How you onboard your recruits and has an undeniable impact on the salespeople’s future “career” within your company.

Sales onboarding is a critical step of sales recruitment. Incomplete, botched or even non-existent integration ensures that there will be a lack of alignment between the salesperson and management.

The secret is having a sales-specific onboarding process. Follow the principles listed below to give your new sales force every chance to succeed with you.

1. Setting expectations

What you expect from your new representatives must be established from day one:

Onboarding Program

Going over the onboarding program with new reps allows everyone to understand what’s expected in the first 90 days. Compliance with the program facilitates achieving full performance at the pace you have defined.

Objectives, quotas and activities

It is necessary to communicate expectations regarding sales activities and targets from the beginning to allow new salespeople to start their activities immediately. In turn, this that will enable them to be aligned as soon as possible with their sales targets.

2. Developing accountability

Your salespeople need to know who they are accountable to, what accountability mechanisms are in place and what the consequences are if they fail to comply.

3. Setting the pace

From a representative’s first day, it is essential you set the pace that will systematically prevail. It is in the early days that a new employee will be most receptive to taking on new habits, so this is the best time to pass on any good habits you want to establish, starting with:

Meetings

Daily meetings at the beginning and end of the day, as well as weekly sales meetings.

Sales activities

Establish from the outset the number of activities that your new salespeople will have to carry out on a weekly basis (number of prospecting calls, number of first base meetings, number of referral requests, etc).

4. Building a strong relationship

I can never say it enough, but the relationship between a sales manager and his or her representatives is a critical success factor. As a sales manager or business manager, it is necessary to know your salespeople: family situation (spouse, children, etc.), interests, personal projects …

By taking a sincere interest in your representatives, you build a bond of trust.

Be open to sharing personal information as well.

By knowing your representatives’ personal goals, you will be able to sit down with them face-to-face to connect those goals to corporate objectives and help them link their professional efforts to their own goals.

5. Role-playing

The most powerful tool you have when training your representatives to use your sales process is to role-play each step of it. Through role-play, you place your representatives in a safe context to practice what they will have to do on the field.

6. Regularly validating what they’ve learned

Never assume that what is seen once is fully understood and assimilated. During the first 90 days, be sure to review the critical points of your representatives’ training regularly:

• Ideal client profiles,
• The problems you can solve with your products and solutions,
• The steps in the sales process,
• Questions to ask,
• Typical objections and how to handle them.

It is the repetition that will help your representatives to be more fluid in their conversations with prospects, and the more ingrained the mechanics are, the less likely salespeople are to let their inner voice distract them.

Takeaway

With these broad principles supporting a structured integration process, you will enable your new representatives to develop the habits that promote a short integration period and rapid success.