Is New Employee Orientation Good Business Strategy? – Insights from Mindtickle Research

Mohit Garg on March 12, 2016

new employee orientation business research

Today’s businesses – big and small – are under tremendous pressure to deliver profitable growth year after year. Equity markets, private investors, competition – you name it. Add to this, the uncertain elements of risk. It is pretty tough out there for most businesses – global and local.

To address these challenges with confidence, businesses need the dependable lever of high-performing engaged employees. Ironically, this throws up another business challenge, of Managing Talent. A shrinking workforce because of aging employees is further complicating this matter. Never before in business, has it been so important to attract, retain and grow talent, as today – and become an Employer of Choice. Therefore, the increasing importance of new employee orientation.

New Employee Orientation isn’t just an HR initiative, as most businesses think, but a unique opportunity to catapult your new employees into a high-performance orbit in the pursuit of business objectives. World-Class companies and organizations understand the link between New Employee Orientation and Business Execution. The annual “The Great Place to Work” list featuring the World’s top blue-chip companies is a standing testimony to this. These companies have also created stakeholder value consistently over the years, emerging as corporate leaders in their respective industry sectors and beyond. Businesses, across the board, have this incredible opportunity to leverage New Employee Orientation to drive good competitive business focused on profitable growth, employer of choice, risk management.

1. Profitable growth

Businesses exist to maximize profits – an objective they need to pursue in a sensitive, sustainable and relentless manner, in this fast-changing milieu. Simply put, businesses have to grow revenues and minimize costs. New Employee Orientation has a critical role to play in impacting each of these positively, by driving,

  • Time to productivity of new hires
  • Employee retention and addressing employee turnover
  • Employee engagement

Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company and a global thought leader in business research, has been at the forefront of exhaustive cutting-edge business research in the area of New Employee Orientation. Its numerous studies on Onboarding, over the years, have time and again, established how businesses have achieved improved productivity, employee retention, and engagement, through New Employee Orientation. The studies have established that through new hire onboarding, organizations can focus on their biggest asset, their employees because the experience of new hires has a direct impact on profitability.

new employee orientation as business strategy

In the book “The First 90 Days” Michael Watkins puts the break-even point of new hires at 6.2 months, highlighting it remarkably through this graphic.

As can be seen from the graphic, new hires consume value for the first three months and then begin contributing. New Employee Orientation can improve the chances of achieving this break-even on time and at times, even early. Any slippage in onboarding new hires would not only add to direct and indirect costs, it would also result in loss of revenues, especially in the case of top management executives and business facing employees.

Employees and new hires in an organization, given their bearing on revenues and expenses, can be broadly classified into the following:

a) Top management – Employees at a senior level often in leadership roles are the most expensive assets for an organization, but they can be the most productive of the new hires as they will be the one to guide their team to perform up to potential and contribute to the company’s growth. Personalized new employee orientation for leaders that help them is indispensable to get them contributing in a meaningful productive way. They:

  • Align with the company’s overall business strategy,
  • Understand short and medium term business imperatives,
  • Experience the company culture, and
  • Bond with their team

b) Employees on the Business Front – New hires who are in the marketing and sales departments contribute to the revenue and profits of organizations directly. New Employee Orientation can establish and communicate a ‘line of sight’ from the new hire’s performance to the company’s goal. This can help them see and understand how quickly their productive contribution can benefit the organization, their performance and ultimately their professional careers.

c) Business Support Functions like Human Resources, Accounts – While new hires in these departments do not impact company revenues directly, it is essential that they get productive at the earliest to optimize on costs. New Employee Orientation can help engage and motivate these new hires to become productive sooner.

In one of its studies, Aberdeen interviewed 466 companies that were running some form of new employee orientation. It was found that the top 100 of these companies reported a 24% year-over-year decrease in time to productivity for new employees and 12% year-over-year decrease in cost per employee for onboarding. Another example is to look at the talent management practices of IT and ITES outsourcing companies that have been recruiting in large numbers over the last few years. All the top tier IT outsourcing companies have institutionalized new employee orientation to buttress their off-shoring business strategy that thrives on “cost arbitrage” and “value creation”.

The present-day economy continues to make it expensive and challenging to find, hire and retain talent. The cost and time involved in the recruitment process make employee retention a priority for all business. Retention of employees is critical because hiring employees and training them to contribute directly to business costs. Added is the fact that a new employee makes a decision to stay with the company within the first six months. So, in the initial onboarding phase, the employer is vulnerable with respect to the new employee. Therefore, the necessity of new employee orientation.

Employee turnover is not always about direct costs. It consumes expensive management bandwidth, dampens employee morale and not to mention the loss in revenue opportunities. Worse still, if the leaving employee joins the competition, it increases the possibility of loss in market share. So, new employee orientation assumes significance when onboarding new hires.

An Aberdeen Survey based on the analysis of about 282 organizations, reported that organizations which conducted a new employee orientation program saw a 50 % increase in retention rates. The report also stated that the new employee orientation program was used as a means to reaffirm the new hire’s decision to join the organization and ensure a long-term commitment from the new hire thereby reducing costs of hiring and training. Other than increasing employee retention rates, the study highlighted the opportunity of leveraging new employee orientation to help new employees plan long-term careers with companies. Without a doubt, organizations have experienced higher retention rates and lower turnover costs by having a new employee orientation program.

3  Employee engagement

An exhaustive study by Aberdeen on Employee Engagement pointed out that almost all 466 participating organizations identified New Employee orientation as a means to engage and align employees. The same report states that employee engagement contributes to retention, productivity and most importantly drives customer satisfaction – an important revenue driver. In fact, the top 100 organizations marked engaging employees to drive customer satisfaction as the top objective of their onboarding program, and rightfully so.

Increased customer satisfaction leads to positive word of mouth, loyalty, repeat business, cross-selling opportunities, and high-quality referrals. All these are key revenue opportunities that businesses can capitalize on, by driving employee engagement through new employee orientation.

New employee orientation can drive employee engagement and alignment by focusing on new hire development and performance, taking frequent informal feedbacks, updating them on a company’s vision and encourage leadership where appropriate. New Employee Orientation can work wonders in aligning the new hires to business strategy and execution. Employees who are engaged early, from the word “GO”, are better placed to deliver a quality experience to customers.

2. Employer of choice

The ups and downs of the economy have made, sourcing and retaining good talent, extremely challenging. To counter this, organizations are striving hard to become employers of choice, as part of a business strategy. Therefore, businesses are adopting Talent Management Best Practices with New Employee Orientation being right up there. The reason is simple and straightforward, to make a good solid First Impression. This is also corroborated by the research from Aberdeen that suggests that New Employee orientation can help make that first good impression, which in turn positions the company as an employer of choice.

New employee orientation is a good “first” opportunity to introduce company culture and tradition. Culture and traditions are unique to an organization and give it the advantage which takes them towards successful business outcomes. Onboarding program can help introduce this culture to the new hires at the earliest. The sooner the new hires understand the culture of the organization, the more engaged and aligned they are, to perform. New employee orientation is also an opportunity for employers to demonstrate respect, reward, and responsibility, such that they are able to retain the new hires forever.

It is really interesting to note how Facebook and Google – Best companies to work for in 2013 – communicate their engineering and people culture through New Employee Orientation.

All new engineers – fresh or laterals – at Facebook undergo the Engineering Bootcamp during new employee orientation. This Bootcamp is intricately linked to Facebook’s Scale strategy. Facebook uses the ratio of users to engineers metric, to scale and grow. Through the Engineering Bootcamp, Facebook not only onboard engineers to push code onto the live site, but also germinates an engineering culture of fearlessly fixing bugs and not leaving it to code another day.

The new hires at Google are called Nooglers, no marks for guessing why. Through this, Google propagates its culture to new hires, helps new hires make connections in their workplace and increase their motivation.

Not surprisingly, both Google and Facebook appear in the Best companies to work for in 2013 list. Employers of choice, undoubtedly.

Great workplaces are responsible towards their employees. They respect, reward and compensate the employees well enough to earn their trust and loyalty creating a brand name for their company in the eyes of the outsider.  Great workplaces are employee focused and judiciously use the new employee orientation to also share the company’s immediate goals with the new hires. They understand that an aligned, engaged employee who trusts the leaders of the company will make extraordinary contributions to the success of the business.

3. Risk management

Remember Enron and Arthur Andersen. And more recently, Lehman. The risk is truly real – whether it is market, regulatory, reputational and operational. New Employee Orientation is a non-negotiable opportunity to sensitize the new hires on the various aspects of risk, whether it is with respect to the organization or the industry sector it operates in. Organizations would do well to customize the New Employee Orientation program with respect to risk sensitization, depending on the criticality of the position of the new hires. Senior management onboarding can definitely feature an exclusive track on risk management.

New employee orientation, so what’s next?

Challenges of the Economy, the positive impact new hires can have on business and many other business imperatives, are putting increasing pressure on organizations to include New Hire Onboarding in their business strategy and with good reason. Business profitability, typical HR challenges like Employee Engagement and also risk management, new employee orientation programs can address it all.

Only having a new employee orientation is not enough. As the wants and needs of each organization are different, the approach to new employee orientation should also correspond accordingly. Organizations have to determine the best practices for their new employee orientation and implement them in the pursuit of their business objectives. Many approaches to new employee orientation are possible:

  • Formal and informal
  • Full and partial Automation
  • Mentoring
  • and more currently, Enterprise GamificatioN

Onboarding approaches that drive engagement, alignment, productivity and contribute to company growth, have the highest chance of driving business success. This is where the importance of social HR comes to the fore. Jeanne Meister, best-selling author of “The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today” in her January 2013 Forbes article touted 2013 as the Year of the Social HR, wherein organizations would integrate social technologies in recruiting, developing and engaging employees. Of the five social media trends that Meister writes, will impact HR in 2013, Enterprise Gamification ranks at the top.

The World’s leading knowledge organizations like Deloitte and Capgemini have already taken leadership in employing Enterprise Gamification to drive higher levels of employee engagement. Fresh graduates joining the workforce, the now omnipresence of Gen Y millennials at the workplace and the rise of remote teams, are all contributing to heightened interest in the concept of gamification to drive business execution.

Business, it seems is discovering FUN, all over again. And what better than to begin at from the starting line – New Employee Orientation. Get, set, go!

Sales Training Practices for a Robust Sales Onboarding Program

Mohit Garg on February 9, 2016

I’ve written previously about how effective onboarding of sales reps can increase the top line of your business, but how exactly should you do it? Given that it can take between 6 to 9 months to get a new sales rep to meet their quota, the benefits of expediting the process are high both in terms of opportunity cost and having to hire fewer reps to meet your targets. I’m often asked to share tips and best practices when implementing sales onboarding training, so I thought it was worth putting my thoughts down.

Broadly, when developing a sales onboarding process, I suggest dividing the program into 5 stages.

Training is the first stage of the sales onboarding process; this post will cover this stage in detail. Future posts will then go through Assess, Coach, Analyze and Reinforce.

sales onboarding frameworkSales training stage

The training stage should take about one month to complete, and cover two key aspects; “What to Sell” and “How to Sell”.

What to sell

There are 4 key pillars of “What to Sell.” These put the customer front and center and should cover foundational knowledge regarding the customer’s industry, business, and needs. It also ensures that your rep understands, and can articulate, the product’s unique value proposition so that they can engage a prospect in meaningful conversation when they’re ready to sell.

By the end of the “What to Sell” section, your rep should be able to understand and articulate what the different customer personas are, how they differ, and how to recognize them. They should also understand how the product satisfies their needs, and articulate the value proposition clearly, along with its competitive advantage.

Through the use of online learning, your sales rep can learn some of the “What to Sell” components during the pre-join period, saving you both time and money. For example, with online learning, you can introduce your new hires to the company culture and corporate vision, as well as a broad introduction to your customers (perhaps add some testimonials), and other publicly available or non-proprietary information. A structured online program prior to their first day will make it easier for them to get up to speed, and get them excited about starting to work with you. After day 1, you can then combine on-demand training, with both live training and online resources, so that your reps can review materials at their convenience.

How to sell

The “How to Sell” component should cover tools and processes that will make your rep more efficient and shorten the sales cycles. This is functional and should be tailored to your business.

For example, consider these questions:

  • How are leads generated within your business?
  • Is there a marketing team that supports them, or will the rep be expected to prospect for themselves?
  • What prospecting best practices are used by your best reps?
  • What is market intelligence available within the business?
  • What questions should they ask a customer when qualifying them?
  • What CRM is used, and how is the information recorded in it?
  • What are each of the components of the sales cycle, from demo to follow-up?

This is all invaluable knowledge, designed to ensure your rep will be ready to get out there and sell, once the onboarding is complete. Success stories, product updates, and best practice sales initiatives, are also important to include here.

Data point: 30% of reps in a typical company are not aware of latest wins and success stories.

sales onboarding

How do you make sales training effective?

Flip It

One method that I’ve found effective when delivering sales training is a flipped classroom.

The structured learning plan can be shared with the reps upfront so that they understand how each topic will be approached. The trainer here is more of a consultative guide, rather than a teacher; this engages reps from the get-go and gives them the opportunity to take the initiative in their own learning. Reps are encouraged to speak to each other, benefit from their peers’ perspective, and get hands-on with the product.

The key to this training model is to ensure that you have defined the required business outcome, provided the pre-work and pre-material, and then develop a structured in-person facilitation format. This will ensure that sales reps come in prepared with their questions, and engage in a democratic learning process.

They can then apply their understanding, reinforce it, and even go beyond by taking on more challenging tasks if they wish to stretch themselves.

Leverage the power of the video format

We have found that 92% of people will watch a full video, compared to only 78% when given a presentation. The impact is much more engaging for the learner, like this video that I use when training our new reps at Mindtickle.

One thing to keep in mind when creating sales training videos, the ideal length is between 3 and 10 minutes. Anything longer is likely to disengage your audience.

Test-to-teach

An important aspect of training is to determine if the reps absorbed the knowledge. While I’ll go through assessment and certification when I cover the “Assess” stage, it’s worth talking about the “test-to-teach” approach I have practiced for the last four years. It’s an integral part of the Train stage.

The test-to-teach approach employs quick quizzes as a way to reinforce the material, as opposed to an examination or assessment objective. Small bite-sized modules and quizzes, not only reinforce specific nuggets of knowledge have been retained, but also get the neurons fired up when combined with explanations and additional (contextual) along with the correct answers. It’s a bit like running a series of small sprints, building fitness in short, sharp bursts, that will help you get through the marathon in the long run.

The tests are small so there’s also a greater chance of the rep completing it, in fact, Mindtickle data shows that 88% of learners complete test-to-teach modules.

Gamification

Gamified techniques are not a new concept in the sales enablement space, but in my opinion, very few teams tap into the full potential of this technique. When implemented right, gamification can enable peer-to-peer feedback, benchmarking against a standard of performance (and a little healthy competition), and positive reinforcement, all have the potential to keep sales reps engaged and learning. Gamification can also be leveraged to provide the new sales reps a sense of aspiration by making the points meaningful in real-life. One of our clients projects the new hire leaderboard on the sales floor provide bragging rights to the new reps against their peers and fosters a sense of healthy competition.

Following these handy tips in your sales onboarding process will help you move the bell curve forward, and result in a higher percentage of new hires achieve their sales quota after the initial ramp-up phase.

Is It Time To Hire a Sales Enablement Manager?

Mohit Garg on February 3, 2016

There are many factors that affect sales target achievement. Unfortunately, many of those are beyond your circle of control such as competitor pricing, state of economy etc. The good news is that predictable sales can be accomplished in any environment by adopting a disciplined approach to sales management.

Most sales organizations do a pretty good job of managing the well-known levers of sales management such as hiring the right talent, actively managing the pipeline and CRM reports, and optimizing OTEs and incentive structures. However, the number of organizations that leverage sales enablement the right way is shockingly low. Mindtickle’s survey of more than 40 tech startups with more than $10M in venture funding revealed that less than 25% of those organizations were even thinking about a systematic approach to sales enablement.

Mindtickle Benchmark Report New Sales Enablement Standard

Is sales enablement a nice-to-have, or do you really need it?

Most of those sales leaders claimed that they were too small and tight-knit to formalize the enablement function and that they were (somehow) managing to achieve quarterly targets. But the fact that they may have been overlooking is that it is just a matter of time before the ad-hoc approach will start limiting the growth of these companies. What are the tell-tale signs that you could be in the same boat?

  • Are you consistently losing deals in the last stage?
  • Is the sales cycle all over the place?
  • Do your new sales reps take 6–9 months to start hitting their quotas?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, your sales funnel may need fixing, and it would serve you well to get an expert (aka sales enablement manager) to fix it. That is because most fast-growing sales teams start showing symptoms of a broken process, and it is important to plug these gaps as early as possible.

Here are some common examples of what actually might be going on in the sales process that may lead to the above symptoms:

1. Failure to identify the buyer persona and needs
Simply buying and setting up marketing automation and lead intelligence tools doesn’t help. If there is limited adoption of those tools (as is the case in most fast-growing companies), it is likely that the SDRs are not doing enough digging before and during lead prospecting and qualification. If the sales reps would make it a practice to look up the marketing automation system for what actions did the lead perform on the website, or do some basic research on what kind of type of buyer they are dealing with, they could prioritize their leads and be better prepared to deal with the initial part of the sales process. Unfortunately, most sales reps need some hand-holding and nudging to adopt these practices, and this is one of the low-hanging fruit that data driven sales enablement helps achieve.

2. Lack of readiness to instantly respond to customer needs
Let’s take the example of a common sales situation wherein the prospect raises a query about a product feature, asks for a relevant case study or pops up a question about a competitor’s offering. If the SDRs are not truly “sales ready” i.e. they are not equipped with thorough product knowledge, up-to-date information on features, use cases, and customer stories, they will not only contribute to lengthening the sales process but importantly lose opportunities to communicate the value proposition of their offering. Such instances of sales unpreparedness can result in 30% longer sales cycles.

3. Lack of systematic process and tracking
Every single one of the 40 fast-growing tech companies that we interviewed confessed that they did not have comprehensive tracking of sales onboarding and ongoing training activities. Typically content was stored on the document repository, and they had no clue about what content was being accessed and by whom. In most cases, less than 10% of sales training content was accessed even once by the sales reps. The participation in webinars and classroom sessions was either not tracked at all or recorded manually.

How does sales enablement in your organization stack up?

The following table identifies four stages of sophistication and effectiveness of a sales enablement organization ranging from “Undefined” to “World Class.”
sales maturity v2
Source: demandmetric

What is sales enablement?

According to Aaron Ross, author of the book, Predictable Sales, “Sales Enablement is the process of arming an organization’s sales force and everyone else who is customer facing with access to the right insight, experts, and information at the right time (specific sales step) in the right format in order to increase revenue. It is often used to describe a variety of tools, processes, and methodologies that are applied to enable a sales force, both direct and indirect. The range of sales enablement can span everything it takes for a salesperson to do their job more effectively.”

What are the KRAs of sales enablement?

The top five priorities of the sales enablement function are:

  • Coordinating with sales leadership to define sales support initiatives
  • Creating written content that educates sales reps and customers, and helps in taking deals forward
  • Keeping sales team prepared for customer conversations
  • Managing the content repository and enabling easy access to them
  • Providing ad-hoc support for sales reps

Do you now think it is the right time for your organization to invest in sales enablement?

Online Sales Training Platform: 4 Things to Look for in a Great Platform

Mohit Garg on February 3, 2016

Today’s sales training is rapidly moving away from live on-site seminars and classes. Online sales training eliminates the need to gather your sales team in one place. Training materials can be delivered to your sales reps directly on their computers and mobile devices. If your company is looking at investing in an online sales training platform, here are four things that you should consider.

Does the online sales training support diverse sales training formats?

People learn differently so the training material should be available in a number of different formats.

  • Online video lectures and narrated slide presentation are great for communicating with your sales reps. Videos can also be used to present sale situation role-plays.
  • Audio recordings are great for sales reps who want to listen to training while driving their car or doing some other activity that does not demand their complete attention.
  • Some people want to review and study written material. This printed material can be delivered as a PDF file. This is a great way to distribute review sheets and study guides for any assessments and tests.

Does your sales training platform support different instructional modalities?

Your company may want to offer a variety of training options. It is important that the online sales training platform that you select support these different instructional modalities.

  • On-demand training is great for on-the-go sales reps. The platform should provide the ability for your reps to download and stream training seminars to their mobile devices.
  • Live online lectures are a great way to get your team together all at once. Your online platform should support virtual conferences where everyone can watch and participate in the same live lecture. This captures the benefits of attending a class without the need have everyone in the same geographic location.
  • The platform should also support social learning by having discussion forums, chat capabilities and other ways that your sales reps can connect with each other to discuss what they are learning. This kind of social interaction is essential for online sales training.

Is the sales training platform customizable?

Most online sales training comes with a set of off-the-shelf training modules. These modules are great for the basics, but you will most likely want to be able to add your own content to the learning platform. You may have specific techniques that work well with your market or product specific information that you want to communicate. The learning platform should allow you to easily create and post your own training content.

Does your sales training platform have tracking and metrics?

You want to make sure that your reps are actually using and benefiting from the training program that you put together.

  • A learning platform should track the progress of each sales rep and record the training that he or she has gone through. It should also be able to assess the rep’s mastery of the content through quizzes, test, and other assessments.
  • The training platform should integrate with other performance metrics. In this way, you can see if increased training leads to increased performance from your team.

Choosing an online sales training platform is an important decision. These are just a few of the factors that you can look at to guide your choice.

Are Learning Styles Still Legit Or is This a Myth?

Mohit Garg on February 3, 2016

Back in the early 80s, psychologist Howard Gardner of Harvard University claimed to have identified the following seven types of intelligences:

  1. Visuo-spatial
  2. Bodily-kinesthetic
  3. Musical
  4. Interpersonal
  5. Intrapersonal
  6. Linguistic
  7. Logical-mathematical

Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is the basis of the concept of everyone having their own learning style. According to one survey conducted by a research team at the University of Bristol, 82% of teachers accepted the common concept as truth. Must be true because most people believe it, right? Are learning styles still legit or is this a myth?

Read More about Are Learning Styles Still Legit Or is This a Myth?

Here Are Some Ways to Use Your Employee’s Stories in New Hire Orientation

Mohit Garg on January 20, 2016

new hire training story
Anticipation abounds as the new hires come through the door.  This is not only on the part of the new hires as they entertain thoughts of fitting in, and measuring up to, and perhaps exceeding expectations but also on current employees. Their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors may run the gamut from effusive expressions of welcome to subtle coldness.  (The latter to be avoided at all cost.)

The use of employees’ work stories is not just a “fluffy” thing to try. The use of employee work stories such as ones demonstrating integrity related to business practices, engagement with local, national, or international community organizations (service, charity, health fairs, athletic events), and employee assistance are all indicative of organizational culture.

Research indicates that culture is considered one of the most powerful and stable forces operating within an organization. It really is a no brainer for human resources and training departments to include stories as much as possible but rather it is a tactical, creative, and authentic way to enrich onboarding initiatives. Everything from lectures to online-based orientations is made better with stories.

Definitions vary but include concepts such as shared beliefs, values, and assumptions that are reflected in attitudes and behavior. What better way to acclimatize new hires to become productive and effective organizational members than through the judicious, and timely use of employees’ stories at all levels of the organization.  In addition, research also shows that engaging new hires in a positive manner will prevent costly staff turnover, burnout, and improve quality of service (all good for the bottom line.)

So What Stories Should Employees Tell in New Hire Orientation?

  1. I am proud to work here – because of the quality of our product, give details such as usability, durability.
  2. Outstanding service record – related to the impact on the lives/ businesses of customers, use examples of customer satisfaction responses such as personal messages, recommendations, going the proverbial extra mile, and satisfaction surveys statistics.
  3. Community Engagement – employee mobilization efforts in time of community crises such as natural disasters Sandy, Katrina. ‘Team Organization’ for breast cancer walk, drunk driving, hunger walk, mentoring/tutoring at local schools.
  4. Employee Satisfaction – really expound on this facet. Stories should illustrate the value placed on mentoring, competence, respect, integrity, ideas.

Ready, Set, Go – The Ways and Means of Employees’ Stories

  1. Have employees collect and document success stories that illustrate organizational culture.
  2. Create a database with searchable keywords featuring employee stories that tie in with the keywords.  This will clarify your messaging.
  3. Disseminate these employee stories – take them for a spin, not only in orientation but at job fairs, brochures, interviews, college campus recruitment.

Identifying key personnel to tell these stories through creative orientations is solid strategy companies are using to make training new hires more personal and memorable! So….What’s your story?

Mike Kunkle on Sales Onboarding (Part 1)

Mohit Garg on January 13, 2015

Mike Kunkle Sales Onboarding

So you just hired a new salesperson? For many businesses, the ramp-up time for new sales reps is typically six months or more. With turnover being slightly less than two years for most reps, companies need to have a solid onboarding plan in order to realize a return on their investment. An outdated or overly labor-intensive sales onboarding program leads to increased turnover and wasted company resources.

sales onboarding ramp up times

Source: via Mike Kunkle, Sales Onboarding: Twice as Good, Half the Time

Sales onboarding isn’t just about going through pitch videos or having new reps shadow tenured sales reps. Not only should your sales onboarding have a clearly defined objective and end goal, your sales reps also need to know the milestones that they need to achieve to be successful. Your new salesperson has potential, but that potential is only unlocked with a structured onboarding program. For advice on what excellence in sales onboarding looks like, we turn to Mike Kunkle, a recognized leader in sales training and organizational effectiveness. Mike shares actionable steps you can take to help accelerate ramp-up times and reduce turnover.

What are the pressures and trends that sales managers must contend with today?

Mike Kunkle: The pressure is still all about the number… making your sales quota. It’s the environment that’s changed. Due to information available online, with a few clicks, today’s buyers are doing their own research before reaching out to suppliers. Buyers are more informed than ever – although not always more accurately informed.
Along with these changes in buyer behavior, there are more RFPs than ever before and more decision-makers involved. For instance, the average number of buyers involved in a complex sale is 5.4 (according to CEB). If that’s the average, there are some that have even more buyers involved.

Tweet This: “The pressure is still all about the number… making your sales quota.”

Then there are factors like corporate cost reductions that result in shrinking training departments and budgets, making it more difficult to serve our sales forces.  To further complicate things, even in this day and age of big data, many still roll the dice when we hire and select sales reps on gut feel.

Bottom line is that the expectations placed on sales managers are enormous, and often organizations pull them in far too many directions, rather than removing obstacles to allow them to focus on hiring, training, coaching, and managing their teams as effectively as possible.

You said: “It takes many companies from 7 to 12 months to ramp-up their new sales reps.” Why is sales reps ramp time moving in the wrong direction?

Mike Kunkle: If you look as far back as 2003, which I did recently for an article I was writing, ramp-up times were shorter. “Ramp up times have generally gotten longer over the years. There’s variance, but if you trend-line the data, we seem to be headed in the wrong direction. There could be quite a few reasons for that, though, including a more complex, competitive business environment, a shift toward the buyer’s market, and/or an increase in complexity of problems, opportunities, and solutions to address them, or even some year-to-year difference in research protocol or other speculative reasons.”

Selling was a lot less complex than it is today, and to a large degree, it’s because there wasn’t a proliferation of information on the Internet. It was before buyers were doing so much research on their own.

Combine that with a drain on training department budgets and sizes, in comparison to the early 2000’s, and how much new reps need to learn to be productive, and it’s not hard to imagine why onboarding remains a sales challenge.

Question: What can be done to accelerate sales rep ramp time?

Mike Kunkle: I’d start by defining outcomes. When you say accelerate, is that just a faster time, or is it higher productivity in the same time, or both shorter ramp-up time with higher productivity? The first thing is to get clarity around what you want and benchmark where you are, so you have a measuring stick to gauge your progress. Put a stake in the ground saying, “This is where we are today.” Then ask yourself: “where are we aiming and what are we trying to do?”
When companies actually try to shorten their ramp up time, many of them are actually deterring productivity as opposed to enhancing it. There’s an awful lot of five days of death by PowerPoint in orientation and onboarding.

Tweet This: “The sales job has become increasingly complex.”

We need to step back and apply some sound instructional design thinking, stuff that has been around since the dawn of time. Analyze top producer practices and really try to understand what are the differentiating factors between top and mid producers. Then document the best practices in your organization.

The best practices give you a real focus on what are the things that are making a difference. When you’re developing content or teaching content to new people, you know what you’re teaching gets results. This is where hard core prioritization and decisions need to be made. What are the absolute need-to-know and need-to-do things to achieve sales rep productivity?
For example, three common goals I’ve used in some businesses include:

  1. making their first sale,
  2. achieving their first monthly quota,
  3. and then making quota 3 months in a row.

These goals won’t work for every business. They have to match reality, and when achieved, they signify that the employee is truly ramped-up and a fully-productive sales rep. The concept sounds simple but it is far from easy… People struggle most with the NEED to know vs. NICE to know piece.

You also want to have ways to reinforce what is taught such as job aids, places to get answers, buddies or mentors, and plenty of follow-up and coaching from either specialized onboarding coaches or sales managers.

Check back for part 2 of our interview on sales onboarding with Mike Kunkle. We’ll cover common mistakes training managers make in sales onboarding as well as actionable advice and best practices.

You can see more of Mike’s thoughts about sales onboarding at http://bit.ly/SalesOnboardingLI

Mike KunkleMike is a training and organizational effectiveness leader with special expertise in sales force transformation.
After his initial years on the frontline in sales and sales management, he spent the next 21 years as a corporate manager or consultant, leading departments and projects with one purpose – improve sales results.

Today, in his role as commercial training & development leader for a Fortune 10 corporation, Mike uses his in expertise in best-in-class learning strategies, methods, processes, and change leadership to develop the capabilities of sales representatives and sales managers to drive business results.

Mike freely shares his own sales transformation methodology, speaking at conferences and writing online (see http://slidesha.re/PerfLevers082011  and http://bit.ly/EffectiveSalesLearningSystems as examples) and can be reached at <mike at mikekunkledotcom>, through his blog at http://www.mikekunkle.com, or on various social media sites.

Get free access to the best sales-readiness content.

© 2024 Mindtickle Inc. All rights reserved.