Listen now to learn how Powers deployed a successful sales onboarding program and maximized value from their boot camp experience.
In this 16-minute interview Powers outlines:
How onboarding helped MongoDB’s sales reps achieve sales excellence
How you can reinforce information after your boot camp
The key metrics that determine the success of an onboarding program
How sales enablement is structured and who owns it at MongoDB
“At MongoDB, we have a pretty thoughtful and structured approach to our new-hire onboarding. The goal is to provide the sales team with an in-depth understanding of the industry, our customers, our technology and solution sets. The second step is to build upon that baseline and knowledge to equip our reps to consistently qualify their opportunities, setting great meetings with the right people and then ultimately prepare them to engage in highly effective, highly valuable conversations with prospects.”
That is the vision behind the sales onboarding strategy at MongoDB. MongoDB is a leading technology company who spends nearly six times the industry average onboarding their sales reps. In this episode of the Sales Excellence Podcast, Jeremy Powers, Senior Director of Sales Enablement, shares how they structure their sales onboarding and boot camps to maximize their results.
“I think we took somewhere around 11 months before a rep was productive. In the last six to eight months we have really fine-tuned this onboarding program using Mindtickle from the boot camps to advanced sales training. And what we have seen is very consistently our people getting ramped in about five months. So we’ve gone from 11 plus months down to five which is just tremendous,” exclaims Jeremy.
When it’s time for your sales organization to invest in sales enablement and productivity
How to enable your sales managers to perform at their best by shifting their mindset
How to prioritize and continuously improve sales enablement and training initiatives
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to
Soundcloud
,
Stitcher
,
iTunes
or find it
here
.
“If you’ve got to double your revenue to stay on track with your projections, you can’t do that on 30k deals. And if marketing is doing great things and attracting really great logos, but sales aren’t doing the right things, you’re not going to get what you’re looking for. And if sales is doing a really good job targeting their accounts and they’re motivated to hit the phones, but marketing isn’t giving them any air cover you’re not going to get the lift you’re looking for.”
That was the problem the Marketo was facing by relying on inbound marketing for its sales leads. So it decided to find a new way to scale, and leveraging the power of Account Based Marketing Engagio was born. Ray Carroll moved to Engagio as VP of Sales and was tasked with the job of building and scaling this next generation marketing technology company. As the business grew the issue of sales productivity became more apparent.
“The incremental efficiency on the average sale price, the time it takes to get a rep to productivity, the average sales cycle; you get those gains through having a first-class sales enablement function. And that’s why you see companies like Box, Zendesk, and HubSpot have Directors of Sales Productivity. Because if you can get 500 people with all deals at a 1% more close rate or making their deal cycle less, that is a significant uplift. That’s bigger than any single deal which you close for half a million dollars,” explains Carroll.
Thanks to sales enablement the role of the sales manager is also changing. “Managers have to realize that your job no longer is having your name in lights or closing the deal. It’s helping your team be as good at their job at scale, and only when you do that will you win as a team. It’s shifting from tactical to strategic.”
Listen now
to find out how Carroll has helped Engagio make the transformative shift from tactical to strategic sales.
As Manager of Sales Enablement at Procore Technologies, this collaborative approach to enablement has been core to Alex Jaffe’s
success. Procore is one of the world’s most widely used construction management software that recently hit unicorn status.
But it hasn’t been an easy ride Jaffe reflects, “New reps were coming in and we didn’t even have phones set up or Salesforce login. So we really focused on building the foundation. Depending on where you’re at in your company lifecycle you’re going to have different challenges, but it’s all going to revolve around your rapidly growing sales team.”
“Just like racing car drivers, even the rock stars in your sales team need to make sure that their car is perfectly tuned for the track they’re racing on. Sales enablement is just like this. It allows your racing drivers to go fast and go well,” chimes in Marc Wendling, Vice President of Sales at Mindtickle.
In this webinar Alex and Marc explain:
How to create a sales enablement program that meets the needs of each stage of your sales reps’ development;
What role stakeholders, technology and data play in building a sales enablement framework;
Why coaching your sales managers is just as important as training your reps; and
How coaching can be personalized to meet each of your reps’ individual needs.
Listen now
to hear Alex Jaffe of Procore Technologies, along with our VP Sales, Marc Wendling, talk with Larry Reeves of AA-ISP about how to create a sales enablement powerhouse that will help you make your sales reps successful.
This post is based on a webinar on how to accelerate new hire productivity for consistent production with sales onboarding. You can listen to the entire webinar here.
CrowdStrike is one of the fastest growing technology companies in Silicon Valley. It is on a mission to stop breaches through next-generation anti-virus, endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed hunting – all in the cloud. CrowdStrike has a unique ability to not only prevent cyber attacks but also respond to malicious attacks. It’s no surprise then that they were recently ranked number 40 on
Deloitte’s’ technology Fast 500
, North America, recognized for the exponential growth of 2,665% in the past 3 years. Thanks to this stunning growth trajectory the company’s sales force has doubled recently and is continuing to grow rapidly. Rapid growth comes with its challenges
Trying to maintain exponential growth was CrowdStrike’s biggest sales enablement challenge. To achieve this Tracey Meersman, Director of Sales Enablement, believed the key was to focus in on how they onboarded their new sales hires. It’s a sound strategy when you consider that 60% of businesses with onboarding programs ramp up faster and achieve double the top line revenue per rep with an agile structured onboarding process.
To create their successful onboarding program CrowdStrike ensured it was: The onboarding program has five distinct phases
“The complete program is pretty quick, just 90 days with ongoing mentoring and coaching opportunities. One of the things that we’re tasked with is helping our B players become A players, and to ramp people as quickly as possible as the cost of onboarding is very expensive. And we’re tasked with trying to get everyone ramped on their phones, so they’re out in the field, selling and achieving quota as quickly as possible,”
comments Meersman.
The 5-part onboarding program was designed to achieve this while incorporating CrowdStrike’s four building blocks of onboarding; compliance, clarity, connection, and culture.
Pre-Boarding
Phase one begins prior to the new hire commencing with CrowdStrike, leveraging technology to deliver courses to future employees. “
Topics include the company’s strategy, resources, benefits, and compliance. The objective is to identify CrowdStrike’s advantages, complete onboarding activities and reaffirm their decision to join CrowdStrike,”
explains Meersman.
Pre-Bootcamp
“Phase 2 occurs on the new hire’s start date with a virtual webinar. Topics include a product overview, initiatives and most importantly an opportunity to ask questions. The objective is to accelerate their ramp and productivity by utilizing tools and resources, engaging in the culture and finalizing onboarding requirements. For sales new hires, they are added to the CrowdStrike Sales Academy. A learning platform powered by Mindtickle which we use specifically for sales. New hires are assigned specific learning activities related to their role. This includes the mobile capability to complete learning through the Mindtickle mobile app,”
continues Meersman.
Bootcamp
“And Phase 3 is an in-person program featuring executive presentations and departmental overview. For new sales hires this includes an additional 1.5-day interactive boot camp to align selling strategies to the company’s growth objectives by articulating our key messages and unique business value. New hires are onboarded a minimum of one week prior to attending the in-person program and there is pre-work to provide foundational knowledge. The boot camp provides an opportunity to pitch back messages in CrowdStrike’s unique business value as well as align with the sales process in the key prospect and customer program. “That allows us to be able to use a scenario-based approach through the Mindtickle platform as well,”
explains Meersman.
Post-Bootcamp
With boot camp completed the next aspect is to align the learning with real-world selling.
“So how often have we heard from sales reps, ‘I’ve never used this or that. It’s not what my customers want/need to hear’? More than once, right? So our onboarding program aligns with real-world sales scenarios with learning activities at specific intervals in their onboarding journey including the opportunity for sales scenarios and coaching by their manager. they also have the opportunity to have a buddy to be able to reinforce the learning and provide just-in-time information,”
explains Meersman.
Continuous Reinforcement
“
[Continuous reinforcement] is also a key component that includes personalization, scalability, structured and milestone-based approaches. So each learning activity in CrowdStrike’s sales academy includes a knowledge transfer. We have the ability to teach hires, not penalize them through the use of what Mindtickle refers to as ‘tickles’. So those would be matching true-false to multiple choice questions. There are 16 different tickles within Mindtickle and we try to utilize all of that. We also do continual learning in terms of providing a quick update and courses. We try to push those out on a weekly basis so the new hires are not just getting onboarding information they’re also getting just in time information that’s related to their role,”
outlines Meersman. Milestones help drive consistency
“It’s imperative for our growth and success that the program is standard and consistent,”
explains Meersman.
“Therefore there are key milestones within the onboarding program at weeks one to four as well as at 60 and 90 days. CrowdStrikes’ Sales Academy provides the structure through workflows, with key milestones to be successfully completed at each interval. The sales rep needs to complete the activities before moving forward to the next onboarding phase. When we’re looking at the components of the onboarding program we’re looking at five distinct areas; one is, understanding the buyer, understanding CrowdStrike’s offerings, beating the competition, CrowdStrike’s differentiation, including our unique business value, use cases and success metrics and all the sales tools and resources.” Personalization helps each new hire learn what they need to
When you’re onboarding tens or hundreds of new sales reps at a time personalization is a huge challenge. So how does CrowdStrike achieve this?
“First the process and programs need to be personalized for each role. As with many sales organizations, there are various target markets and associated roles and responsibilities. The program needs to be role-based. So our onboarding guide, though applicable for the entire sales team, has call outs for specific roles,”
explains Meersman. This is easily achieved thanks to Mindtickle’s deep integration with
salesforce.com
that enables the onboarding program administrators to allocate aspects of the course to specific roles, markets or responsibilities. Scalability is achieved by leveraging mobile technology
“The other key component of sales onboarding at CrowdStrike is that it had to be scalable. Utilizing CrowdStrike Sales Academy ensures that the sale onboarding program is scalable through the app based Mindtickle platform. From day 1 forward the program is available 24/7 to new hires. And soon the platform will have the capability for managers to be able to run their own report to track progress,”
comments Meersman. Experiential learning aligns to real-world selling
“When we looked at our program we also wanted to be able to blend learning and activity. Within our approach and utilizing the Mindtickle platform, we’re able to provide a blend of self-paced knowledge combined with activities that are reviewed by the rep’s manager, which provides a virtual coaching opportunity. This is really key for the manager to be involved in the new hire’s onboarding,”
explains Meersman.
“
This is accomplished by having the reps complete what is known in the Mindtickle platform as missions, that are activities that your rep completes. These include elevator pitches and value proposition as well as email and voicemail pamphlets And respond to specific situations including objection-handling, competitive scenarios etc. So rather than spend time and resources having the new rep deliver the poor pitch during our boot camp, they have to complete this within the CrowdStrike Sales Academy after boot camp. Again this is reviewed by their manager and provides an additional coaching opportunity.”
Experiential learning is also applied to peer-to-peer learning.
“From the experiential learning standpoint it is very key we get this all the time from reps. I’d like to see how one of my peers and how they pitch, how they handle the objection. In the real world they’re often presenting to executives, so they want to be able to build up that knowledge and see how their other peers are doing it as well.”
Utilizing Mindtickle’s app, CrowdStrike is also able to share peer examples so the reps can learn from each other in their own time as well.
“And we talk a lot about sales rep but there’s also the capability for a day technical salespeople to be able to do a demo as well through the platform. So it’s not just the pitches for the field sales rep but also applicable for the technical sales people as well,”
adds Meersman Communication between reps and management enhances coaching opportunities
Communication should go two ways. Leveraging the Mindtickle app CrowdStrike is able to facilitate this kind of communication.
“This allows the new rep and manager to effectively communicate progress, areas of improvement and also coaching opportunities. Reports are also available to managers so that they can track that progress. Right now I provide those reports to them but there will be a self-service portal coming soon,”
“Additionally each new hire should buddy with a peer with whom they connect on a regular basis, learn how to be successful in their role and feel comfortable asking questions they don’t want to ask their manager. The buddy reinforces the key learnings and helps the new hire if they require training on utilization of key tools and resources. So think of all of those questions that you don’t want to ask your manager like how to use Salesforce, find specific tools and resources etc.” And make it easy … for reps and for sales enablement
Tools have to be easy to use otherwise they’re not really enabling the rep. “
And that’s really a key component because so many sales reps live in salesforce they have access to the Mindtickle platform through salesforce. So there’s no need to login to an official website. This makes it very very easy and because the Mindtickle app has the mobile capability as well it’s also very easy to access.”
But enablement and collaboration are also important for the administrators of the system as Meersman explains, “
I am a strong party of one. A one-woman show in terms of creating and maintaining the content. I know of many who are probably in the same situation. The good news is that I have a great relationship with our product marketing organization. And we work together to be able to create content. And also others meet within the organization depending on what the topic is.”
“So my commercial for Mindtickle is nobody ever said that it was fun using an LMS. I love the Mindtickle platform and our reps do as well because we have the mobile capability, we have the tickles or the gamification and social aspects, and we can push out bite-size chunks to people as well as perform better missions which are really the scenario-based approaches. And that provides reinforcement.”
Meersman continues “
My philosophy is it does not have to be so hard. In every sales enablement role I’ve had, it’s been a new role and I basically had to onboard myself which in turn led me to create onboarding programs for sale new hires. It was challenging for me, I didn’t have it to be challenging for the new sales hire. It’s my role and responsibility to connect the dots for sales reps to make it easier to learn quickly and attain specific productivity metrics.” CrowdStrike’s onboarding program has been a success for management and reps
CrowdStrike has seen impressive results with their new hire sales onboarding. “
The typical ramp time for an enterprise software sales rep in our industry is six to 12 months. However, we’ve been able to fully ramp reps in half that time. Over 70% of ramped reps achieved or exceeded quota in their first quarter following their ramp.”
Meersman continues,
“We define ramp as the rep’s ability to achieve quota.”
“Our boot camp has received an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5. 99% of reps recommend the program, but in terms of value, our ratings are 100%. And we’re also correlating the training to learning. Out of our top 10 reps, the majority has been onboard for less than one year but are top in completing training. And several of them have been promoted. We also use KPIs and our onboarded reps are achieving or overachieving those KPIs as well,”
Meersman says proudly.
And the feedback from the field speaks for itself.
“Of all my years of various on boarding / new hire trainings I will say that this was the best experience and easiest to grasp.” ~
New sales rep
“You’ve got it down to a science, and I just wanted you to know how valuable it was in helping to get me ramped up.” ~
This post is based on a podcast on how ForeScout enables its sales team for their competitive advantage. You can listen to part 1 of the podcast
here
.
ForeScout is a cutting-edge network security company that can detect devices the instant they connect to a network. They are at the forefront of cybersecurity and have been named one of the
20 Fastest Growing Security Companies in 2015
by the Silicon Review. The company has customers around the world and requires a cohesive sales team in order to keep up with growing demand.
According to Renee Capovilla, Director of Sales Enablement, their motto is to turn its A players into ForeScout sales superstars by mastering six core elements:
Industry knowledge;
Buyer knowledge;
Product knowledge;
Pitch knowledge;
Process knowledge; and
Systems knowledge.
The business encountered challenges in the process, messaging and onboarding
When I first joined ForeScout it became very clear to me that we needed to up-level our sales process. We had a documented sales process but it just wasn’t being followed consistently. Moreover, from a messaging perspective, there was no consistency across the sales organization. In order to scale the business and to accelerate our new hire ramp up, we needed to re-engineer our sales process and more importantly document that.”
Three solutions were identified
To address the key challenges, the company focused its efforts on three key areas.
Creating a sales playbook
“The goal of the playbook is to capture and certify what your top performers are saying, asking and doing at every stage of the sales cycle. A playbook needs to provide guidance around first the deal, the call and the forecast management best practices throughout the sales process. Because we have a complex sale process and we work with a lot of very high stake deals, it’s critical that the playbook clearly defines the roles and responsibilities and the rules of engagement of all the different seller stakeholders, to ensure that we in the end delight that buyer throughout the selling process,”
explains Capovilla.
“The playbook should use the sales process as the framework. This approach has enabled us to give that clear direction and guidance on what the rep should do say, do and ask it at every stage of their sale cycle, replicating the best of the best. Then as part of this, it should also include a review section which is the coaching questions at every stage. This is where the manager comes in and plays the part of the coach with the rep, it’s a must-have.”
“We also have sections for the buyer role profiles, so we understand the buyer we are selling to and what they are doing through the sales process so we can lead them through it. We have security topic focus conversational tracks that really draw out the business value for why we are talking to those buyers and then we have an objection handling section which is again one of my favorites. And then we have key customer success story section where reps can talk about other customer successes again embellishing that conversation with the customer,”
outlines Capovilla.
The sales playbook is currently being migrated to Mindtickle so that the technology can be leveraged for all aspects of the process.
Instituting a corporate pitch certification program
When approaching the issue of consistent messaging, ForeScout decided to institute a company-wide corporate pitch certification program.
“This corporate pitch program serves as a framework to which we present our capabilities, our differentiators and our values to our customers. It enables that discussion again around security buyers’ challenges, we present use cases, the current infrastructure gaps that could be occurring and then we help walk the customer through how ForeScout can uniquely address each one of them.”
“I call it the 30 – 3 – 30. You need to be able to just give a 30-second pitch on your company. I think everybody has to have that in their arsenal of conversation. Then we go into the three which is the “three-minute elevator pitch.” That’s where you start talking a little bit more about the buyer challenges and a few of the use cases, but not in too much depth because we have to stick to three minutes. And then the last is, of course, the 30, and that’s where we consider the full-on pitch,”
she continues.
Each pitch is recorded and reviewed using Mindtickle and feedback is provided back to the reps. This then enables the certification to be recorded as well.
Building a robust onboarding program
ForeScout’s onboarding program builds on the sales playbook.
“We use the playbook content as the basis for developing our sales university and we use Mindtickle. Our perspective is that the playbook beckons that onboarding program. It’s the basis for developing the university courseware and the referencing coaching guide that drives our overall process and best practice application post the onboarding experience,”
Capovilla explains.
“We have tackled it in a 30-60-90 day approach. The first month is focused on completion of the online courses that we have put in Mindtickle, along with the prescribed shadowing activities. Around week four to six we bring in the new hires to a boot camp, where we expose them to the best people. We bring the concepts that were taught in those online courses to life, and learning scenarios and role play sprinkled with a little bit of tribal knowledge and customer situations. In my opinion, the best way to learn is to have the trainees apply the concepts to real deals so we also have them do teach back concepts, that’s the role play. We do a lot these role plays, where the trainees have to present what they’ve learned to their peers, and it’s through that collaboration that the learning really starts happening.”
“That’s why I got the platform:
because all of that is in Mindtickle. We use that platform to push out quick updates, to make sure that they haven’t forgotten what we taught them initially in the courses and the missions. One of my favorites is the pitch back because you really want to know once the rep knows it. You want to know how they are using it on a sales call and the only way you’re going to know that is if they tell you. So the pitch back is so important for us to hear what they are going to say when they get to the customer, a great way to reinforce the learning through listening,”
she explains.
“Mindtickle allows me to ramp up my onboarding as well as my ongoing field training. I enable the technology sooner rather than later. Don’t feel intimidated to add the technology early on, because it won’t just help with the cycle time,”
Capovilla continues.
“It’s the ease of use for both the administrator and the user. I’m on both sides of the platform all day long. I quickly set-up a course, a mission, a pitch back. It’s so easy and then from a user perspective, I love the UI. It’s just beautiful and simple and clear, you know what you need to do. We also love the fun and interactive learning experience. Invariably we hear comments like ‘this was the best learning experience I have had, very positive’. I think people learn a lot from seeing themselves.”
New hires are now hitting productivity targets within six to nine months
In a dynamic industry that is constantly evolving getting new hires to ramp up is challenging, but ForeScout has found their sales playbook and onboarding program so effective that by the six to nine month mark their new hires are hitting their productivity targets. They are also expected to deliver their corporate pitch within their first 30 days, using a scorecard to help judge it impartially.
“If you partner with the right companies they will work with you on your team. Mindtickle’s been great. I don’t look at them as a vendor, I look at them as a partner. So when I get stuck or have a challenge, I call my Customer Success rep and we work through it. It’s really like having another person on my team. That’s how I have been able to be successful,”
This is the second part of my series on learnings from the
Onboarding 2025
event in San Francisco. This post looks at key takeaways from some of the top companies in Silicon Valley on their sales onboarding plans and experiences. You can find also find part 1 of this series here.
Facebook: Laine Forman, Global Programs, Learning Program Manager
Laine gave us a great overview of how sales onboarding is being revamped at Facebook and how critical it is that it’s aligned with the company’s values of “
move fast and make an impact
”.
At a company that has
weekly
product updates, it is important to have a dynamic sales onboarding program. Facebook breaks down sales onboarding into 6 key areas:
New hire orientation
Global sales orientation
Sales Bootcamp
Role-specific Bootcamp
eLearning and testing
Mentoring and shadowing
A new operating framework establishes what is done on a global level and outlines what needs to be regional, to account for cultural differences and local nuances or example, although new hire orientation and global sales orientation are done at the HQ in Silicon Valley the sales boot camps are done regionally.
Another important fact that Laine highlighted is that change, especially on a global scale for a company the size of Facebook is extremely hard. Getting different stakeholders involved early on is key to make it happen.
Key Learnings:
Awareness is important. Is everyone aware and agree on what problem needs to be solved and why your onboarding program needs to change?
Transparency to everyone involved will move things along. Don’t just communicate changes to the onboarding program but rather bring people to the table to discuss.
Collaboration with the right people will ensure your program succeeds. Get training facilitators and content creators in the mix, not just sales leaders, as you will need their buy-in for the program to be accepted.
Focus on what will be most effective for the learner as you creatively think about the different elements of your onboarding.
Microsoft: Hector Rosales, Global Program Manager – Sales Onboarding
It was very interesting to learn how a behemoth like Microsoft has deployed their sales onboarding. Their approach was somewhat different from other companies in that they decided to go for a fully online experience with no classroom training. Microsoft developed their own learning platform (running on Microsoft Azure, of course) in which all sales reps have access to training programs.
Microsoft’s sales onboarding program focuses on sales, discipline and product fundamentals. They implemented an interesting framework called Manager Checkpoints that revolves around the following elements:
Plan
Pitch Perfect
Drive
These three elements are foundational for sales managers to ensure the reps are managing their plans (territories, accounts, etc.), are pitching the solutions correctly and can drive towards closing the deals.
Key Learnings:
Don’t overwhelm reps in their first 90 days with too much information. Microsoft has condensed information that is important for the reps to know during onboarding but doesn’t want them to get too many details that are not relevant until they have fully onboarded. This ensures reps are still knowledgeable but not lost.
Checklists rule. Providing manager checklists can help with coaching sessions and ensures consistency and the ability to track progress.
Structure the onboarding experience. New reps will appreciate a guided approach to what they need to learn.
Use stories to highlight the importance of certain key elements for your sales pitch and sales situations.
Give managers visibility into “where’s my new hire and what do I need to do” – this is easily done with the right technology (and you don’t have to build it yourself).
Autodesk: Kriss Ryan, Program Manager, Global Sales Onboarding
Kriss from Autodesk gave us a more detailed look at how to involve sales managers during onboarding. Kriss created an “advisory group” that oversees the entire process from interviews of new hires, defining sales manager processes, elements of foundational learning and onboarding delivery. The advisory group was essential to get everyone in sync about the importance of sales onboarding and the crucial role managers play.
What also stood out was Autodesk’s Sales Management Bootcamp. This is a program designed with the sales manager in mind that had three modules:
Module 1: Creating early Engagement (how managers can stay connected with new hires from interview through the first 90 days)
Module 2: New Hire Expectations & Standards (establishing early how you manage and how you will measure your reps)
Module 3: Accelerating Time to Productivity (sales accelerator and onboarding bench development)
Module 4: “In/Outboard” (new hire progression to performance management and identification of reps that won’t make it)
Key Learnings:
Onboarding is not the same as orientation. This was a great point and some companies do make the mistake of thinking that the traditional HR orientation is the onboarding. Make sure to distinguish the two for your company.
Have your managers attend the sales onboarding. Having gone through the experience themselves will help to not only get their buy-in and feedback, they will be better able to coach reps and connect with them through the program.
Track, measure and communicate the success of your sales onboarding program. If improving onboarding can impact even 1% of revenue per employee, this is huge when you think about the cumulative effect to the bottom line. Find out what the right metric is for your company.
Treat sales managers as your customers. They are the fundamental piece for a successful onboarding.
Don’t be afraid to release “imperfection”. You can’t wait to have the perfect sales onboarding, so don’t waste time and course-correct.
HPE’s presentation was interesting as it focused on the key element that is on everyone’s mind when the talk is about sales onboarding: time to productivity.
How do you sell sales onboarding to senior management? What are the key metrics that will resonate with them?
Key Learnings:
Use sales numbers to sell your onboarding program.
If you don’t have sales experience, hire someone for your team that has that kind of experience or partner with someone that can provide that perspective.
Build a successful program by thinking about what will make it successful. For example, HPE devised the following framework
Business aligned and supported
Targeted recruiting and pre-boarding
Structured and comprehensive solutions
Formal productivity targets and metrics
End-to-end program management
Nutanix: Joan Morales, Senior Manager of Partner and Alliances Marketing, Cloudera: Phil Aaronson, Director of Global Onboarding and Readiness, Mindtickle: Mohit Garg, Co-Founder and CRO
This was a panel discussion and presentation from two hyper-growth companies (Nutanix went IPO just 4 weeks ago and Cloudera is on the IPO path) and Mindtickle. After talking about some industry stats, the discussion centered around sales competencies and onboarding for channel partners.
Key Learnings:
Define what sales competencies are important for your reps to succeed so that you can effectively measure onboarding success
Give reps the opportunity to go through a real-life scenario that forces them to think about all the different elements they will encounter in selling situation (pain discovery, technical questions, potential objections, etc.)
Make onboarding a fun, engaging and competitive. Gamification technology can help drive new sales reps and channel reps to not just go through content but pay attention as well.
Provide reps with learning paths and visual maps to tell them where they are, where they need to go and what will take to get there.
Have your best sales reps produce the content your new hires will consume. It will feel more authentic, earn their respect, and the reps that produce the content will help spread out the word about onboarding.
There were so many great learning that is difficult to capture all of them in a simple post, I hope this nuggets of information will give you some food for thought and help you create better sales onboarding.
where Sales Enablement leaders from some of the top companies in Silicon Valley shared their sales onboarding plans and their experiences in what proved to be an extremely productive discussion.
Here are part 1 of the key takeaways from each session. You can find part 2 here.
Autodesk: Julie Sokley, VP Global Sales Operations
Julie gave a great overview of the challenges she faced when taking over Sales Ops at Autodesk. She had to enable a team of over 250 sales reps globally. Her approach followed three key elements: Processes, productivity, and people.
Focusing on the “people” element, she established a sales methodology, built out a hub-based selling approach and created a sales onboarding program.
Key Learnings:
Think about structuring your sales onboarding into three phases:
Before you join
While you are here
After onboarding
Pre-work is important. Autodesk gives new sales hires 50 hours of pre-work.
Autodesk transitioned from product-based selling to pain-point selling, which contributed to their growth. How are your teams approaching selling situations?
Don’t send sales reps data, send them stories. This was a critical takeaway as we sometimes get so focused on data that we forget that you need compelling stories to change sales behaviors.
Focus on the “why” of training, not the “what”. This will help you get executive buy-in and involvement in sales onboarding.
Google: Jen Bradburn, Sales Training and Development Lead
For the past ten years, Jen has led sales training programs at Google for different groups. During her presentation, she explained how she has changed the sales onboarding for new Google sales reps from a pure online and self-serve experience to interactive and case-study based training. The use of real scenarios during the onboarding program has helped prepare and give reps the confidence they need to work on deals as soon as their onboarding is over.
Key Learnings:
Use real sales scenarios and make them interactive case studies for the reps, so they can apply the theory into real sales situations.
By overloading the reps with the information they would face in a live selling scenario you can simulate what they would encounter in real life and assess their selling skills.
Reps face many surprises in real life, so how can you add those dynamics during onboarding? Google reorganizes the teams going through onboarding so the reps have to scramble and form new teams as they work on case studies which mimic challenges they will have in real situations.
Google has designed their sales onboarding with a mix of 50/50 instruction and practice. Find the right balance for your organization.
LinkedIn: Amy Borsetti, Global Director of Sales Effectiveness; Naomi Davidson, Sr. Operations Mgr of Sales Effectiveness; Thomas Igeme, Sales Effectiveness Strategy & Innovations Lead; Jade Bonacolta, Strategy, Innovation & Analytics Associate
Four people from LinkedIn led an incredibly interesting session focusing on data-driven sales coaching, which aims to address the most important question in everyone’s mind:
Are sales reps truly ramping effectively?
Amy had a great slide that said:
“Successful onboarding calls for mutual accountability across sales effectiveness and sales managers”
She talked about the importance of involving sales managers during onboarding and beyond. The new sales onboarding at LinkedIn also has a different approach, focusing on five phases:
Phase 1: Structured pre-work
Phase 2: Classroom-based simulation
Phase 3: Role-based sales clinics and leader-led series
Phase 4: Sales coaching
Phase 5: Success program for under-performers
They also have an interesting approach in which they talk about “Learning Quota” (Phase 1 and 2), “Behavioral Quota” (Phase 3) and “Sales Quota” (Phase 4 and 5).
But the most impactful change the team at LinkedIn did was related to sales coaching. They deployed a “Coaching for Gold” program to train sales managers on how to coach. It explained why to coach, how to coach, and who to coach. They also taught managers the difference between teaching, coaching, and mentoring and implemented a tracking tool to help them record and track their coaching sessions.
Key Learnings:
Approach your onboarding program with the different types of quotes in mind and create KPIs for each phase. You want to identify reps that are not going to be a good fit early on.
Focus on your B players. LinkedIn saw the best results in terms of lift in performance from their B players.
Managers should prioritize coaching efforts and identify the reps who need the most. In fact for reps that received 3 or more coaching sessions on the same competency the lift in quota attainment was up to 14% more than before. That’s a huge impact on revenue.
Identify what are the core competencies every rep needs to master and document it and measure how each one impacts results.
Build a culture of coaching at your company starting with senior level executive sponsorship so that it becomes a habit for all sales managers.
Zenefits: Elizabeth Pierce, Director of Training and Enablement
Elizabeth walked us through the sales onboarding program at Zenefits and the technology they rely on to get reps up to speed. From pitching, flashcards, quizzes, and more, the sales reps are fully supported by a variety of technology tools that help them ramp up faster.
At Zenefits she implemented a 70:20:10 learning model that splits the time reps spent on different learning activities:
70%: Experience (immersion, experiential learning, learn and develop through experience)
20: Exposure (social learning, learning, and development through others, feedback, and coaching)
10%: Education (formal learning, learning and development through structured courses and programs, in-house and outsourced training and e-learning)
Key Learnings:
Leverage the technology your reps are comfortable with. At Zenefits most of the new hires are millennials and use SnapChat, so they created specific training that leverages the platform the team is comfortable with. It also has the added benefit of giving them 24 hours to see and act on a video or other training component. Very creative!
Link sales reward with certification. By linking opportunities in SFDC with sales certification, they ensure reps can only see sales opportunities if they keep their sales certification up to date (as soon as their certification expires, they lose visibility into new opportunities).
Ramp time needs to match the company’s stage. Startups can’t wait 9 months for a rep to be fully ramped. Your ramp time needs to acknowledge your company’s stage in growth and lifecycle.
Use ongoing assessments in the form of short quizzes to keep reps on top of their game and share the data with the sales manager so they have full visibility.
This post is based on a podcast on MongoDB’s formula for sales enablement success. You can listen to the entire podcast
here
.
MongoDB is the database for giant ideas. It offers the best features of traditional databases while providing the flexibility, scale, and performance that modern applications require. It is known for helping its customers gain a competitive advantage by leveraging information and technology. It helps customers reduce their risk for mission-critical deployments and accelerates their time to value, enabling them to bring new and interesting apps to market faster. It also dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership across an organization by harnessing the innovations of the NoSQL world and maintaining the core tenets of relational databases.
The company is expanding globally and hiring new sales staff to keep up with its phenomenal growth trajectory. It is seeking more enterprise-ready salespeople to help more organizations leverage their product to scale faster and achieve success.
Maintaining sales effectiveness is a challenge
The key challenge MongoDB faces as it scales is maintaining the effectiveness of its sales team,
“We have to have a very effective onboarding program and support sales to be more effective, be more productive. That’s the main goal and that’s our focus,”
outlines Jeremy Powers who heads up Sales Enablement for the company.
“The goal is to provide the sales team with an in-depth understanding of the industry, our customers, our technology and our solution sets. We then build upon that baseline and knowledge to equip our reps to consistently qualify for opportunities and getting and setting great meetings with the right people. Then ultimately prepare them to engage in highly effective, highly valuable conversations with prospects. Ultimately we want to arm our sales team to not only differentiate themselves based on what we sell but also based on how they sell and how they interact with the customer. We want to provide an environment through our onboarding program where they can practice these things and really receive feedback, valuable feedback as part of the process,”
explains Powers.
Onboarding, advanced training, and analytics are key to sales effectiveness
MongoDB has taken a three-pronged approach that leverages technology to maintain and improve the sales effectiveness of its sales team.
Onboarding sets the baseline
MongoDB has established a 30, 60 and 90-day onboarding program. In their first month, new hires attend a week-long boot camp. Prior to attending the Bootcamp the new hires use Mindtickle to read up on pre-work so they have a baseline knowledge before attending in-person training.
“We have tried to put participants in the best possible position to succeed and get the most out of the training, the pre-work really provides a great foundation upon which they can build,”
explains Powers.
“It introduces new folks to all kinds of things: the industry, our customers, what we sell and how we sell it. It’s a very comprehensive program that also allows them to do missions that are really effective and provides an opportunity for sales reps to really try things on, have them record themselves delivering a customer success story or proof points.”
Mindtickle is then leveraged to deliver follow-up courses and advanced training, along with new product releases and information to keep sellers up to date.
Advanced sales training brings in real-world learnings
Everyone undertakes advanced sales training within their first 6 months. This is a three-day comprehensive deep dive that builds on their onboarding and learnings from the real world. This boot camp style training is delivered by a cross-functional group that includes executives, sales leaders, product marketing and the sales enablement team.
“We’ve really made the choice, as a company, to make a significant investment in our time and our resources, in order to provide a great development opportunity for our sales team. In fact, we ran the numbers on this and we spent over 6 times the industry average on developing our sellers and that is something we are really proud of,”
explains Powers.
Mindtickle is leveraged again in the advanced training to deliver relevant content, conduct missions and deliver feedback to management and the sales enablement team.
Accountability and constant evaluation keep the team on track
To help keep reps accountable MongoDB leverages Mindtickle’s functionality.
“We really believe in setting clear expectations and a standard of accountability and this like anything else really starts with the sales leaders. We refer to it as leading from the front,”
explains Powers.
“When we look at performance to really evaluate how can we move the needle with specific sales teams and sales reps, objectively we have been able to gauge the degree to which folks really understand and complete the pre-work and quizzes through Mindtickle. We can leverage things called missions in which we have reps record themselves delivering customer success stories that they learn or delivering a standard pitch. We get feedback and managers can also see how someone’s tracking.”
“In Bootcamp we have an entrance exam to kick things off and the much anticipated final exam towards the end of the week. These things give us a really good sense of, Is this sinking in? Is it sticking?”
explains Powers.
“There is a feedback mechanism that we have in place to capture all this data and anecdotal stuff as well, and then feed that into the follow-up process. In terms of adoption and reinforcement, we leverage Mindtickle in a spaced learning concept keeping the contents and concepts top of mind.”
New hire ramp-up time has reduced from 11 to 5 months
This comprehensive program has really started to deliver results for MongoDB, allowing them to reduce their ramp-up time for new hires from over 11 months to just 5 months.
“I think the thing that really set us apart is being able to identify where people are struggling, giving them the support they need, and keeping things recent and relevant. Staying up with new things, new and interesting and great things that we are releasing in the product that address more and more customer problems. Helping them to achieve business outcomes and really being able to attach to that and enable reps to have great conversations. We really find that this process dramatically improved our onboarding,”
explains Powers.
By using the data within Mindtickle MongoDB has been able to provide data to its managers that give them the ability to really focus in on how to improve the effectiveness of each individual rep.
“The great part about it [Mindtickle] is that we are able to take all the data points like the exams and the minor feedbacks from the final presentations and really give managers some great direction. Hey what are the key things that you need to focus on, where are the knowledge gaps, and really equipping and arming them to have a great targeted approach in how they coach and develop their teams,”
Cloudera is an open-source data management and analytics platform. Cloudera has enterprise customers in every vertical market including financial services, public sector, telecommunications, retail, and healthcare. The company has been scaling rapidly, and in just three years has grown its sales operations from a team of 11 reps based in North America to almost 200 reps globally. Supporting the sellers is an additional team of over 150 sales engineers, solution architects, business development and customer-facing staff.
As Cloudera’s sales team was growing rapidly it was experiencing several challenges that fell into two broad categories:
Consistent Messaging
With so many sales reps, one of Cloudera’s biggest challenges was conveying their message consistently and efficiently. This was compounded by market and product issues, as Drew O’Brien, Field Operations noted,
“
Cloudera is in a market that’s changing very rapidly on so many different levels. The market right now is very, very hyped and as a result, you have all these different companies entering the market. They all have mixed and often conflicting messages, so how do you come up with something that resonates and cuts through the noise. Because we deal in open-source technology, the product changes rapidly because it’s developed by a worldwide pool of developers from all different walks of life, so things change very fast on that front. Now you add on top of all that rapid hiring, it’s extremely challenging to be crisp and clear.”
Onboarding
While Cloudera had a basic onboarding program in place, like many companies, they relied heavily on marketing to undertake many of their sales enablement activities. As the team grew it became apparent they needed a structured process to onboard sales reps to be as productive faster.
Sales enablement investment
Cloudera has invested heavily in sales enablement resources and put together a formidable team. This made all the difference according to O’Brien,
“
Investing in it [sales enablement] early, making that investment in the supporting infrastructure for our sales people while building a foundation rather than after we’ve built the house already was something that we did earlier than most companies do and it saved on a lot of things for us. Secondly actually building formal infrastructure and not relying on marketing and random half-hearted webinars and weekly web access at the end of our training.”
To help create their value proposition Cloudera put together a cross-functional team of sales and marketing leaders and business development individuals over a three-week process. Lars Nilsson, VP Global Inside Sales explains, “
Together we came up with an entire kind of value framework for how do we talk about what it is we do, the problems that we solve, and companies in different segments, whether they be different revenue segments or different industry, verticals or different geographies.”
“
If you involve all of those parties in the development process, in the creation process, they feel like, in many ways, they’re part-owner of it. And for sales teams, driving an option is a matter of getting it started and then, if you can show success and you can actually demonstrate that this indeed does make their lives easier and helps them be more effective, then it kind of begins to gain its own momentum. Because we involved marketing and product management and all those different account executives in the process, it became much easier for them to understand what it was we were doing,”
clarified O’Brien.
Following this process the business then developed assets and content in various different forms, that was disseminated and communicated so that alignment could occur. The alignment resulted in a common message that everyone in the sales team could use when talking about the business, its products and value.
Cloudera leveraged Mindtickle to elevate the readiness of their field sales team and provide them with the right information at the right time. “
You can’t have a field sales team be effective if you’re trying to give every little piece of information to them and have a rep know absolutely every little thing about your products and market. The exercise of readiness is acting like a filter, distilling what’s really important from a selling perspective. What do reps really need to know, and make sure they know that and nothing more. If they need more than that, they can learn it as they need it or they can call another resource. That’s why you have systems engineers, professional services people and product managers so that when the time is right, you can bring in additional resources to help you out. So involving everybody in the process just helps solidify the mission, the goal, everybody’s on the same page, and for us, it’s been very, very effective so far,
” explains O’Brien.
More effective onboarding
While Cloudera already had a sales onboarding class in place they identified a need to make it more robust for their new hires. Krista Wiederhold, Sales Enablement Coordinator explains, “
We looked at
ways of improving it to be more effective, making it more engaging and role-based, moving a lot of the lecture to the first 30 days. So for us, we were kind of just grabbing what we already had in place, and making it better.”
Being able to leverage technology was key to taking their onboarding program to a new level. Cloudera uses Mindtickle to prepare their reps for boot camp Nilsson explains, “
Because we have offloaded or off-boarded a lot of the content that our sales reps usually get during that week of onboarding training, we bring in people from all over the world to our corporate headquarters for this week-long onboarding. We have put 3 days of content into the pre-work in the form of videos and on-demand instructor-led video content, so when they come to Palo Alto we have a lot more time to do role plays, live presentations, and whiteboard, where they learn the content and retain it. For me that was a huge value add-in, just taking all the content you have and allowing your reps to consume it before they come.”
“Using Mindtickle we get feedback from employees, specifically there are ways to do polls and collect feedback in terms of what content’s helpful, what they need to learn next, so that’s the way we gather information from the field to test its effectiveness. Within the system, we also pull analytics and other metrics we can use to see how effective the enablement efforts we’re putting forward are working,”
continues Wiederhold. “
We can see how fast a rep is coming up to speed on particular topics. Being able to look back at the courses that they completed, exams we ran in Mindtickle or to really test them for the areas that they may need a little bit more help on. So we really look at it to get more insight into how we’re revving them up or how fast it takes them to close a deal, get their first meeting or assess them on areas of our product that they may need more education on. We look at the course analytics as well as how long it takes them to close a deal or land a meeting.”
Achieving objectives
The technology was key to Cloudera’s solution according to O’Brien, “
Invest in technology, like Mindtickle or something like that, to actually structure your programs and enablement practices in an organized way and that just methodically covers everything that you need to cover.”
Using a technology that can perform multiple functions in the process certainly made the process easier for the sales enablement team according to Wiederhold,
“Investing in systems that are going to help you accomplish and teach the field and make it easier for to meet them where they’re at. Also pick a tool that’s going to have integrations from a learner perspective, and that you can modify and make it a lot easier to consume materials. We personally use Mindtickle for onboarding as well as ongoing enablement.”
Technology has also played an important role in reporting and analytics for Cloudera. Mindtickle has enabled the sales enablement team to look at what their reps are doing, what courses they are watching and then reporting back to management on this.
“
When you see these reports, and they stack rank in the different regions, and the different segments by how many of their reps have completed versus started versus not started. That sends the message loud and clear to the field and everyone who has a stake. If you are a manager and you see yours at the bottom of the stack with respect to your reps learning one of our key new values drivers, then we’re providing a tool for our leaders to manage their teams. They can then go ahead and make sure their reps get the training,” continues Nilsson.
A final area where technology can really be leveraged is in certifying and testing reps. “
Most recently we’re rolling out certifications. We’re building courses on a particular topic and certifying the field on that course with an exam, or making them do a pitch presentation,”
explains O’Brien.
Results
“
Now we have a common framework and a common set of messages that 200 individual contributor sellers and the extended teams of sales engineers, solution architects, business development, inside sales, we’re all singing kind off the same hymn sheet, when it comes to who we are, what we do, and the problems we solve and the stories we tell,”
exclaims Nilsson.
“So when we’re out there, inspiring and teaching, it all sounds the same, from the CEO down to one of my SDRs. Today there’s a lot of excitement globally, just to be able to share stories because we’ve all have common terminology, language, and value drivers. It’s actually a wonderful place to be. Took us a while to get here, but now we feel poised as this very fast moving company that wants to continue to do that. We have a lot of hopes and dreams here at Cloudera and we definitely feel poised to be able to do that with all the things that we’ve invested in and around sales.”
How ForeScout’s 30 – 60 – 90-day onboarding program is structured;
What the pitch back is and how it’s used to keep new hires on track;
Her advice to new sales enablement directors on how to build an onboarding program from scratch; and
How ForeScout has leveraged technology in its onboarding.
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to
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,
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or find it
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.
“
The best way to learn is to have the trainees apply concepts to real deals so we have them do teach back concepts. We do a lot of these role plays where the trainees have to present what they’ve learned to their peers and it’s through that collaboration that the learning really starts happening.”
Renee Capovilla, Director of Sales Enablement at ForeScout, is reflecting back on what has been critical to ramp up their new sales hires quickly. “Our goal is to really pack those first 90 days with a lot of learning and effective training and then get them out into their territory. But it’s about month six to nine that they start hitting their productivity targets.”
Ramping up new sales hires so quickly is no mean feat and Capovilla puts it down to a combination of effective learning and smart use of technology. “You want to know how they are using [their learning] on a sales call and the only way you’re going to know that is if they tell you. So the pitch back is so important for us, to hear what they are going to say when they get to the customer, a great way to reinforce the learning through listening,” she says explaining the importance of online role plays.
When prompted to explain her secret to success she offered humbly, “I think what I might have as an advantage is the fact that I enabled the technology sooner rather than later. Don’t feel intimidated to add technology early on, because it won’t just help with the cycle time.”
CrowdStrike is one of the fastest growing technology companies in Silicon Valley. It is on a mission to stop breaches through next-generation anti-virus, endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed hunting – all in the cloud. CrowdStrike has a unique ability to not only prevent cyber attacks but also respond to malicious attacks. It’s no surprise then that they were recently ranked number 40 on
This post is based on a podcast on how ForeScout enables its sales team for their competitive advantage. You can listen to part 1 of the podcast 
This is the second part of my series on learnings from the
Last week I attended the
This post is based on a podcast on MongoDB’s formula for 
This post is based on a webinar on 
“