Is it hard for you to fill Sales Jobs? Does new hires under-perform? What about time and money lost in circling around?
Sales On-boarding is a BIG Challenge for 80% of the Organizations. Long on-boarding time, New Hires under-performance, high churn rate, time and opportunity cost in replacing Sales Reps are few of them. As a result, Organizations are missing Sales Quotas and Revenue.
That makes effectively on-boarding Sales Reps, the top most priority for Organizations across the globe.
What’s so hard about on-boarding?
On-boarding Sales Reps requires you to impart them with knowledge on three essential elements - Product, Process and Customers.
Sales are a special skill and sales training has to be unique to organization’s requirements which are linked to its set of Products, Market Focus, Target Customer Segments and Market Differentiation. Toughest part is being able incorporate this Intel into your New Reps approach to enable sales team top performance.
Additionally, Complexity in Sales is increasing with changing Sales trends viz. Globalization, growing competition, dealing with price war, pitching to multiple decision makers, Social Selling, is all part of the game now. It makes it difficult for Organization to optimize their on-boarding for Sales Rep to learn and build a Sales approach overcoming these challenges and win deals.
Strategies to handle on-boarding effectively
Today’s Sales On-boarding requirements are not limited to general Sales Process, Tools and Product learning anymore. Organization’s Sales Success lies in embedding Market and Customer intelligence into On-boarding to enable New Hires top performance. Below are the top on-boarding strategies that have helped organizations optimize their on-boarding program for success in Sales.
1. Does your new team really know your customers?
Organizations limit Customer Segment discussions to “Generic Customer Business’s product portfolio”. Is that helping new hires to understand prospects and engage them effectively?
Delivering customer intelligence as part of on-boarding that is insightful, helps New Reps engaging users throughout the buyers’ journey. Organizations should draw “Customer Persona” by identifying the attributes of their ideal and most profitable customer. This should include:
Identifying and building attributes of Big Deal & Strategic Customers, Small and mid-size customers with information like Business Model, Business Portfolio, Business Customers, Operation Size, Local and Global Presence, Employees Size. This information will help Sales Team effectively qualify prospects and its business potential at the very beginning of the Sales Engagement.
Intel should also include prospect Business Challenges, product implementation strategies, Purchase Procedures, Typical Sales Cycle, and Decision Makers & Influencers information, Sales Drivers etc… that will help New Reps identify the right Sales Approach to engage prospects based on their “Customer Persona”.
With this, organizations will benefit from Sales Rep’s precise understanding of prospects, identify their right purchase potential and design effective sales approach for engagement.
2. Are they ready to engage all types of decision makers?
Changing buyers trends, increasing Competition and last economic crunch have completely changed the Sales Game. Now, Sales reps have to deal with multiple decision makers at every stage of the decision curve. Decision makers and influencers hail from different departments with their own set of goals and priorities in the company. A CXO level business owner might be looking for Automation, ROI, and Productivity in a product where as an IT Manager will be interested in technical dependencies, updates and upgrades, migration etc…
This mandates the Sales Rep to understand the product and its features from Decision makers as well as influencers’ point of view. A Sales Rep needs to understand their challenges and priorities to pitch it right. He also needs to understand the Features, Advantages and Benefits of the product that the audience in question would find appealing.
Organizations require incorporating product intelligence, that is built from decision makers and influencers’ point of view and impart it to Sales Reps during the on-boarding. This will ensure New Reps are ready to address information quest of all types of Decision Makers.
3. Is your new hire ready for competition?
Organizations and Sales Reps know who their biggest competitors are. But do Sales Reps also know how to handle discussions when they come across one? It has become quite a standard question for prospects to ask during the engagement “Who is your biggest competitor and how do you compare?”
Organizations need to prepare their New Reps to handle discussions around competition. Does he know?
Direct and Indirect Competition?
What is your business USPs (Unique Selling Points) against competition?
Does your market and customer focus differ from your competition?
Past histories, goof-ups, shakeups of your direct and indirect competitors which can prove decisive in Sales Discussions?
Organizations that impart this intelligence to their Sales Reps will find their reps well placed to handle competition at any stage of the discussion to convert BIGGER and BETTER each time.
4. Can they position your brand to win deals?
Building and articulating compelling Value Proposition is the key to engage prospects and maintain his interest in the engagement. Have you built one for your Sales Reps or are they building it on their own?
Sales Reps have a tendency to try what works for them which might work incidentally in some cases but then believing it to work with every prospect leads to losing prospects and missing quotas.
A Value Proposition is different for every prospect based on their business size, challenges, industry, and target customers. Hence, a value proposition should be built for each type of customer persona or profile (refer above section “Customer Intel”). This will help new sales reps rightly pitch solutions to the prospects and build engagements that lead to deal conversion.
A compelling value proposition is a positioning statement that explains what benefits your brand provides for who and how unique it is in terms of its offering. It should include the following Intel to make is effective:
Target Audience
Current Challenges
Product features, Advantages and Benefits
Comparison with competition.
Additional services benefits that make your better.
Remember an organization whose Sales Reps are well prepared to perform - will always outgrow its targets and outshine its competition to win mind share and market share both.
So, what do you think is you biggest on-boarding challenge and how have you tackled it?
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