Onboarding can set the tone for a sales rep’s success for years to come. Many companies want new reps to start selling quickly, so they turn to one-time onboarding programs that try to cover lots of ground in a few short weeks. However, if not done well, short onboarding programs can contribute to knowledge gaps as reps navigate complex sales months later. This can lead to longer ramp times, longer sales cycles, and poor quota attainment.

Fortunately, there is a better way.  Here are 5 must-haves for any sales onboarding program to prepare your team for lasting success.

1. Organize Learning Paths

Think of a learning path as multiple courses strung together in a logical grouping to achieve a desired learning goal.  Organize your learning paths by week, and prioritize the key objectives at each stage. Specifically, at the end of each week, what will your reps need to know to excel at their work?

Here’s a basic learning path that sets clear expectations for your sales reps at each stage:

• Week 1: Demonstrates clear understanding of the company, our values, sales organization, market positioning, and use of sales tools
• Week 2: Shares key features and benefits of our top two products with confidence
• Week 3: Poses insightful questions, overcomes objections, and matches business insights to the top 10 customer problems. The rep will be graded on how well they can differentiate the company from our top three competitors

Effective learning paths take time to build and require continuous iteration, but they’re critical for successful onboarding programs and improving employee tenure. For more on how to build sales onboarding programs that work, please see our free guide here.

2. Add a Sales Playbook

Good playbooks bridge the gap between learning and doing. They give practical guidance for how the rep positions, qualifies and sells your product or service at each stage of the sales cycle.  Organize your playbooks by sales role for each product, and boost memory retention by providing examples for each sales stage. Effective playbooks outline how to position, educate, qualify, differentiate, sell on value, and close. Since each of these stages will vary depending on your products, market, and buyer personas, be sure to adjust your guidance for each stage accordingly.

Establishing a good playbook is crucial for your team’s onboarding program. For tips on setting up a killer playbook, please refer to our free guide here.

3. Incorporate Practice

Picture this: you take a training program that consists entirely of lectures. One lecture after another, eight hours a day, 5 days in a row. Six months later, you’re given a surprise test based on the training that will determine your income for the next six months.

That’s exactly how your sales reps feel after ‘traditional’ onboarding programs.

Now let’s take a different approach. Instead of endless lectures, encourage reps to practice different situations through role-play with each other.  To scale role play and maximize practice and feedback opportunities, incorporate video coaching into your onboarding programs.   Consider adding a capstone video set at the end of each week to help the rep practice and apply what they learned and get immediate feedback.

By now I’m sure you’re asking yourself, “If effective onboarding programs cover so much more than what I’m covering now, how will this help my team reach their goals faster?”

That brings us to the fourth element of successful onboarding programs, which leave traditional coursework in the dust.

4. Build in Ongoing Reinforcement

Most companies get onboarding wrong because they ignore a crucial paradox: the best onboarding programs keep improving long after new hires first pick up the phone.

In other words, training applied once is training gone and forgotten.

Research shows our understanding fades by 55% after 3 weeks, and after 90 days we only retain 16% of what we learned. Continuous reinforcement can boost reps’ confidence, but we can go much further.

What if reps could access the right content right when they needed it? Education in isolation is not enough. Sales reps need a way to tap into onboarding knowledge in real-world situations, and they need it fast.

Consider this: You connect with a decision-maker at one of your target accounts. You establish good rapport, and she asks you to email her the product’s key benefits. You tell her you will… and then spend the next hour after you hang up searching for the right piece of content for her business model. You finally email it to her… and she emails back with questions that you already answered during the call.

Remember we just learned how new information rapidly fades unless we can engage with it right away? That applies to buyers and sellers.

The good news? We can take advantage of this. If the right content can help reinforce what buyers just learned from our pitch, we’re much closer to winning that deal.

Let’s go back to the scenario above. The decision-maker asks you to email her… yet this time you find the right content and hit ‘send’ before she finishes her thought. Instead of a wild goose chase, you can address her pain points immediately. Think of the time it might have taken to schedule another call with her. Congratulations! You just shaved an entire week off your sales cycle.

Now imagine that everyone on your team has access to the right content at the right time. That’s the power of ongoing reinforcement in the form of in-context training and Guided Selling.

5. Measure What Matters

Now bring it all together. We’ve clarified the need focused learning paths and objectives, a robust playbook and frequent practice sessions. Finally, we’ve extolled the benefits of ongoing reinforcement including in-context training and Guided Selling.

All these steps are critical to successful onboarding programs… and none of them mean anything unless you measure your team’s progress and correlate this to business impact.

Think of program completion as the bare minimum. For stellar results, track proficiency and correlate this with pipeline ramp and time to first close. As reps gain confidence with learning paths, playbooks, and ongoing practice, you need to track which content helps them win deals. This last detail is crucial, since 93% of organizations don’t track content used by sales reps. Give your team the edge.

Sales teams can do far more than thrive “in spite of” poor onboarding. We can turn this around so that reps succeed because their training is aligned with their goals. More than anything else, sales reps want to win. Give them the resources that will help them reach their goals and an onboarding program that keeps them engaged, and you’re on your way to your best results ever.