Around one-third of your salespeople will leave the organization this year. Think about it. To hit your revenue targets, you’ll need to fill all those open positions—and onboarding for sales teams is a lengthy process.
It takes months to onboard and train a sales professional. We surveyed over 150 sales leaders at large B2B organizations in multiple industries and found:
It takes an average of nine months for a new sales professional to be ready to engage with customers, either face-to-face or virtually.
It takes an average of 12 months until those sales professionals are competent and capable of carrying a full quota or performance target.
How can you shorten onboarding time, train new sales hires effectively, and retain them longer?
It starts with a solid sales onboarding program.
Sales onboarding is a systematic process designed to welcome, train, and engage new sales professionals. When done well, sales onboarding puts them on a faster track to meet sales targets and, ultimately, ensure success for the organization.
Your ability to get new sales team members up to speed quickly separates best-in-class organizations from underperforming peers. According to The Brooks Group research report Best Practices of High-Performing Sales Teams:
- Success begins on day one for a sales professional.
- Companies with structured, hybrid onboarding and consistent use of personality assessments and hiring profiles do better.
- Adherence to a clearly defined sales process and continuous training around essential selling skills correlates with higher performance.
The first few months of a new sales professional’s tenure at your company are the most critical. A good onboarding experience impacts retention, performance, and long-term success. It’s important to get your sales onboarding process right.
9 Sales Onboarding Best Practices
Set your new sales professionals up for success with a structured onboarding strategy. Follow these steps for a process that will propel your new sales professionals to productivity as quickly and effectively as possible.
1. Create a Formal Sales Onboarding Process
While you want salespeople to be resourceful, it’s a mistake to simply let them fend for themselves. Your onboarding process can include company and product knowledge, industry insight, regulatory information, sales process, and selling skills.
- 87% of successful teams have extensive, structured onboarding.
- Only 75% of underperforming teams have structured onboarding; 25% have informal or no onboarding.
A structured sales onboarding plan provides a framework that introduces them to the resources, tools, and information they need in an organized manner within an appropriate time frame.
A successful onboarding process will:
- Set time-based goals for content and skills proficiency.
- Establish expectations for new hire participation in the process.
- Guide the sales professional and the sales manager through the process.
- Include clear checkpoints to measure progress.
A best practice is to have 30-, 60-, and 90-day plans for onboarding, with scheduled check-ins to evaluate the new rep’s progress and determine what they’re doing well, where they’re struggling, and what type of targeted coaching can be used to help them further improve.
2. Offer Hybrid Onboarding
Successful teams are more likely to conduct a hybrid mix of in-person and virtual onboarding. They’ve adapted to new ways of conducting business that require supporting sellers outside of the office.
46% of sales leaders say their sales organizations are hybrid, with teams working both in-person and remotely. 37% say they operate in-person exclusively, and 18% are fully remote.
Hybrid onboarding requires technical support and targeted training, but it’s beneficial for both attracting and retaining new hires. Offering hybrid onboarding allows sales leaders to recruit talent from more locations and gives sales professionals greater flexibility where they work and sell—leading to greater job satisfaction.
3. Start Onboarding for Sales Before Day One
Part of an effective sales onboarding process is preparing your new hires by giving them context and background about the company before their first day. This is the time to share non-proprietary information to ease them into their role.
Send your new sales hires a welcome package with an outline of their first days and resources to give them a head start.
On day one, each new hire should have a basic understanding of:
- Company history and leadership
- Products and services
- Values and mission
- Key differentiating points
- High-level information that is publicly available and relevant
Ask new hires to come to their first day of work with questions for their sales managers based on their research into your company.
This initial conversation establishes a strong foundation for the coaching relationship by helping the salesperson and the manager get to know each other. It also sets the stage for the culture of coaching at your organization.
4. Use Hiring Assessments
Hiring assessments are useful before and after hiring a new sales professional. Assessing a candidate’s skills and personality before hiring can help you decide whether they’re a good fit for your corporate culture. Learning more about them after they’re onboard can show you the best way to train, coach, and mentor them.
There are a wide range of sales assessments that show individual and team behaviors, communication style, and motivators. Selling skills assessments reveal whether your salespeople have the acumen to know the best thing to do across a host of situations and sales process steps.
According to our research, more than half of successful sales teams (those that met or exceeded the previous year’s revenue goals) use personality assessments, sales skill assessments, hiring profiles, and/or job benchmarks in the hiring process.
- 53% of organizations that consistently use personality assessments in hiring met or exceeded their previous year’s revenue goal.
- 63% of companies that use assessments are confident in their team’s ability to achieve 2024 sales objectives.
- Meanwhile, 65% of organizations that DON’T use assessments were below goal.
5. Follow a Consistent Sales Process
If you expect team members to meet goals, you must also give them the knowledge, skills, and tools they need. Use a sales onboarding program that teaches new sales hires how to close deals by following a consistent sales process.
Sales process adherence is an important factor for sales performance. In contrast with underperforming teams, sales teams that met or exceeded the previous year’s revenue goals were more likely to consistently follow their sales process, less likely to struggle across all stages of the sales process, and more likely to integrate their sales process into their CRM.
- 95% of successful teams closely adhere to their sales process, but only 69% of underperforming teams do so.
- 83% of teams that rarely follow the sales process were behind goal last year.
Adopt, communicate, and enforce a well-defined sales process for every new hire for long-term success.
Learn about our award-winning IMPACT Selling® sales process.
6. Set Expectations
To succeed, members of your sales team must know exactly what defines “success” at your organization. It’s critical for sales leaders to communicate expectations early on and reinforce them regularly.
Establish short-term and long-term goals with your new hires. Set realistic expectations with measurable milestones. When you break goals down into specific tasks, it’s easier to track their accountability and progress. Collaborative goal setting motivates sales professionals and helps keep them on track.
7. Have Experienced Sellers Mentor New Hires
An effective onboarding experience should include some time for experienced sales professionals to mentor your new hires. Explain to your current team members that their participation during the sales onboarding process is important.
Tenured team members can share insights about your customers and competition. Shadowing on sales calls allows newer sellers to see your process and sales methodology in action.
Use a “welcome” meeting to get your entire sales team involved in onboarding. Ask each team member to bring a story or tip based on the prompt, “What I wish I had known when I was new.” This builds camaraderie and exposes new hires to inspiring stories and helpful tips directly from the field.
8. Evaluate Performance Early
If you have a milestone-based sales onboarding process, you will know relatively quickly whether a new sales professional is meeting expectations.
If they’re not, intervene early and determine what you can do to help them improve. If, after interventions, the new hire still fails to make satisfactory progress, you may need to make the hard decision to release them to the marketplace.
Holding onto an ineffective new sales hire who doesn’t make satisfactory progress will only demoralize the rest of your team and cause more harm in the long run.
9. Invest in Continuous Improvement
The most successful sales teams have a mindset of continuous improvement. Once you’ve onboarded a salesperson, maintain your investment in them by providing more advanced skills training such as negotiation training or sales territory planning, for example.
Reinforce sales skills with ongoing access to refresher training or online resources. This will help your sales professionals retain and apply the skills they need to be able to adapt to changing market conditions and new competitors.
Providing professional development opportunities will not only improve performance; it will also increase the likelihood that new hires have long and successful careers with your organization.
Learn More
Find out how The Brooks Group’s IMPACT Selling® training program can reduce ramp time and give new hires essential skills to succeed.
2024 Sales Leader Trend Report
Best Practices of High-Performing Sales Teams
What do top performing sales teams do differently? We surveyed B2B sales leaders across multiple industries at organizations to discover the answer.
In this research report, we share what the best sales teams do differently.
