You’d never send a rookie baseball player out onto the field without sizing up their game using team drills and scrimmages.

In the same way, you don’t want to wait until after sales onboarding when a new batch of reps are already out in the field putting up low win rates and discounting heavily before you assess their ability to handle key components of customer conversations.

By then, you’re already losing deals.

Sales certification should play a critical role in the onboarding process, and modern learning tools empower sales enablement and training professionals to personalize reps’ path to getting certified.  

Three essential skill areas stand out as key candidates to build sales certifications around:

1. Presenting the solution

When the new hire delivers the company messaging, can they clearly articulate the mission statement? How well do they understand buyer pain and convey value?

Sales certifications give you answers to these and other key questions before new reps get in front of customers after sales onboarding.  But before certification, show them what “good” looks like by giving them access to libraries of short video clips featuring top sales performers in your organization demonstrating how they do it.

2. Articulating customer success stories.

There’s nothing more compelling than an endorsement from a satisfied customer.  New sales reps should be able to confidently articulate stories of customers successfully using your product today.  

Ask them to  submit a video of themselves explaining two or three customers’ business problems, the impact your solution had, and the ROI the customers realized.  Get the reps’ managers to evaluate and post comments on key moments throughout the videos to drive new hire engagement through early 1:1 manager-rep interactions during sales onboarding.

3. Handling sales objections

Once your new hires submit their videos demonstrating their ability to present your solution, surprise them with a video scenario of an objection to which they need to respond.

Do they remain calm? Do they provide the best answer and back it up with any customer anecdotes or examples?

Share the best of these submission videos to promote peer-to-peer learning and friendly competition.  From there, curate and publish them to a best-practices channel for your reps to review throughout their onboarding and beyond.

Sales learning and coaching platforms open up lots of ways to let your sales trainees learn, practice, and submit sales certifications at their own pace throughout onboarding.  

To learn more about “just for me” sales onboarding, watch this video of sales development expert Pat D’Amico on how to modernize your new hire onboarding process.