The High Cost of Extended Sales Rep Onboarding

Taking months to bring a new employee up to speed in sales is costly in several ways. Consider the direct costs of sales rep onboarding. A new hire is drawing a salary (or advance on commissions) for a period of time before they start to close sales. For example, a sales rep earning a base salary of $70,000 might cost the company over $35,000 in compensation expenses if they take a full six months to get up to speed.

In addition to direct costs, there are indirect costs to onboarding. The new hire may need additional training and support from managers and other sales representatives. For companies that have minimal sales training resources, informal sales training and mentorship can be especially time-consuming.

Don’t get misunderstand us… It’s probably not possible to eliminate sales rep onboarding entirely. It takes time to learn a new product, different ways of selling and company culture. But what if you could shave a month or two from your onboarding process? That improvement alone could boost sales productivity dramatically, especially if you are hiring many sales staff.

Reducing Sales Rep Onboarding Time: 4 Factors To Optimize

The first step in improving your sales onboarding process is to analyze it and determine the root causes of slow onboarding. As a starting point, use the following 4-factor model.

1. Streamline Administrative Support

The reality is that new employees generally need more support in order to be successful. However, many of their support needs are predictable. For example, every new hire is going to need guidance in learning how to book time off, set up their benefits, and more. 

If you are planning to hire more than two sales representatives in the next 12 months, it is worth taking the time to optimize your support. At the very least, create a checklist of steps that each new hire should complete in their first 30 days. Ideally, a new hire’s basic technology setup – laptop, phone and accounts on key platforms – should be ready to go on their first day.

2. Emphasize Necessary Product Knowledge

You can’t sell a product without understanding how it works. In the first few weeks at the company, each new sales rep should have scheduled training to understand your key products. If possible, give them the opportunity to meet customers and see how they use your products. 

There is a significant opportunity to save onboarding time on product knowledge by focusing on the essentials. For example, make a list of the 50 most common customer questions that come up in presentations or demos. The list of the most common questions and objections can become a living document for the entire sales team.

3. Focus Your Sales Training

The time required for sales process onboarding varies considerably depending on experience level. Brand new sales development representatives (SDRs) and other new sales reps will likely require substantial sales training. In comparison, bringing in more experienced sales professional can significantly cut sales training costs.

By the way, there’s no need to rely exclusively on internally produced sales training materials. Sales training courses on LinkedIn Learning or Sales Gravy can save sales managers hours of time in creating presentations. The only caveat is that these online training course libraries tend to be vast – so create a short list of “must complete” courses during onboarding.

4. Identify Sales Quick Wins During Onboarding 

Most sales people are highly motivated to achieve goals. Therefore, asking a sales person to spend weeks or months on sales training, administrative tasks and other preparation can be demoralizing. To mitigate this onboarding problem, create opportunities for new sales hires to win.

Closing a new sale, especially in enterprise sales, is unlikely to happen right away. However, there are other wins to be had when you focus on the leading indicators of the sales process. For example, consider a sales process that emphasizes providing product demos. A leading indicator for success in this context would be booking appointments with prospects. Therefore, you may want to set an easily achievable activity goal (e.g. contact 10 prospects for demos in your first 30 days) to give prospects a chance to wine.

Optimizing each of these four factors will incrementally speed up your sales rep onboarding program. Once you have this foundation in place, there’s one more crucial strategy to speed up sales rep onboarding.

The Surprising Way Recruiting Improves Sales Onboarding

Assuming that sales rep onboarding starts on the first day of work misses a major opportunity. In reality, the hiring process has the potential to speed up onboarding in a few ways.

More companies are emphasizing the value of exercises, tests and applied work during the interview process. For instance, you might ask a SDR to develop a plan to pursue a single high potential customer. In other cases, the exercise might ask prospects to draft outreach emails and other sales collateral. Success in these practical exercises is valuable because it indicates that the candidate has the drive to compete despite the uncertainty of the hiring process.

Focused recruiting can also cut down sales rep onboarding time by focusing on passive candidates. When you recruit a sales rep with a strong track record of exceeding their quota, their personal drive and skills will help them to speed through onboarding.

There’s just one problem… The best salespeople are usually focused on serving their customers and making the most of their current role. Relatively few of these sales stars are actively looking for new sales positions. 

The solution? Bring in an outside resource – Peak – that has the expertise to consistently identify, contact and appeal to passive sales candidates. Peak has helped recruit top sales professionals for companies of all sizes including multinationals like John Deere and startups like Fetch.

Click here to contact Peak Sales Recruiting today.

Looking for tips on how to build and onboard a successful B2B sales team? Visit our article on B2B Sales Team Structure to find out more.

As the Covid pandemic enters its third year, it’s clear the world will never again be as it was before the spring of 2020. Employees all across organizations experienced extended WFH for the first time — coming to grips with the difficulties (and delights) that have been familiar to remote salespeople for years. If you’re a veteran of remote sales, you have a leg up on office-bound peers, perfecting behaviors that seem foreign to them. If you’re newly liberated from your cubicle, don’t panic: You can not only survive, but thrive, in the new environment. And if this isn’t your first remote rodeo, adapting your skills to account for Covid-related changes can supercharge your performance.

Here’s the best advice to do just that.

Here are 10 tips on how sales reps can be successful working remotely:

1. Island Time

Remember the old saying, “no man is an island?” If you’ve worked in remote sales, you know that’s not true. Selling is by nature a lonely endeavour. Even if you have a support team, at the end of the day, it’s you and the client, mano a mano. By all means, lean into and take all of the support your organization is capable of giving, but also be self-sufficient. That means mapping and mastering your own sales process, attaining a black belt in digital kung fu so you can find and maintain your own online tools, track your own sales funnel and — unless you’re the lucky beneficiary of a robust lead-gen operation — find your own targets.

2. Office Space

Maybe your “office” is just a laptop and a phone. Doesn’t matter. You need a dedicated space where you go to work. It can be an isolated nook in an apartment. Maybe you have a giant walk-in closet that can be repurposed If you’re lucky enough to have a spare bedroom, set it up with comfortable work tools: An ergonomic chair, an efficient desk, some shelves for filing and holding notebooks. When you’re in there, you’re working. When you’re not in there, don’t be working. This helps separate personal and professional and cues your brain to get ready to rumble when you enter the space.

3. Narrowed Focus

As a wise man once said, “All things being equal, I’d rather work near my refrigerator.” Working remotely usually means working from home, with all of the perks — and pitfalls — that entails. Your first priority is to tame the distractions. This is harder than it sounds. We live in a distracted world, bombarded by Tweets, twangs, emails, Slack messages. When you’re working remotely from home, that volume only goes up with dogs barking at mail carriers, doorbells ringing with deliveries and possibly kids crying in the background.

Either you take control of these things or they will control you. Do this: Keep a separate notebook handy and for a week, write down everything that diverts your attention from work as it happens. You go into the bedroom to grab a sweater and notice the full laundry hamper, then think “It won’t take but a minute to start the wash.” Write that down, along with the time it actually took to start the wash — which was more than a minute. At the end of the week, read the list and add up the time spent on non-work activities during your workday. This includes pausing next to the TV to catch a minute of news, the time it took to rearrange the refrigerator shelf when you went to look for a cold drink and exchanging pleasantries with the Amazon delivery guy.

Now start paying attention to what you’re paying attention to. You don’t have to run to the door when the bell rings. You shouldn’t have the TV on in the background. Keep the kids in daycare (if it’s open) or hire a sitter to come in. Don’t get sidetracked by domestic tasks. Focus on your sales process.

4. Office Rules

Figure out when you’re going to do your work, make a schedule and stick to it. If that’s 7 am until 3 pm, fine. If it’s 10 am until 6 pm, also fine. During those hours, commit to not spending time on personal calls or emails, stay off of social media, turn off the television. Don’t make any playdates (for your kids or yourself) during those hours. The converse is also true: When you’re “off,” be off. Keep the personal and professional times separate. Having work bleed over into your personal hours is one reason you’ll be tempted to start doing personal things during your work hours. If you’ve trained yourself to turn the computer off and walk away, you can ignore the laundry because you know you’ll do it tonight when you get “home” from the “office.”

5. Line Up

The cell phone is at once incredibly useful and also the biggest impediment to getting things done. While it’s convenient to just have all of your messages come to the same device, that means — at a minimum — taking the time to glance at the screen when it bings or dings. Consider getting a work-only line to add to your cellphone and train everyone to call you on that number. Set a distinctive ringtone and alert sound for that number. Then train yourself to only respond to incoming calls/texts/emails sent to that number. The things hitting your personal phone you can take care of during breaks — as you would in an office setting. Most cell providers will add an extra line to your phone for around $10 a month. It’s a small price for increasing your productivity.

6. Process Makes Perfect

If you’re accustomed to having others provide the structure and process for your sales, take control. When you have concentrated, uninterrupted time — probably on a weekend — shut off all of your devices. Go outside on the patio. Grab a notebook and pen and think through how you sell, from start to finish: Prospecting, qualifying, contact, follow-up, pitching, closing, post-close handoff. If your company has a CRM (like Salesforce or Outreach), learn to use it to its full potential. It can probably keep track of your prospects, where each one is in the sales funnel, last contact, next steps and even send alerts. If it doesn’t, consider subscribing to one yourself (Salesforce has a single seat option for $25/mo) or use another workflow tool to formalize your process in digital form. Yes, it takes time to type in names and messaging data, the time you could use on phone calls. But that time will more than pay off in higher sales (and more commissions). Allow time in your schedule to “clean up” your tools every day. The most effective time is at the end of the day. An hour before you “close shop” put the day’s activities into your tool. That will also prep your mind to be thinking about tomorrow’s tasks — what’s important, what’s not, the best way to make that pitch.

7. Stock the Shelves

You need things to do your job: Sell sheets, presentations, price lists, videos. If your company doesn’t have a central repository for these things — a GoogleDrive folder, a shared DropBox — make one of your own. That will save countless hours searching random folders for that updated product specification sheet.

8. Multitasking Is A Myth: Learn to Single task

Set aside time in your day to do each of the things in your process. Yes, people will return calls you made earlier in the day in the middle of the time you allocated for prospecting, but don’t be tempted to “multitask” while prospecting and talking simultaneously.

The idea that humans can do more than one thing at a time — and be truly effective at both — is pure, unadulterated horse hockey. Modern neuroscientists have confirmed what Publius Syrus said 2000 years ago: “To do two things at once is to do neither.”

Bottom line is, your brain just doesn’t work that way. When you’re multitasking, you’re not actually doing two things at once, your brain is just switching back and forth from one task to another very quickly. So far, so good. However, when task switching, the brain is still partially occupied with the first task even as it tackles the second. This is called “attention residue” and it prevents the brain from focusing its full energy on either task, slowing both down and reducing accuracy. Want to see the research yourself?

9. Emphasis on Communication

Having both worked remotely and managed remote workers, I can’t emphasize enough your need to communicate effectively with home base, wherever/whoever that is. Make time Friday afternoons to write a brief, bulleted summary of things you did since Monday along with a forecast of things you plan to accomplish the following week. Remember not to predict the unpredictable. Instead of writing “Close the Williams deal,” write “Appointment is set to talk with Mike at Williams to press for a sale.” That way, when Mike doesn’t pick up the phone or some event prevents Mike from saying yes, you show that you are maintaining your schedule, whether or not you get the desired outcome. In reporting this, if Mike doesn’t close, write why he couldn’t or wouldn’t in your summary along with what you plan to counter the objection.

10. The Upside

The lack of face-to-face communication in sales is a major, seismic shift. Getting in to see someone in person is rare, and the opportunity to schmooze them over a pricey dinner is even rarer. While that will likely ease up in the coming months, you may find that your customers are more than happy to continue seeing you virtually as it’s less of an interruption in their work. Leverage the fudge out of that. You can make many more virtual appearances than physical ones in a day. Just be in your neatly organized office space, dressed for success, prepared and on time. Now, go get ‘em. 

Put these 10 tips to use and visit the Peak Sales Blog for the latest actionable insights on how to advance your sales career.

When you find a leadership podcast you love, you suddenly get a dream team of mentors to whisper in your ear as you go about your day. You can find a clever strategy or stumble across an entertaining story from one of the greats in your industry.

We’ve compiled ten podcasts *not in order of preference* for leaders and sales executives who want to develop their own leadership skills, build better relationships, and design high-performing teams. 

Happy listening!

1. Leadership Lab

Patrick Leddin PhD is The Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Five-Week Leadership Challenge and an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University. Leddin not only points out the things you should be doing as a leader, but breaks them down into practical, common sense steps. Past guests include Patrick Lencioni, Karen Dillon, Atlanta Braves Shortstop Dansby Swanson, Stephen M.R. Covey and many others.

Sample episode: Learn The Rules of Power

Why we like it: Leddin’s approach to his subjects goes beyond exploring their philosophies of leadership to probe the details of how, in practical ways, listeners can apply those principles to their own lives. 

2. Thirty Minute Mentors

If you’ve ever wondered about how a corporate or cultural icon became who they are, Adam Mendler’s Thirty Minute Mentors will spill the beans. Guests run the gamut from celebrities to athletes to military leaders and CEOs. 

Sample episode: General David Petraeus

Why we like it: Mendler’s interviewing style is flexible, and he likes to draw out his subjects patiently, searching through their backgrounds for the forces that molded them and their approach to leadership. He then turns up the microscope and examines how their habits and practices affect those they lead, and how they can be translated into action. While many podcasts focus on business leaders, Mendler broadens the focus, examining leadership in the arts, athletics and politics as well as business. 

3. The Leadership Habit

Especially for those who’ve recently become leaders, developing effective behaviors is a habit that can be learned and practiced. The Crestcom Leadership Institute draws on the lessons learned developing leaders in 60 countries worldwide to facilitate the growth of strong, ethical leaders. 

Sample episode: Scale Up Your Business

Why we like it: Each episode is a mix of high-level principles and ways to apply them, often with business leaders who aren’t often heard from in other media. Yes, it’s interesting to hear from the CEO of a global enterprise, but getting a step-by-step recap of how an entrepreneur grew from a tiny business to a medium-sized enterprise conveys a lot of information you can use today and tomorrow — not once you’ve reached the pinnacle. 

4. The Leadership Hacker

This podcast comes from the summitteers who’ve reached the peaks in their respective fields. Interviewer Steve Rush expertly guides his guests through a discussion of a focused topic unique to them, such as the chief of Allergan and GSK on how diversity strengthened his organizations, how to make leadership sustainable with Eddy Badrina and Dr. Benjamin Ritter on how being promoted to management almost ended his career. 

Sample episode: Be Yourself First

Why we like it: The choice of guests brings variety and differing viewpoints, examining the topic of leadership from many angles and many points of view. 

5. Boss Files

CNN’s Poppy Harlow conducts in-depth interviews with global entrepreneurs, CEOs and innovators, uncovering their insights and the “secret sauce” that led them to sustained business success. Harlow’s insightful questions get at root truths that helped these high achievers rise from the ranks. 

Sample episode: Delta Airlines CEO On Surviving the Pandemic

Why we like it: First, Poppy Harlowe is an excellent interviewer as you’d expect from a CNN anchor. Second, this podcast has the resources of CNN, producers and engineers and researchers, giving it a depth and polish not found in many other podcasts. Third, the guests are all A-listers from Salesforce king Marc Benioff to YouTube’s CEO to the CEO of 3M. 

6. Coaching for Leaders

Each week Dave Stachowiak talks with a different leader. His insightful interviews have led to 20 million downloads of conversations with bestselling authors, expert researchers, and everyday leaders, and is the #1 search result for “management” on Apple Podcasts.

Sample episode: Leadership In Chaos: General Jim Mattis

Why we like it: Not only do you get a weekly dose of reality from leaders who have performed at the highest level, but Stachowiak also distills his conversations and gives listeners the key takeaways in a concise written summary on his website.  

7. The Radical Candor Podcast

Leadership is about far more than the Xs and Os of getting the right people into the right positions. Kim Scott focuses on how to be effective while also staying human, being compassionate, empathetic, and clear. The Radical Candor Podcast shows you how to provide praise or criticism as soon as the person earns the right to hear either of them.

Sample episode: Bob: A Tale of Ruinous Empathy

Why we like it: There are plenty of podcasts that deal in the what and the why, but Kim Scott takes it in another direction, exploring the effect that emotions and personal interaction have at the leadership level. Managing your team’s emotions — how they react to you, to each other, and how you react to them — can have a bigger effect on productivity than any other single thing you do 

8. Team Anywhere

Remote work has radically changed how teams work and interact. These new norms require a new kind of leadership. Team Anywhere taps into the insights of leaders who are building teams where the majority of members are remote. Topics include how to increase engagement with remote workers, how to connect with remote teams and how to inspire those teams to compete in an economy where your competition isn’t down the block or across the state, but around the world. 

Sample episode: Giving Memorable Recognition to Hybrid Teams

Why we like it: The choice of guests focuses more on bottom-up than top-down. Instead of interviewing generals, politicians and CEOs the hosts focus on innovators who are developing new techniques and new tools for leaders to cope with the changing workscape. 

9. Accelerate with Andy Paul

Three times a week, global sales authority Andy Paul records candid conversations with revenue leaders thoughout the world, getting their perspective on current events, money and markets. He’s already 900 episodes in, so maybe start listening to him before you get any further behind. 

Sample episode: Develop Extraordinary Sales Abilities

Why we like it: Host Andy Paul is author of two award-winning sales books and is ranked #8 on LinkedIn’s list of Top 50 Global Sales Experts. His interviews with revenue leaders are brass tacks, detailed and focused on things that will work for you and for your sales team. 

10. Dare To Lead

Dare To Lead

Brené Brown’s book Dare To Lead debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Here’s how she describes her podcast: “A mix of solo episodes and conversations with change-catalysts, culture-shifters, and as many troublemakers as possible. Innovating, creating, and building a better, more just world, requires daring leadership in every part of our daily lives.” 

Sample episode: America Ferrera on Identity and Integrated Leadership

Why we like it: Brown takes a wide view of leadership, giving context from outside the world of business and bringing new perspectives in. Besides, any podcast that promises to interview “as many troublemakers as possible” is a must-listen in our book.