New hires take an average of 4.8 months to ramp to full productivity according to TOPO’s benchmark report (get TOPO’s latest benchmark report here). That’s well over an entire quarter spent in rigorous training sessions without an actual sale in sight.
Don’t get me wrong, onboarding correctly is important. New account executives need to develop an in-depth knowledge of your product or service, from competitive intel to the most minute technical details. But onboarding new reps does not mean they must spend months trying to learn all the necessary information or building their own processes. Each new hire requires a significant investment in order to bring them up to speed, and every day they spend learning adds to their time-to-value.
You can make the onboarding process less time-intensive with the right technology. Using sales engagement platforms like Salesloft, you can provide a templated process that easily prompts new reps through their sales cadences. Let’s explore three ways Salesloft will have your newest sales reps selling faster.
Standardize the Sales Process
A company’s sales process can often be an elusive thing. Where does it live? How is it formatted? Is it a document on somebody’s computer? A diagram that’s referenced once a quarter? If your sales team can’t reference the process easily, they’re not likely to follow it.
No matter how the process is displayed, if it is not standardized across your team your existing reps will create processes of their own. This can lead to dozens of different processes floating around for one team. Having multiple sales processes in place makes it really hard for new reps to learn and trust the supposedly standard process. If the whole team’s not using it, how can new reps have confidence in it? Who’s custom sales process is best?
The solution is to implement a standard process within the sales platform you’re using to execute it. Having the process built into the platform makes it easier to onboard reps. The process is automatically available for them based on where they are in a sales cycle. Plus, integrating the process into the platform aligns new and existing reps on the same sales process.
With Salesloft, features like team cadences codify every step of the sales process for any given scenario — whether that be persona, business type, etc. They also offer analytics so you can have confidence that your process works. If the team cadence isn’t showing good results, you can easily update the process for the entire team without disrupting ongoing sales.
Share the Most Effective Messages
Even with team cadences in place, your new reps may still want to craft or adjust messages to their own voice for each step. This can be immensely time-consuming. At worst, new reps are spending time and effort to build their emails from scratch. At best, they’re tracking down and cajoling their fellow reps for top performing messages.
Platforms like Salesloft put all of your team’s messages in one place so your reps can share email templates freely. New reps can view the templates of other team members or access team templates. With team templates, you can create the messages your reps will use. So all the correct content is readily available to them.
Having a robust set of messaging templates in your engagement platform also provides insightful statistics and analytics into each template used. This way your new reps can use the messages that are performing best. Template insights also come in handy when your new reps begin selling. Based on stats like reply rate or open rate, new reps can quickly assess which messages are strong or which ones need some adjustments to gain more traction.
Make Content Easily Accessible
A large portion of the onboarding process is spent learning the ins and outs of your company’s product. You’ll see the new team member off in the corner studying away. New reps are often assigned reams of content to read and review. Or worse, they’re sent to disorganized or poorly maintained resource center hoping to gather whatever knowledge they can. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
The right sales engagement platform makes content easily accessible right within the platform itself. Features like Snippets make all of your team’s content accessible inside their email with the click of a button. They can search and sort for all the content they need. By providing a platform with organized and codified content, new reps can learn as they get acclimated to the platform, versus taking the time to find resources.
So before your next new hires begin onboarding, there are two questions you should ask yourself. Would you rather have your reps spend months digging for knowledge and creating processes? Or would you rather offer them a platform like Salesloft that provides new reps what they need to be productive in a matter of weeks?
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