Adding new salespeople to a team is always challenging. Join me as I share two ideas to help your newly hired sales reps better understand your company, expectations, and your company’s values you want them communicating to your customers…so they can sell even more!
Hi, Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. Have you noticed we're starting to add a lot more salespeople to sales teams? So now how you train and onboard a new sales person is becoming a significant challenge for a lot of sales organizations. I'd like to offer two ideas that might help you successfully onboard a new sales rep. This is in addition to any of the product or technical computer training, territory awareness training, any of that kind of training you have of how they do the job, but it's more making sure that they're aligned with your company. Two ideas I offer you. The first is, consider making sure that when you hire somebody new, they have a chance to interview a couple of your top executives. This is where you want the executives sharing with them their expectations for anybody joining the company. What kind of history and values of the company are important that they need that new person joining the organization to know and understand?
And what do you do if you see something wrong, and giving them ideas, if they do see a problem or do see something that they don't think is appropriate, how and what the feedback channels are to make sure they can be heard. And also, talking to them about what their long-term career opportunities could be with your organization, to make sure that they see that there is a future if they decide this is the place that they want to work.
A second suggestion is to consider investing a week just having your sales person ride with a bunch of your people. The idea is you want them spending a day each with maybe an outside sales rep seeing what the territory is like, calling on people. To spend a day riding with your drivers to see what's involved in delivery and handling customers and how much customer interactions your drivers do experience with your clients. Spending time in the warehouse to see what it takes to pick an order and what happens and how it's picked and organized to be delivered to a customer. Spending a day with an inside sales rep to make sure they understand how when a customer calls in with an order or has a challenge, how those are resolved. And finally, spending a day just with the credit and accounting people to understand how credits are issued and how you manage the credit worthiness of customers.
Too many times, we bring a sales person in and we only train them on the skills of their job. It takes a while for them to get a true understanding of the company they're working for, and the values that company expects them to be following. These are two ideas that at the very beginning might help you set the proper tone to help your sales person sell even more. We'd love to know how it's going for you, we'd love to know what you think of these ideas. Thanks for checking out my podcast. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage. I hope you check them out.