processes, as Sam Doshi notices, are missing 4 key features that are necessary for a successful onboarding experience.
And Doshi, Director of Sales Enablement and Sales Training at simPRO, of all people would know. With 20 years of experience in the field including years of 100% commission-based sales, sales management, and sales enablement and training, Doshi has seen it all.
We sat down with Doshi to ask him about the what makes a sales onboarding program the most successful. Here’s what he had to offer.
Top 4 Tips for Building the Best Sales Onboarding Program
1. Make Your Sales Onboarding Programs Interactive
Let’s be honest: onboarding is often mentally and emotionally taxing. And especially if the process is entirely reading and presentation-based, it can feel repetitive for those leading the onboarding process and both overwhelming and boring (no offence!) to those being onboarded.
Instead, then, Doshi suggests making these processes interactive. This might look like acting out calls and simulating the environment in which the worker may be in on the job.
It may also look like gamifying certain processes to make goals feel more exciting. And, as Goosechase mentions, this is crucial for both employee engagement and skill retention. That is, employees will be more likely to retain the information learned when exercised in a role-playing or gamified situation.
So, have fun and take lessons into the practice workplace!
2. Offer Tactical Advice in Your Onboarding
Next, Doshi suggests adding tactical advice to your onboarding process. Crucially, when moving through your onboarding process, make sure you’re offering actionable tasks based in real circumstances and not just theoretical approaches.
This means surveying real sales people—either in the team or from other teams, even in other companies—to see how processes are actually done and not just how they should be done in theory.
See what the top sales representatives do and try these practices out yourself. Then, Doshi says, feel it. That is, understand and recognize how it feels to do these processes correctly. How do you understand when you’re doing it right? How does it feel to do so?
3. Emphasize Reading the Client for Better Results
Moreover, Doshi notes that a successful onboarding process also involves understanding what the client is feeling. And depending on the client’s personality, they may not be as straightforward with their words. And in these cases, being able to read and respond to a person’s body language can be the difference between a successful sales career and a lacklustre one.
Specifically, Doshi suggests training on looking at both facial reactions and bodily postures and movements to tactically approach sales pitches.
“When I look at the buyer,” Doshi says, “are they nodding? What do I see from their body language? I’m acting on that.” He continues to suggest that if they are crossing their arms or leaning back—perhaps in disinterest or skepticism—they may need a different approach to be fully persuaded.
So, consider certain bodily postures, motions, or emotions and how you might suggest your workers to reconsider approaches accordingly.
4. Reinforce Skills after Your Onboarding
Lastly, Doshi suggests reinforcing skills taught in the onboarding process. Surely, with all the details and skills thrown at them, even the most retentive workers will need some skill reinforcement.
And this, Doshi says, is the missing piece of the puzzle in many onboarding programs. So, in addition to supporting the sellers when they’re learning new skills, make sure you’re supporting them when building on those skills in the weeks following.
You can determine what skills need reinforcing by offering frequent and targeted surveys on their experiences. But as Doshi insists, don’t ask your employees a million questions. Make these processes easy and straightforward.
Specifically, you should limit your questions (Doshi suggests only asking five to 10 at a time) to only the most important and strategic ones. These, he suggests, can range from once a month to once a quarter.
Then, on the last Friday of the onboarding session for the sales reps, ask questions that directly target knowledge that is key to success. Did that knowledge stick? If not, consider what knowledge may be missing and how you might better offer the information the second (or third or fourth) time around.
Looking For More Sales Onboarding Help?
Even if you follow all of Doshi’s tips to a T, you may find yourself in a very specific predicament that needs specific feedback. And if you don’t have a mentor or trusted advisor—or if your mentor doesn’t have an answer for your predicament—you may hit a wall in your growth as an organization.
This is precisely why Doshi started Helpful People, a platform that offers direct access to experts in the field who offer mentorship and advice on a myriad of topics for free.
“I noticed from my network that there are a lot of people who want to offer help just because it feels good—because it’s rewarding.” – Sam Doshi
The platform, Doshi says, is very simple. It’s just a link, so anyone can use it to request time to meet one-on-one with pros from all over the world for specific feedback and advice.
After all, many of these experts have done it all before and want to help others navigate the problems they’ve seen time and again. And Doshi says so many people offer their advice for free simply because it gives them even more purpose in their job.
“I used to do free help for people on Saturdays—where I would just be giving them business advice,” Doshi says. “And it was […] very rewarding […] it was just about making myself contribute.”
Summary
Headshot courtesy of Sam Doshi.
After meeting with Director of Sales Enablement and Sales Training at simPRO, we conclude that in order for sales onboarding to be truly successful, it must involve interactive, tactical, training with focuses on skill reinforcement and client body language. After all, there is only so far theoretical onboarding processes will get you without practical exercises and learning opportunities with real-life applications.
We encourage all looking for further support to check out Doshi’s personal passion project: HelpfulPeople.co, where experts can offer mentorship and one-on-one meetings for those in need. As well, of course, we encourage those needing targeted advice to check out the website and book a meeting with a pro who may just have all the answers to your specific questions.
Special thanks to Sam Doshi for all the expert advice in this blog!
