You’ve gotten through another days- or weeks-long sales onboarding program with your new sales hires. It feels like it went well, but how can you really know whether it had an impact? Do you know the sales onboarding metrics that will show the impact of the program?

Onboarding is important for introducing new hires to your company and familiarizing them with their roles, teams, daily tasks, tools used, and more. But as happens to even the most experienced sellers, learning so much information in a matter of days is overwhelming — and some information is bound to get lost.

Research shows that over 84% of salespeople forget what they learned in sales onboarding within the first three months.

To really ensure reps are ramped up, ready for the field, and performing at a high level, you’ve got to supplement onboarding with continuous learning and support. These onboarding success metrics help you gauge your team’s performance and provide a more straightforward path on how you can guide them to improve throughout their tenure.

Top sales onboarding metrics

Knowledge retention

Sales reps must retain important information about your company and products in order to properly engage buyers. You can measure retention by providing quizzes and certifications. The best way to help sellers stay up-to-date is with learning reinforcement through virtual micro-learning, videos, recorded role-plays, and simulated sales scenarios. Once you understand where each individual rep stacks up, you can provide personalized learning paths that address any gaps.

Ramp-up time

Also known as time to productivity, ramp-up time refers to the length of time from a new hire’s first day to the day they reach full productivity. This “full productivity” means the rep is embedded in the company culture, can effectively communicate product value, and optimizes use of your tech stack. A shorter average ramp-up time indicates that onboarding has been successful in building skills, knowledge, and behaviors.

Technology adoption

Part of sales onboarding metrics is SaaS onboarding metrics. Sellers use a laundry list of tools to perform their daily responsibilities, so adoption is key in helping them succeed. Make sure your onboarding program includes a thorough review of SaaS applications. If new hires are slow to adopt them, they are either not confident in how to use it (meaning you’ve got some work to do with onboarding) or don’t find it useful for their job (meaning it’s time to reevaluate your tech stack).

Employee satisfaction

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is ensuring your new hires feel supported and empowered from their onboarding program. People aren’t shy to leave a job if they don’t feel like they’re set up for success from day one. In fact, employees who had a negative new hire onboarding experience are twice as likely to leave a job than those who had a positive experience. Save money and hold on to your salespeople by offering a post-onboarding survey, and make changes based on their feedback.

Time to refresh your onboarding program? Here’s a sales onboarding checklist to help you get started on creating a measurable, effective, scalable program.

Wouldn’t it be great to get a peek inside the minds of some of the most successful sales enablement leaders in the business to see the tricks and tools they use to make their sales forces function at the top of their game? Consider your wish granted! We spoke to some of the top minds in sales enablement and asked them how they do what they do. Here are their recommendations…

Know your sellers and individualize training to their particular needs

Sales reps are individuals. They come from different backgrounds and have different levels of experience. They also learn in different ways. So, to help them achieve a constant state of sales readiness, their training needs to be personalized.

When onboarding new reps, many organizations place a premium on speed — and don’t get us wrong, speed is important. What’s more important, though, is ensuring that new recruits truly understand the training. Just because they’ve read all the product info and completed a few mock calls doesn’t mean they’re fully ramped. True ramp-up time shouldn’t be viewed as when a new recruit has closed their first deal. It’s when they’re consistently learning and replicating the winning behaviors that drive bottom-line results.

To ramp up reps faster and more effectively, Marcela Piñeros, Head of Sales Enablement at Stripe, has new employees do a sales assessment and personality test in their first week. New reps upload a video of themselves delivering a pitch so managers can see their baseline skills in action. The assessment not only uncovers where each seller needs individualized coaching and training; it also becomes a benchmark Stripe uses to evaluate the rep after their first year.

“Faster ramp times come from helping salespeople understand — and then utilize — their training,” says Piñeros.

The best sales readiness strategies use data to help managers diagnose where a rep is struggling and how to help them achieve success, says Piñeros. “Data should be used not only to help individuals improve, but also to inform future development of the sales readiness and enablement programs,” she says.

Assessment of an individual’s progress is key. “Good assessment programs show reps what they need to do and measure how well they do it,” says Piñeros.

Be creative, targeted, and consistent with training programs

Gone are the days where sales training consisted of a generic slide deck and a team lunch. These days, sales enablement leaders are using a wide variety of tools to help their reps perform at the top of their game — from microlearning to role-playing to social and gamified training.

Sales readiness requires understanding the different ways people learn, what kind of information they’re digesting, and the best ways to provide that knowledge — including methods such as videos, quizzes, games, and self-paced learning.

When he’s preparing his sales force, Derek Rahn, Head of Sales at Elevate Brands, tries to be creative. “People really learn quickly when you make it a game or give them information in short bites,” he says.

Rahn likes to use call coaching and call recording to help reps understand real-world sales challenges. Recordings of real sales calls can capture great insights into handling tricky scenarios. And Rahn has become particularly adept at leveraging conversational intelligence to identify new objections that can be workshopped during sales team meetings. Conversation intelligence technology finds relevant topics or phrases, records competitor mentions, locates objections, and identifies how to move a deal forward.

And when it comes to making the most of sales enablement, training can’t simply be a one-off activity. It needs to happen regularly.

“In school, you get homework for a reason,” says Michelle Dotson, Head of Sales Enablement at Zoom. “You listen to the teacher, you go home and practice, you try, and you try again until you understand the concept you’re learning.”

For information to truly stick, people need to actively digest it, says Dotson. “They need to do something, come back to it, talk about it, and do it again,” she says. “Nobody just tells you something and then you know it.”

Measure the right competencies

For Rehan Chishty, Enablement Platforms Manager at Okta, the two key components of sales excellence are knowledge and skills. When he sets out to help his sellers obtain excellence, he sets goals in the form of a certification program for sales reps.

Establish what information your new reps need to retain about your company’s products, says Chishty, and then develop levels of certification and training. For example, you can use novice, intermediate, and advanced level certifications for each product or product group.

It’s all about knowing your company’s needs and your reps’ abilities and matching the two.

Stripe’s Piñeros looks for the specific competencies and attitudes that she wants to nurture in her reps. She has identified 21 competencies she thinks help her understand a reps’ potential — everything from a willingness to be disliked to the ability to prospect. Against these qualities, Stripe looks at the world through four lenses — the worker, the work, the workplace, and the world — to understand how to onboard new reps.

When she looks at an individual seller — the worker —she wants to understand what knowledge, skills, and attitudes they have, and how these qualities can potentially help or hinder them in being good salespeople.

“When I look at the work, it’s about how those skills and attitudes translate to their day-to-day,” says Piñeros. “Any training you do needs to be geared to helping the rep improve their skills and attitudes in a way that matches the work required of them.”

To Dotson, sales excellence is when a rep performs according to established metrics and keeps performing consistently and reliably over time.

“I want to create sustainable quality, not a team of one-hit wonders,” she says.

Know your sellers and individualize training to their particular needs. Be creative, targeted, and consistent with training programs. Measure the right metrics. You’ll be well on your way to helping your organization achieve sales readiness.

Want to read more about how these sales readiness pros are getting their teams ramped and productive? Click here to download Ramp Time to Productivity: Why Sales Everboarding is the Key to Your Success.

Countless professions — from doctors to teachers to pilots to electricians — require years of formal training, hands-on practice, and official assessment of skills, and have further requirements for continuous education to maintain their licenses. Regardless of discipline, professionals must have a solid foundation of knowledge to be successful in their roles.

Too often, though, sellers aren’t held to those same requirements for continuous learning and certification. While formal seller onboarding is more commonplace today than in the past, it’s still not unusual for sellers to be hired, handed a digital folder of company, industry, and product information, and sent to their task. This is especially frequent in high-growth, start-up sales teams.

Even companies with onboarding programs that build initial seller knowledge typically fall short when it comes to hands-on practice, certification, and the ongoing training necessary to keep pace with product, market, competitive, and messaging changes.

But, just like with other professions, continuously building seller knowledge is the key to sales readiness. To achieve it, sales teams need to develop a state of excellence to enhance performance, adapt to change, and — you guessed it — increase seller knowledge.

Many sales teams, however, lack the resources, tools, and processes to create enablement programs that build and increase seller knowledge. But with the following tips, sales enablement leaders will be on their way to creating a team of highly knowledgeable sellers ready to take on the competition and grow revenue.

Building initial sales knowledge

Building initial sales knowledge starts on day one, but traditional onboarding approaches typically fall short of arming sellers with the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in the field. An effective approach to building initial seller knowledge includes the following characteristics:

Individualized

Every seller joins the team with a unique set of experiences. For example:

• Seller 1 has 10 years of experience in your industry in other functions but is new to selling.
• Seller 2 has been successfully selling for eight years, but never in your industry.
• Seller 3 is a recent grad who is green in selling and new to your industry, but hungry and ready to prove themselves.

A one-size-fits-all approach runs the risk of under-preparing sellers in areas where they lack experience while boring and disengaging them in topics they’ve already mastered.  According to McKinsey, high-performing companies are two times as likely to offer personalized training for their sales reps. While this may sound unattainable, the best sales readiness software uses a combination of rules and adaptive intelligence to personalize training to individual sellers during onboarding and well beyond into continuous training.

Engaging, interactive formats

Even the most patient, engaged learner gets bored with traditional learning approaches. To build seller knowledge, you need to ditch the boring, hours-long e-learning courses, or days-upon-days of learners sitting through training, and opt for more engaging, interactive formats that leverage a mixture of presentations, hands-on exercises, and insights from real-world sales scenarios. This includes using things like:

• Shorter, visually rich content sourced from different subject matter experts and successful sellers
• Snippets from real-world sales calls

• Gamified assessments and knowledge checks

• Live challenges to assess knowledge in the moment

• Hands-on practice exercises to prove a seller’s mastery and readiness in topics

Reinforce knowledge

Salespeople need to retain the information shared during training and move it to long-term knowledge if they’re going to use it in the field and succeed. But according to Gartner, nearly 90% of that training will be forgotten within 30 days if the knowledge isn’t reinforced over time. So starting at onboarding, incorporate strategies to build a knowledge base that will overcome the forgetting curve. Hands-on practice and reinforcement activities are a great place to start. Exercises like virtual role-plays force sellers to articulate concepts in their own words, building muscle memory and preparing them for the field. And bite-sized, spaced reinforcement quizzes provide a fun, on-the-go mechanism to ensure that no seller is off the hook until they’ve retained key information.

Ongoing sales knowledge

The tips above don’t start and end in the initial knowledge-building phase. To arm your sellers with the knowledge they need to succeed, apply those same concepts to continuous seller training. And incorporating the following tips helps your sales teams pivot quickly and continuously improve:

• Just-in-time learning

The topics and content that sellers need to be enabled on are dynamic. A seller’s day-to-day job is prone to external factors beyond the company’s control. So sellers need quick access to just-in-time learning that’s tailored for the current selling environment and every selling situation.

• Bite-sized microlearning in accessible formats

Sellers are typically on the go, with schedules at the mercy of customers and prospects. They might need to do training offline when on an airplane, or listen to training when driving between meetings in the field. So for ongoing training and updates, opt for formats like podcasts or short, micro-learning that can be consumed easily by sellers, no matter how much time they have or where they are.

• Hands-on practice

Role-plays and practice exercises provide a great space for sellers to continuously build their knowledge in the context of specific deals or new messaging. Create a safe space for sellers to continuously practice beyond onboarding. Using a tool with AI insights enables sellers to practice on their own and get immediate feedback, in addition to getting coaching and feedback from their leaders.

• Real-world call snippets

Sellers learn best when you take training concepts from hypothetical and bring them to life. That’s why leveraging snippets from real-world calls is key to building ongoing seller knowledge. When you incorporate snippets into training, sellers learn from peers what works and what doesn’t. And when you give sellers the ability to review the conversation intelligence from their own calls, you enable them to learn from their own experiences and open their eyes to knowledge gaps or key behaviors and selling skills they may need to develop.

Be ready by building seller knowledge

The knowledge built amongst your sales team is critical in preparing them to tackle business and revenue challenges. When you build initial and ongoing knowledge and skills through enablement training, practice, and reinforcement, you arm your sellers with the key to unlocking real sales readiness. Want more tips on how sales leaders ensure reps receive the continuous training that’s vital to closing deals? Check out Ramp Time to Productivity: Why Sales Everboarding is the Secret to Your Success.

Designing an effective sales onboarding program can be challenging. Finding a balance between the time new hires spend on self-paced learning, bootcamp or instructor-led training, on-the-job learning and one-on-one coaching seems like an impossible formula to perfect. Sales leaders need sellers ramped as quickly as possible and on top of that, they’re challenged to provide effective and fresh learning to their existing salesforce so they’re educated on changing markets, new products or solutions and an ever-changing landscape.

While it’s tempting to look at new hire sales onboarding and ongoing learning programs as two separate beasts, they are actually natural extensions of one another — especially during planning and design stages. Here at Mindtickle, we refer to all ongoing learning as “everboarding” because learning should be a continuous journey. In this blog post, we’ll explore the benefits of blending sales onboarding and everboarding strategies to create a cohesive and effective learning path for your sellers.

Building a framework

The essential first step to any effective onboarding program is evaluating your current state, where you want to go, when you want to get there and how you’ll do it. Here’s our recommended framework for transitioning from a static sales onboarding plan to a completely dynamic everboarding approach.

1. Map sales process and activities to competencies and capabilities

Before you design a slide or write a word, map out the activities sales reps, solutions consultants, etc. do. Start by listing each activity by sales stage. From there, define the competencies and skills or capabilities necessary to demonstrate for completion. This ensures your program is focused on what reps need to be successful while filtering out unnecessary topics. Additionally, mapping can also track trends and learner knowledge gaps.

2. Outline a timeline and priorities

Ask sales leaders what reps need to do their first day, week, month or whatever cadence works best for your organization. As you evolve toward an everboarding approach, look at quarterly and yearly strategic goals, determine the selling capabilities needed to achieve them, and then design your program with those in mind.

As you identify topics, prioritize them by what reps need to recall or apply. Recalling or knowing information is different than being able to apply that knowledge. Defining where topics belong prioritizes them and identifies learning activities. Remember, people typically forget 70% of the information they learn within a week, and 87% will forget it within a month. Prioritizing the most important topics will help you determine the appropriate enablement methodology, recall or application.

3. Determine the best delivery method

As an enablement professional, you know everyone learns in a different way. The same concept is true for content. Not all content should be delivered the same way. When designing your program, consider both learners and content when determining your enablement methodology. Some content may be appropriate for simple knowledge delivery via a slideshow, but other topics may require a scenario-based approach. For example, including a video of a great pitch is more effective than a few slides about the pitch content.

4. Get leadership buy-in

Be sure to engage sales leaders upfront. They are experts at what sales reps do every day. You’ll need their help to map the activities mentioned above, but you’ll also need their buy-in to make your program successful. Leaders care about three main things:

• When will my new hire be ramped? Be sure to clearly define ramp time. Work with leadership to determine what reps need to master before being considered fully ramped.
• What’s in it for me? Let them know how effective enablement helps them meet their goals.
• How much time will enablement activities take away from selling? ROE (return on enablement) is important. Understanding how programs tie to sales metrics helps make the case for rep time spent in enablement activities instead of active selling.

Blending sales onboarding and everboarding

Creating a great onboarding experience is crucial to building a culture of learning within your sales organization. When planning onboarding, think about the content reps need to get started, but also consider the overall experience. The rep’s experience sets the standard for participation in the entire enablement program. Ensure manager buy-in, content is engaging and applicable, and reps clearly understand expectations.

• Set the standard
  Work with leadership and managers to establish a culture where onboarding is mandatory. In our experience, the most successful reps and onboarding programs have 90-100% completion and are often reinforced with incentives such as bonuses with accounts held until it’s completed. To create a learning culture, there should be an expectation that enablement activities are valuable, applicable and required.
• Make it engaging
  While it’s tempting to use the video from your last team call, think about the learner experience. Break content into bite-sized chunks, and pull out key messages or underscore critical objectives. We’ve found that shorter content has a considerably higher completion rate, especially when it’s under five minutes. Break up videos or slide decks with knowledge checks and reinforcement questions. A few questions between topics is a great way to keep learners active and engaged.
• Practice, reinforce, repeat
  Provide a safe space and multiple opportunities for reps to practice the skills they’ll need to be successful. Scenario-based activities not only allow reps to practice their pitches and internal talk tracks but also opportunities for managers to provide constructive feedback that can be implemented immediately. Using tools such as Mindtickle’s role-play functionality for video-based sales pitch activities, or our 1:1 scenario-based coaching helps reps gain confidence in their selling abilities and provides managers instant visibility into skill gaps so they can course correct.

Any good sales leader knows that onboarding a rep is just the first activity in any readiness program. While there are key milestones for the first 30, 60 and 90 days, sellers need ongoing training and practice reinforced throughout the year to keep their skills sharp.

Find what works for you

Like most things in a modern sales organization, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to enablement. It’s important to take these insights and think about how you can make them work for your business.

Factors like audience, culture, available content, and existing processes play a role — and it’s important to consider sellers’ maturity when building your sales onboarding program. It could be the difference between a heavier focus on product knowledge versus a more in-depth readiness program focused on basic sales skills.

Whatever your approach, the number one goal should be to build a culture of learning so that your reps are engaged beyond their initial 30, 60, or 90 days on the job.

Onboarding sales reps is essential to the success of any sales team. It sets the tone for new sellers and plays an important role in getting them acquainted with your company, its culture and their roles. Sales onboarding also equips reps with the knowledge and tools they need to hit the ground running.

A growing number of organizations are making investments in sales onboarding. And for good reason. Effective onboarding accelerates reps’ productivity — which means a quicker boost to the bottom line. What’s more, a strong onboarding program increases the likelihood that new reps will stick around long-term, which can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

We’ve pulled together 15 recent stats from industry-leading organizations that prove why now is the time to develop and optimize a great sales onboarding program that sets up your sellers (and your entire organization) for long-term success.

1. Per G2, sales reps that go through the best sales onboarding programs are productive 3.4 months sooner, on average, than those who are onboarded at organizations with weaker programs.
2. Research from CSO Insights found that effective onboarding services that meet or exceed expectations can improve quota attainment by 16.2%.
3. According to Xerox, via Hubspot, 84% of sales training is forgotten within the first three months.
4. SiriusDecisions research (via Hirebox) found that nearly half (49%) of high-performing sales reps indicate that whether or not a company provides onboarding is a very important factor when considering a new position.
5. According to Aberdeen Research, only 37% of companies extend their onboarding programs beyond the first month.
6. The State of Sales Enablement 2020, a report from Sales Enablement PRO, states that organizations with a sales onboarding tool and effective use of it experience win rates seven percentage points higher than those that don’t.
7. The report also found that 21% of organizations indicate that one of their top three sales challenges is onboarding new hires.
8. The average sales new hire spends 10 weeks in training, according to the Sales Management Association (SMA).
9. The SMA also tells us that the average sales new hire only becomes productive after 11.2 months.
10. According to the SMA, via Sales & Marketing Management, 62% of organizations feel their sales onboarding programs are ineffective.
11. The Periodic Table of B2B Sales Metrics from the Bridge Group shows that the average tenure of a B2B Account Executive (AE) is 2.6 years. And on average, it takes these AEs 4.9 months to ramp up.
12. Spotio reports that 65% of employees say the quality of training and learning opportunities available to them positively influence their engagement.
13. According to UrbanBound, organizations with a standard onboarding process have 50% greater new hire retention than those that don’t.
14. UrbanBound also reports that 49% of companies are currently investing money in updating their onboarding programs.
15. Research from DePaul University found that it costs almost $115,000 to replace a sales rep.

Position your sellers for success with a strong onboarding program
The pressure’s on to deliver onboarding experiences that engage sellers and equip them with the knowledge they need to achieve results — quickly. Ready to take your sales onboarding program to the next level? Download our Sales Onboarding Checklist to make sure you’ve got all of your bases covered.