Sales Onboarding: 3 Strategies for Winning Teams

If you’re involved in onboarding sales reps, you know how challenging it is today. Employee turnover is higher than ever, and companies are continually hiring new sales reps. You must ensure reps not only do their jobs well but that they want to stay with the company.

It isn’t enough to just design an onboarding program to help sales reps hit their number. Sales onboarding success is also about helping new employees feel like they are part of the company.

Allego’s sales enablement director Mary Charles and chief marketing officer Wayne St. Amand explored this topic and more during a recent webinar, The Great Onboarding Revolution.

“You want to build an onboarding program that supports new learners, sets them up for success, and gives them a foundation to work from so they want to continue in the role,” Charles said.

If that weren’t challenging enough, you’re under intense pressure to onboard new sales reps as quickly as possible and in hybrid environments. Some reps are remote-only, some live in different time zones, and others work in the company office—but not all the time.

It’s a lot, but it is possible.

3 Onboarding Strategies to Improve Sales Training and Retention

During the webinar, Charles and St. Amand explained three strategies to ensure onboarding programs give sales reps the skills they need, as well as incorporate sellers into the company culture and make them feel like they belong.

1. Flip the Classroom

With traditional onboarding, employees receive a ton of information at once. The goal is to give them everything they need in case a situation comes up in the future. If you’ve ever experienced that type of training, though, you know it is overwhelming and unless you use that information regularly, you will forget it.

In fact, as much as 80% of the material taught can be lost after just one day of exposure, Charles said. And up to 98% can be lost within 30 days if a new hire hasn’t used the information on the job or hasn’t had reinforcement.

A better option is to provide self-paced, video-based training first. These are short videos—3 minutes or fewer—that include questions about the material in the middle of them. Then supplement that training with live sessions such as role playing, St. Amand said.

“So, they come to the live sessions after having absorbed that content in advance. And they use the live sessions to reinforce what they’ve learned, as well as test what they have learned,” he said.

2. Provide Just-in-Time Learning and Just-in-Case Learning

It’s extremely tempting to give new reps all the information they might need to do their jobs. After all, you want them to be well-equipped, know the ins and outs of your product, understand the competitive landscape—and to succeed. That kind of just-in-case learning does serve a purpose, but it can’t be the only type of learning.

You want to convert some of your just-in-case learning into just-in-time learning, Charles said. “Focus on what sales reps will need when they encounter a particular situation—and make it very easy for them to find it in their day-to-day pursuits,” she said.

Just-in-time learning examples include:

• Short videos about new products or offers
• Best practice videos from your top performers
• Sales reps’ success stories
• How-to videos (how to handle objections, how to conduct a demo, etc.)
• Role playing exercises
• Excerpts from sales calls

You want to create a culture of sharing, show what good looks like, keep content short, and make content easy to access “in the flow of work and at the moment of need,” Charles said.

Not only does this onboarding strategy help reps learn better and sharpen their skills, but the peer-to-peer aspect of it creates camaraderie and grows the team relationship. That’s critical to making new reps feel included and want to stay.

3. Use Reinforcement to Overcome the Forgetting Curve

Reinforcement is the key to preventing newly acquired information from fading away, Charles said. So, you want to create an atmosphere in which sales reps continually learn.

Reinforcement strategies to consider:

• Questions or short quizzes in the middle of a training video
• Daily short quizzes after completing a training session
• Periodic repetition in which you regularly share best practices, conduct role-playing exercises, and have reps take pop quizzes

“You have to find little ways to keep reinforcing the learning instead of these big-bang learning events where you bring them in for two more days,” Charles said.

St. Amand agreed. “By breaking content up into smaller pieces and distributed over several weeks, the information stays with people longer and they don’t feel like they’re running a marathon every time,” he said.

Plus, with quizzes, you can measure reps’ aptitude and adjust individual training as needed. Maybe one rep needs additional product training. Maybe another needs coaching on how to handle buyers’ objectives.

“Onboarding never really stops. You may stop having day-to-day contact with your new hires after a certain number of weeks, but the learning continues,” Charles said.

Learn More

Watch the on-demand webinar The Great Onboarding Revolution – An Enabler’s Guide for Capitalizing on The Great Resignation, and learn how to design an onboarding program for winning teams.