Are You Just Winging Your Sales Rep Training Process?

What’s almost as important as hiring great reps? Your training process. Without proper onboarding and coaching, reps that could have been all-stars in your organization could end up striking out.

In order to be successful, reps need to possess a thorough knowledge of:

• The solution they are selling
• Your entire landscape of competitors (and how your solution exceeds/falls short of each competitor)
• The target buyers who they’ll be selling to (we’ve drafted a buyer persona template to help with this)
• Sales tools (including CRM) that will be part of a rep’s sales process

It’s going to take time for reps to truly absorb all this knowledge. But we’ve found that it helps to document all of this information in a sales playbook, so that reps can continuously reference relevant information.

For our recent eBook, we asked some expert sales leaders to reveal some onboarding tips. Here’s what they said:

Put Reps Through Onboarding Bootcamp

With respect to the SDRs who are new hires, we put them through an actual onboarding camp, and we spend five dedicated days with them focusing on ideal customer profile, critical business issues, articulating the offering, etcetera. But I would say that the onboarding phase truly ends after the first four to six weeks in the role. That’s when I’m seeing production and productivity start to happen.

Ralph Barsi
Senior Director, Global Demand Center,
ServiceNow

Train SDRs to Use Ideal Customer Profiles to Sell Contextually

When training SDRs – start by learning the market you are serving, then how Ideal Customer Profiles receive value from your solution, followed by the buyer personas involved. Then review how to execute best practices for the SDR function.

It’s vital to be personalized, timely, contextual and actually help people, rather than push your own agenda. Without understanding industry trends and Ideal Customer Profiles, SDRs will not be able to engage potential buyers early with insight, to help shape their journey with relevant education.

Brian Lipp
VP Sales, Sales for Life

Start Account Executives (AEs) With Small Territories

When we bring in a new AE, regardless of their past experience, they are starting with the smallest territories that we have. They’re focused on the smallest companies just to start, and usually those are less qualified. It allows them to have a lot more conversations in a quicker period of time. By doing this, we’ve even seen new AEs close deals in their first month.

Ben Sardella
Co-Founder and CRO, Datanyze

For more expert onboarding tips check out our latest eBook!