Improving New Sales Hire Training ROI

Good new sales hire training provides excellent ROI

Last week, we talked about the importance of having a scalable sales onboarding program. Today, we want to talk about bumping up the return on investment (ROI) of new sales hire training.

Every job has a learning curve, but sales training curves can be especially steep. Generally, you should give newbie sellers at least three months before they start getting up to speed—though keep in mind three months is optimistic. According to an Aberdeen review, only 29% of new hires hit performance milestones in their first year. Factor in that average turnover for salespeople is about two years, and new sales hires could actually end up costing you money.

How do you avoid this resource drain and improve your sales training ROI?

Extending training beyond the initial onboarding period helps improve performance; so does adapting your training to how people actually learn, use and remember information.

New Sales Hire Training: Ideal Duration and Frequency

How much is enough, then? This varies from company to company, of course, and depends on factors like the length of your sales cycle. However, there are several rules of thumb for new sales hire training length:

  1. Initial sales onboarding should run one to two weeks
  2. Sales managers should spend about a third of their time coaching their team
  3. Continued training should last for the duration of the rep’s time with your company, but with decreasing frequency
  4. Evaluation should occur at least once a month for new hires
  5. Expect new sales hires to underperform for the first 90 days plus the length of your sales cycle

One of the most important aspects of sales training is the ongoing reinforcement beyond the first few months. Even the most seasoned sales reps forget things, and quick-hitting refreshers can help course correct and close knowledge gaps before they become a problem.

Making Your Training Stick

Repetition and reinforcement are only part of the equation for successful new sales training. Make your training materials easier to learn, use and remember to help speed up the process and increase effectiveness.

Try some of these methods:

  • Use a variety of media that engage multiple senses: text, graphics, video and interactive exercises
  • Have your new reps practice the new skills as they’re learning them with manager- or peer-mentored role play, e.g., setting up a practice sales call and providing feedback after
  • Establish quick weekly reinforcement sessions—especially crucial for the first few months
  • Guided Selling™ tools that provide coaching and training recommendations directly in the CRM are especially useful, since these recommendations dynamically change with sales stage, prospect information, and other contextual data—ensuring the most useful training content is right where the sellers need it most
  • Keep information short, focused and modular to make it easier for sellers to find the exact bit that they need, and so short attention spans don’t stray

Wrapping Up

According to a 2015 CSO Insights study, the relationship between training and performance is directly correlated. When sales skills exceed benchmarks, reps close 52.6% of deals. Reps who need more sales training close only 40.5% of deals. Sales training can yield excellent ROI; the trick is getting them to top performance more efficiently. We hope this post gives you some ideas on how to start improving your training program.

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Sales Onboarding: Transforming Chaos Into Scalable Process

Reduce confusion and improve outcomes with sales onboarding

‘Tis the season for hiring, which means it’s also the season for sales onboarding. It can be an exciting, energizing time, but also a time for chaos, frustration, and unexpected expenses. To maximize the productivity and minimize the hair-tearing, keep these three things in mind as you work out what to do with your batch of sales newbies as you onboard them:

Sales Onboarding is its Own Beast

If you don’t have anybody in charge of sales onboarding, you’re either really small, or you’re in trouble. If the former: ad hoc will work for now, but remember that if all goes well, you’ll probably be growing, so it won’t work forever—and this article will help you get some good process in place before it gets too hairy. If the latter: not all hope is lost! Read on for concrete things you can do that will help.

If you do have someone holding the sales onboarding bag, and that someone is HR, your results probably aren’t going to be pretty. They’re great for training people on company-wide processes, but ineffective for training that actually involves selling.

New sellers—whether they’re grizzled veterans you’ve hired away from another place, or starry-eyed hopefuls completely new to sales—need to be trained by people familiar with sales process and products. Specifically, your sales process and products. That means dedicated sales trainers who can walk new sellers through CRM process, product information, messaging and differentiation, and the staggering amount of stuff they’ll need to get through to get up to speed.

Keep in mind that sales trainers are their own breed: they know how to sell and know sales process, but they also know how to teach—which is a very different skillset (and mindset). Sometimes your top performers are also your best bets for sales trainers, but that’s not necessarily going to be true.

Not All Sales Onboarding Reinforcement is Equal

Boot camps can only do so much. The dismal numbers are famous enough that they deserve their own stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: salespeople who don’t receive reinforcement and refreshers lose 80-90% of what they learned within a month. Effective sales onboarding is an ongoing process, one that can take months to complete sometimes—but not all types of reinforcement are equally effective.

Learning modules in the LMS? Let’s be honest: salespeople can’t click through those fast enough. Email a PDF with product updates and process reminders, or put it on SharePoint? That’s the equivalent of tossing a pebble into the ocean. There’s already so much stuff going on, it’ll barely make a ripple.

Three things can help make sales onboarding reinforcement substantially more successful:

  1. Ensuring the sellers get a good variety of practice—especially in applying their sales skills.
  2. Providing reinforcement and support directly in the selling context.
  3. Keeping the content short, modular, and relevant to specific training needs or challenges.

We actually cover this topic in detail—and even delve into the science of why these techniques work—if you’re interested in reading more: “Smarter Practice Methods for Sales Enablement: Better Ways to Level Up.”

However, no matter how amazing your reinforcement is, how good is it actually if you can’t track progress—or even figure out if people have completed assignments? Which is why you need to…

Measure and Track Training Results

You can push updates, assign process and sales skill reviews, and run the occasional review session, but will that really tell you it’s working? You could find out by waiting to see if sellers start hitting quota faster after you make the changes, but by that point, it’s probably too late to actually course-correct.

Chart Magnifying Glass

You need to start measuring during the onboarding process, and you need to measure, at minimum, these two indicators:

  1. Behavior indicators: Are your trainees finishing the assignments you’re giving them? If you’re assigning quizzes and knowledge checks, how are they doing? What’s the feedback they’re giving you on the assigned material?
  2. Leading indicators: How well are they following up on leads? Are they able to hold real conversations of value that move prospects along the funnel? What pieces of training content are helping?

You can’t know if something works unless you have data, and these give you a good starting point.

Wrapping Things Up

Sales onboarding is never going to be easy, but it doesn’t have to suck, either. You can let chaos reign—or you can put together a scalable sales onboarding program that ensures your new sellers get the tools and skills they need to succeed. We hope this post gives you some good ideas for improving your sales onboarding program, if you have one already, or a good starting point for you to build your own sales onboarding process if you don’t.

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MobilePaks Joins Microsoft PinPoint Marketplace with Improved Microsoft Dynamics CRM Integration

MobilePaks in MS Dynamics

June 16, 2015 – Portland, Ore. – MobilePaks, an award-winning cloud-based marketing and sales enablement tool, today announced that it is now a certified member of the Microsoft PinPoint Marketplace. Additionally, MobilePaks integration with Microsoft’s newly upgraded Dynamic CRM platform is now available.

MobilePaks solutions are available as stand-alone web applications, or it can seamlessly integrate with CRM systems like salesforce.com, Oracle CRM and Microsoft Dynamics.

“Our mission is to help businesses improve sales productivity by giving sales reps the training support they need at the right time and right place—ultimately helping them improve their selling conversations,” said Chanin Ballance, CEO of MobilePaks. “Integration with key enterprise platforms allows us to deliver MobilePaks’ solutions easily into the natural workflow of the sales person.”

Improved Dynamics features include:

  • Updated user interface with easy search function so sellers can find relevant information on any device.
  • Automatically predicts useful assets to sellers based on prospect profile, selling history, sales stage, and more.
  • Machine learning identifies and promotes the most useful sales assets and marketing content.
  • Personalized sales assignments tab to support ongoing training and onboarding.
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CEO Chanin Ballance Presents on Sales Performance Support at Performance Support Symposium

Better sales performance support with MobilePaksWhat’s the most effective sales enablement support you can give your sales team? The answer isn’t content. Content alone doesn’t help reinforce good sales behavior or enable your sellers, and too much content can overwhelm instead of help.

You need to provide relevant information right in the selling context, just when your sellers need it, so they can engage prospects more effectively and, ultimately, close more deals. You need a science-based approach that takes into account the way people actually learn.

MobilePaks CEO Chanin Ballance will show you how you can better enable your sellers with retention science in Austin, Texas on Wednesday, June 10 at the Performance Support Symposium. “How to Leverage Retention Science for Effective Sales Performance Support” will show you:

  • How to design efficient and effective sales performance support content using retention science methodologies
  • How to effectively deliver sales support content where and when sales will use it
  • Real-world examples of how top selling organizations have used and benefited from a retention science approach
  • How to seamlessly carry forward sales support from onboarding and integrate it into sellers’ daily activities

More content and better content access don’t necessarily help sales reps sell more. They need support that helps them learn, remember and use the information more effectively. If you’re attending the Performance Support Symposium, you should stop by Chanin’s session and learn more about how you can help improve sales performance and accelerate sales.

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