Onboarding: how to Make your New Sales Reps Productive as Quickly as Possible?

According to a study conducted by the Aberdeen Group in 2013, only 37% of companies surveyed invest in an onboarding program to welcome their new hires. However, the stakes of successful integration are both numerous and crucial: it’s about making new employees productive as quickly as possible, but also fostering their loyalty and retention within the company.

What if you deployed your own onboarding program to get your new sales reps operational from the first few months? Find out how in this 3-step onboarding guide.

Step 1: Conduct an Audit of your Onboarding Process

According to the Aberdeen study cited above, only 15% of companies deploy their onboarding program for more than 6 months. However, onboarding is conceived as a long-term transitional period: it can last up to 12 months, depending on the scope of the sales organization and the profile of new arrivals.

To improve your onboarding process, it will therefore be wise to analyze the existing situation: how much time do you dedicate to welcoming your new sales reps? What are the main steps of your current onboarding process? What are the most frequently encountered questions and issues by new arrivals?

The answers to these questions will allow you to identify the weaknesses, but also the strengths of your onboarding process to optimize it. Don’t hesitate to directly question your most recent hires: they will provide you with a wealth of information on best practices to adopt.

Step 2: Take Care of Welcoming your New Sales Reps

Welcoming new hires presents crucial challenges in terms of integration, but also in terms of engagement and retention of your sales reps. You must therefore pay particular attention to this first step, which will determine the productivity and performance of your new employees.

Often, welcoming new hires boils down to a quick presentation of the organization and teams, before concluding with the assignment of a workstation and the handover of an onboarding booklet. As you might have guessed, these measures are far from sufficient: they may help your new sales reps familiarize themselves with their work environment, but they won’t allow them to be productive from the first few weeks.

And that’s the secret to successful integration: each step of your onboarding process must aim for the productivity of your new hires. Therefore, there’s no need to present the entire company or all teams: prioritize useful, operational, and effective information. Instead, present the strategic missions of the sales organization, as well as a few reference people (of whom you can be one) to whom your new hire can ask questions.

Engaging and Retaining Your Sales Force

Step 3: Combine Training and Integration for an Effective Onboarding Process

When a sales rep joins your team, they must familiarize themselves with two aspects of the organization: a new technical environment (with its specific tools and methods), as well as a new company culture. The key to successful integration therefore lies in these two aspects, which are both distinct and complementary.

By deploying training sessions for your new sales reps, you will help them assimilate their new technical environment. However, you will need to complement this training effort with a “social” integration, which will allow new employees to find their place within the organization.

Encourage exchanges between junior and senior sales reps, strengthen the cohesion of your sales force, and facilitate the transmission of information, soft skills, and know-how within your teams: in this way, you will retain your new employees while making them productive more quickly.