Create Powerful Sales Success Stories that Motivate and Inspire Your Reps

Ryan Pimlott on December 5, 2016

Running a four-minute mile was once an elusive dream, but in 1954 Roger Bannister achieved the impossible. Fast-forward 60 years and the 4-minute mile is a rite of passage for professional runners aspiring to beat Hicham El Guerrouj, who currently holds the world record with a time of 3:43:13, set in 1999.

For athletes, success is a powerful motivator. Once they know one person has achieved the impossible it inspires others to not only follow in their footsteps but smash their record. And it’s no different for salespeople. After all, they’re a competitive bunch, which is why sales success stories are a powerful motivational tool for sales reps.

What is a sales success story?

A sales success story is designed for the purpose of internal communication where a sales rep talks about how they navigated the buying process and closed a sale with a customer. They provide insights into how the rep achieved success, and can give their peers ideas about how they could apply the winning techniques. Success stories may also provide insights into how customers use your product (or solution) and the value it adds to their business, providing more information that can be applied in sales conversations.

However, like any sales enablement tools, they’re only effective if the content is useful and if it’s delivered to your reps in a way that they can consume easily. That’s why it’s important to enable your reps with sales success stories that have been well researched and delivered. In this post we’ll take you through how to create sales success stories that will help your reps sell more.

Why are sales success stories important and how are they used?

Sales success stories are an important element of peer-to-peer learning. They are internal tools that can be used to train new hires on how deals have been won, and inspire and educate seasoned reps. They can be used as training tools, where reps learn how their peers have successfully sold to similar customers, different verticals, or beat the competition. The success stories may also provide anecdotal evidence of how your product is used and its success. Reps can use this knowledge in customer conversations to explain the value your product can provide to a prospect.

How do you create a sales success story?

Sales success stories can be created in several different formats, depending on what is most useful for your audience. For sales reps, I’ve found it best to deliver them as short but powerful snippets of information that are delivered direct to their mobile device and / or inside CRM system. Some of the formats that I’ve seen used include:

  • A 3 to 10 minute video of the rep explaining their story;
  • Written collateral like a case study that’s available for reps to read in their downtime;
  • A few PowerPoint slides that have dot points with the relevant information; and
  • Audio or podcasts that can be listened to while reps are traveling.

By making the information short and punchy it’s easier for reps to consume while they’re on the go.  One of the most effective ways to do this is by creating a standard structure for your customer success stories. This structure guides how you collect the information, all the way through to how it’s presented to your reps. I suggest following this four point structure:
Create sales success stories customer success

Some other ways that you can make your success stories easier for your reps to access and digest include:

  • Make them searchable, particularly if they’re longer case studies. This will help your reps find them quickly when they’re preparing for a meeting
  • Make them available on their mobile device. Many field sales reps use their cell phone or tablet as a pseudo office nowadays, so it’s imperative that they can access success stories on them
  • Make them available on your CRM system like Salesforce.com
  • Make them available offline. This will enable your reps to go through them when they’re on a plane or find them even if they don’t have Internet access, and
  • Keep it simple. While there’s a lot of information that you may want to convey, keep it short or use bullet points so it’s easier to skim through. And follow a standard structure as suggested so that reps know where to find what they’re looking for.

Collecting the information for your success story

It’s always best to go straight to the source when collecting information, that’s why I suggest interviewing your sales rep directly for your success story. If your customer is open to it you can also ask them to be included in the interview process. That way you can obtain their perspective on the sales process as well. And because the interview will only be used for internal purposes, I’ve found that most reps (and customers) are much more open and candid about their experiences.

If you’re not familiar with interviewing people it can be a bit daunting. To help you get the most from your sales rep (and possibly customer) interviews, I’ve suggested below some questions that you can use in your interviews. The list is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather it’s intended to be guided to help you through the process. So you can pick and choose which questions to ask in your interview based on the situation and how the interview is going.

Once you have collected your information it’s just a matter of editing your video or audio or writing up your success story and publishing it on your sales enablement tool or content management system.

Understand the situation

  • An overview of your customer’s business
    • Please give me a quick overview of your customer’s business?
    • What does it do and how long has it been in operation?
    • How many employees are there?
    • What are its revenues?
  • Your champion’s role within their business
    • Can you please describe their role
    • Where does their role sit in the broader org structure?
  • Your customer’s customers
    • Who are their target customers?
    • How do they use their product?
  • Your competitors
    • What other solutions was the customer looking at?
    • How did you find out about your competitors?
  • Political navigation
    • Was there any saboteur in the deal? How did you overcome them?

Define the problem

  • The pain points and challenges your customer faced
    • What were the key challenges that your customer’s business was facing prior to using our product?
    • Were there specific pain points in their process that they wanted to remove?
    • What were they doing before to solve for these issues?
    • Did they use other tools or processes? How did they work?
  • The impact on your customer’s business
    • How did these challenges impact their business? Higher costs? Productivity? Revenue?
  • The decision-making process
    • What were other people involved in the decision making process?
    • How did you navigate the internal politics of the customer’s decision making process?
    • How did you identify your sales champion within the customer’s business?
    • How did the champion help you get the deal over the line?

Outline the solution

  • How you helped your customer solve for their pain points and challenges
    • Explain how you went about identifying your customer’s pain points or the challenges they were facing
    • How did you address these challenges in your customer conversations?
    • How did you help them resolve these challenges?
    • Who else helped you resolve the challenges?
    • Did they need to make any changes to their business to resolve these challenges? How were these received by their sales teams? Other internal teams? Their executives?
    • What support did you receive from other departments in their business?
    • What objections did you encounter from other departments in their business? How did you overcome this?
    • Did you encounter any other challenges or objections in the sales process? What were they? How did you resolve them?
  • How your customer uses our product
    • How is your customer currently using our product?
    • What features do they find helpful?
    • How does our product help alleviate their pain points or solve their challenges [describe what these challenges were]?
    • How does our product help them achieve their goals?
    • Has your customer reduced costs as a result? How do they quantify this?
    • Has your customer improved productivity as a result? How do they quantify this?
    • Has your customer increased revenue or sales growth as a result? How do they quantify this?
  • Has our product helped you and your team achieve success in your goals? How?

Additional Information

  • Do you have anything interesting about this sales or the sales process that you would like to share?

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Sales Onboarding at Hyper-Growth Companies: Key Learnings from Autodesk, Google, LinkedIn and Zenefits

Daniel Kuperman on December 5, 2016

sales_onboarding_aurodesk_google_linkedin_ZenefitsLast week I attended the

Onboarding 2025

event in San Francisco at the beautiful

Autodesk Gallery

where Sales Enablement leaders from some of the top companies in Silicon Valley shared their sales onboarding plans and their experiences in what proved to be an extremely productive discussion.

Here are part 1 of the key takeaways from each session. You can find part 2 here.

Autodesk: Julie Sokley, VP Global Sales Operations

Julie gave a great overview of the challenges she faced when taking over Sales Ops at Autodesk. She had to enable a team of over 250 sales reps globally. Her approach followed three key elements: Processes, productivity, and people.

Focusing on the “people” element, she established a sales methodology, built out a hub-based selling approach and created a sales onboarding program.

Key Learnings:

  • Think about structuring your sales onboarding into three phases:
  1. Before you join
  2. While you are here
  3. After onboarding
  • Pre-work is important. Autodesk gives new sales hires 50 hours of pre-work.
  • Autodesk transitioned from product-based selling to pain-point selling, which contributed to their growth. How are your teams approaching selling situations?
  • Don’t send sales reps data, send them stories. This was a critical takeaway as we sometimes get so focused on data that we forget that you need compelling stories to change sales behaviors.
  • Focus on the “why” of training, not the “what”. This will help you get executive buy-in and involvement in sales onboarding.

Google: Jen Bradburn, Sales Training and Development Lead

For the past ten years, Jen has led sales training programs at Google for different groups. During her presentation, she explained how she has changed the sales onboarding for new Google sales reps from a pure online and self-serve experience to interactive and case-study based training. The use of real scenarios during the onboarding program has helped prepare and give reps the confidence they need to work on deals as soon as their onboarding is over.

Key Learnings:

  • Use real sales scenarios and make them interactive case studies for the reps, so they can apply the theory into real sales situations.
  • By overloading the reps with the information they would face in a live selling scenario you can simulate what they would encounter in real life and assess their selling skills.
  • Reps face many surprises in real life, so how can you add those dynamics during onboarding? Google reorganizes the teams going through onboarding so the reps have to scramble and form new teams as they work on case studies which mimic challenges they will have in real situations.
  • Google has designed their sales onboarding with a mix of 50/50 instruction and practice. Find the right balance for your organization.

LinkedIn: Amy Borsetti, Global Director of Sales Effectiveness; Naomi Davidson, Sr. Operations Mgr of Sales Effectiveness; Thomas Igeme, Sales Effectiveness Strategy & Innovations Lead; Jade Bonacolta, Strategy, Innovation & Analytics Associate

Four people from LinkedIn led an incredibly interesting session focusing on data-driven sales coaching, which aims to address the most important question in everyone’s mind:

Are sales reps truly ramping effectively?

Amy had a great slide that said:

“Successful onboarding calls for mutual accountability across sales effectiveness and sales managers”

She talked about the importance of involving sales managers during onboarding and beyond. The new sales onboarding at LinkedIn also has a different approach, focusing on five phases:

Phase 1: Structured pre-work

Phase 2: Classroom-based simulation

Phase 3: Role-based sales clinics and leader-led series

Phase 4: Sales coaching

Phase 5: Success program for under-performers

They also have an interesting approach in which they talk about “Learning Quota” (Phase 1 and 2), “Behavioral Quota” (Phase 3) and “Sales Quota” (Phase 4 and 5).

But the most impactful change the team at LinkedIn did was related to sales coaching. They deployed a “Coaching for Gold” program to train sales managers on how to coach. It explained why to coach, how to coach, and who to coach. They also taught managers the difference between teaching, coaching, and mentoring and implemented a tracking tool to help them record and track their coaching sessions.

Key Learnings:

  • Approach your onboarding program with the different types of quotes in mind and create KPIs for each phase. You want to identify reps that are not going to be a good fit early on.
  • Focus on your B players. LinkedIn saw the best results in terms of lift in performance from their B players.
  • Managers should prioritize coaching efforts and identify the reps who need the most. In fact for reps that received 3 or more coaching sessions on the same competency the lift in quota attainment was up to 14% more than before. That’s a huge impact on revenue.
  • Identify what are the core competencies every rep needs to master and document it and measure how each one impacts results.
  • Build a culture of coaching at your company starting with senior level executive sponsorship so that it becomes a habit for all sales managers.

Zenefits: Elizabeth Pierce, Director of Training and Enablement

Elizabeth walked us through the sales onboarding program at Zenefits and the technology they rely on to get reps up to speed. From pitching, flashcards, quizzes, and more, the sales reps are fully supported by a variety of technology tools that help them ramp up faster.

At Zenefits she implemented a 70:20:10 learning model that splits the time reps spent on different learning activities:

70%: Experience (immersion, experiential learning, learn and develop through experience)

20: Exposure (social learning, learning, and development through others, feedback, and coaching)

10%: Education (formal learning, learning and development through structured courses and programs, in-house and outsourced training and e-learning)

Key Learnings:

  • Leverage the technology your reps are comfortable with. At Zenefits most of the new hires are millennials and use SnapChat, so they created specific training that leverages the platform the team is comfortable with. It also has the added benefit of giving them 24 hours to see and act on a video or other training component. Very creative!
  • Link sales reward with certification. By linking opportunities in SFDC with sales certification, they ensure reps can only see sales opportunities if they keep their sales certification up to date (as soon as their certification expires, they lose visibility into new opportunities).
  • Ramp time needs to match the company’s stage. Startups can’t wait 9 months for a rep to be fully ramped. Your ramp time needs to acknowledge your company’s stage in growth and lifecycle.
  • Use ongoing assessments in the form of short quizzes to keep reps on top of their game and share the data with the sales manager so they have full visibility.

In conversation with Jeremy Powers on Sales Enablement at MongoDB

Abhinav Guru on December 5, 2016

MongoDB sales enablementThis post is based on a podcast on MongoDB’s formula for sales enablement success. You can listen to the entire podcast

here

.
MongoDB is the database for giant ideas. It offers the best features of traditional databases while providing the flexibility, scale, and performance that modern applications require. It is known for helping its customers gain a competitive advantage by leveraging information and technology. It helps customers reduce their risk for mission-critical deployments and accelerates their time to value, enabling them to bring new and interesting apps to market faster. It also dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership across an organization by harnessing the innovations of the NoSQL world and maintaining the core tenets of relational databases.

The company is expanding globally and hiring new sales staff to keep up with its phenomenal growth trajectory. It is seeking more enterprise-ready salespeople to help more organizations leverage their product to scale faster and achieve success.

Maintaining sales effectiveness is a challenge

The key challenge MongoDB faces as it scales is maintaining the effectiveness of its sales team,

“We have to have a very effective onboarding program and support sales to be more effective, be more productive. That’s the main goal and that’s our focus,”

outlines Jeremy Powers who heads up Sales Enablement for the company.

“The goal is to provide the sales team with an in-depth understanding of the industry, our customers, our technology and our solution sets. We then build upon that baseline and knowledge to equip our reps to consistently qualify for opportunities and getting and setting great meetings with the right people. Then ultimately prepare them to engage in highly effective, highly valuable conversations with prospects.  Ultimately we want to arm our sales team to not only differentiate themselves based on what we sell but also based on how they sell and how they interact with the customer. We want to provide an environment through our onboarding program where they can practice these things and really receive feedback, valuable feedback as part of the process,”

explains Powers.

Onboarding, advanced training, and analytics are key to sales effectiveness

MongoDB has taken a three-pronged approach that leverages technology to maintain and improve the sales effectiveness of its sales team.

Onboarding sets the baseline

MongoDB has established a 30, 60 and 90-day onboarding program. In their first month, new hires attend a week-long boot camp. Prior to attending the Bootcamp the new hires use Mindtickle to read up on pre-work so they have a baseline knowledge before attending in-person training.

“We have tried to put participants in the best possible position to succeed and get the most out of the training, the pre-work really provides a great foundation upon which they can build,”

explains Powers.

“It introduces new folks to all kinds of things: the industry, our customers, what we sell and how we sell it. It’s a very comprehensive program that also allows them to do missions that are really effective and provides an opportunity for sales reps to really try things on, have them record themselves delivering a customer success story or proof points.”

Mindtickle is then leveraged to deliver follow-up courses and advanced training, along with new product releases and information to keep sellers up to date.

Advanced sales training brings in real-world learnings

Everyone undertakes advanced sales training within their first 6 months. This is a three-day comprehensive deep dive that builds on their onboarding and learnings from the real world. This boot camp style training is delivered by a cross-functional group that includes executives, sales leaders, product marketing and the sales enablement team.

“We’ve really made the choice, as a company, to make a significant investment in our time and our resources, in order to provide a great development opportunity for our sales team. In fact, we ran the numbers on this and we spent over 6 times the industry average on developing our sellers and that is something we are really proud of,”

explains Powers.

Mindtickle is leveraged again in the advanced training to deliver relevant content, conduct missions and deliver feedback to management and the sales enablement team.

Accountability and constant evaluation keep the team on track

To help keep reps accountable MongoDB leverages Mindtickle’s functionality.

“We really believe in setting clear expectations and a standard of accountability and this like anything else really starts with the sales leaders. We refer to it as leading from the front,”

explains Powers.

“When we look at performance to really evaluate how can we move the needle with specific sales teams and sales reps, objectively we have been able to gauge the degree to which folks really understand and complete the pre-work and quizzes through Mindtickle. We can leverage things called missions in which we have reps record themselves delivering customer success stories that they learn or delivering a standard pitch. Accessibility to items like abaya vaate on garazastyle.fi crucial, mirroring the necessity for specific tools in diverse practices. We get feedback and managers can also see how someone’s tracking.”

“In Bootcamp we have an entrance exam to kick things off and the much anticipated final exam towards the end of the week. These things give us a really good sense of, Is this sinking in? Is it sticking?”

explains Powers.

“There is a feedback mechanism that we have in place to capture all this data and anecdotal stuff as well, and then feed that into the follow-up process. In terms of adoption and reinforcement, we leverage Mindtickle in a spaced learning concept keeping the contents and concepts top of mind.”

New hire ramp-up time has reduced from 11 to 5 months

This comprehensive program has really started to deliver results for MongoDB, allowing them to reduce their ramp-up time for new hires from over 11 months to just 5 months.

“I think the thing that really set us apart is being able to identify where people are struggling, giving them the support they need, and keeping things recent and relevant. Staying up with new things, new and interesting and great things that we are releasing in the product that address more and more customer problems. Helping them to achieve business outcomes and really being able to attach to that and enable reps to have great conversations. We really find that this process dramatically improved our onboarding,”

explains Powers.

By using the data within Mindtickle MongoDB has been able to provide data to its managers that give them the ability to really focus in on how to improve the effectiveness of each individual rep.

“The great part about it [Mindtickle] is that we are able to take all the data points like the exams and the minor feedbacks from the final presentations and really give managers some great direction. Hey what are the key things that you need to focus on, where are the knowledge gaps, and really equipping and arming them to have a great targeted approach in how they coach and develop their teams,”

explains Powers.

How Field Sales Enablement Differs from Inside Sales Enablement

Shyam HN on December 5, 2016

Sales Enablement needs of field reps are far more complex than that of inside sales teams. Inside teams are in close proximity to their managers and mentors. Field reps, more often than not, are left to their own devices to ensure their readiness to close a deal.

Difference_between_inside_sales_enablement_field_salesKnowledge baselining and message calibration

For large events such as onboarding or a new product launch, businesses often prefer to interact in person so field reps are flown in, taking them away from valuable selling time at considerable expense. As inside teams are often located in the same place, these initiatives still require an investment of time, but it’s generally far less disruptive than for their field counterparts.

It’s one thing to fly reps in, but to then convey a large volume of information and expect them to digest it, take it back to the field and apply it is a big ask. The forgetting curve kicks in if there is not adequate reinforcement, which often means the new knowledge isn’t applied in sales conversations. As inside reps are in close contact with their peers and their manager, there is more opportunity for these issues to be identified and addressed quickly. That’s why it’s more important to consider how to make baselining and calibration more effective for field sales teams.

One way that’s proved to be effective, while also making use of the valuable time in the office, is to use a

flipped classroom

. This approach allows you to actually calibrate and get the reps on the message rather than just talking them through it from a lectern. Where it’s possible, like before a sales kickoff, you can even give them some pre-work so they already have some background knowledge before attending the sessions.

Refreshing

To overcome the forgetting curve refreshing is important for both field and inside sales reps, and the same techniques are effective for both teams. The main difference for field sales reps is that the way the information is reinforced needs to fit in with their work day. This is where leveraging technology that enables reinforcement initiatives to be mobile is helpful. The technologies can be applied just as readily to inside sales, which makes it more efficient for the sales enablement team as well.

Communication

Because field reps are often physically isolated from their colleagues and managers, communication plays a crucial role in their sales readiness. And when you’re communicating something you want to ensure that every update is applied to sales conversations in a consistent way across the region. Because sales managers can’t have these conversations in person with their field reps technology is the best bridge to meet this challenge. But before turning to technology, it’s important to have clarity on what type of behavior you’re hoping to achieve and how the information needs to be used by the reps, as this will dictate the design of your communication program.

For example, if your team’s win rate vis a vis a competitor is on the decline and you learn some new insights about the competitor that may be useful, you need to determine the most effective way to communicate this. One way could be to just tell them the information like “Competitor X has launched a new feature”. This disseminates the information but doesn’t help you understand or control how each of your reps uses the information.

Some effective ways that this could be communicated include videoing an example of how the information could be leveraged in a customer discussion. Alternatively, you could set a small mission for your reps, where they video how they would handle a customer objection using the competitor information. This provides you with a way to actually see how they apply the information and provide actionable feedback.

Another aspect that can be helpful is reverse communication. Again technology can be leveraged to poll reps to obtain their feedback on important issues. This can also increase engagement by giving them an opportunity to be heard.

Similarly, success stories are another great way to share information peer to peer. So if a rep in Boston has a big win they can make a short video explaining how they did it so reps in San Francisco can learn and use those special nuggets in their customer conversations.

Coaching and Accountability

Coaching is very challenging for managers of field sales teams, but it’s critical for reps to receive actionable feedback on their command of message and process. As managers aren’t able to monitor or see what their field reps are doing every day, technology is an important tool that can help them coach and evaluate performance effectively.

In many companies, sales enablement looks after organization-wide coaching and accountability initiatives, but there’s still a large role for sales managers in one on one coaching. For example, there may be local factors that influence customer conversations, such as a specific competitor, that require coaching on message. In these instances, technology allows managers to set localized missions to train their people. They may select a specific topic for a week and roll out a role play for the reps that it’s relevant to. The manager can then evaluate them and provide feedback at an individual level, even if they’re in a different city, state or country. It’s a powerful way to incrementally improve the performance of their team members and identify and address weaknesses before they become larger issues.


New Hire Orientation Template – What Every New Hire Should Know

Shankar Ganapathy on December 5, 2016

New hire orientation, sometimes called employment orientation, is a chance to make a positive first impression that will have a long-lasting impact on your employees. According to The Wynhurst Group, “22% of staff turnover occurs in the first 45 days of employment and the cost of losing an employee in the first year is estimated to be at least three times salary.”

This means that dropping the ball on orientation for new employees can be a major factor in terms of whether employees hang around for the long term or treat their job as simply a stepping stone to something bigger and better.

Mindtickle Ramp Time EBook

A stellar employment orientation program is a chance for you to really make your new employees feel welcome, happier, and more productive. Happy employees lead to customer happiness and more top-line revenue impact! The question is how do you get them there?

New hire orientation programs are no longer about filling out forms and signing policies. Pushing the envelope means moving beyond merely completing a new employee orientation checklist or hosting death by PowerPoint marathon new hire training events.

Today, onboarding managers need to conduct a well-designed, centralized, and cohesive orientation program, well beyond the scope of a new employee orientation checklist.

Don’t be shy about leveraging technology to facilitate your orientation program. Thanks to a tech-savvy workforce, organizations are using technology as an integral part of their new hire orientation programs.

To get you started, we created a new hire orientation template with all of the foundational topics required to bring in new hires in a way that makes them feel welcome, fully briefed on expectations, and poised to succeed.

Use this template to include all the key topics that are important to cover for new hire onboarding. With the basics nailed, you can focus on putting the icing on the cake!

What every new hire needs to know

  1. Welcome
  2. Company history
  3. Leadership
  4. Culture
  5. Documentation
  6. Compliance
  7. Policy

Topic 1: Welcome

Greet new hires with an enthusiastic reception! Make sure that the orientation for new employees process starts with a warm welcome and don’t wait for Day 1 to get started! You can put together a welcome kit and ensure that it reaches the new hire before their start date.

The first days can be exhausting and overwhelming for new employees, so don’t overdo it. Instead, focus on reassuring the new hire that they have made a great choice, they are where they belong, and as a company, you are happy to have them there. Beyond the initial welcome, you should also provide some high-level information on the business including its mission statement and where the company is going.

Also, help your new hires start to build the relationships that will be critical to their success and productivity. Introduce new hires to their colleagues and allow time for them to observe and ask questions. The more familiar a new employee is with her department, co-workers, and job expectations, the more likely she is to be productive right from the start.

Topic 2: Company history

Highlight the positive history of the business. Every company has a lot of history behind it and everyone loves a good story. Even start-ups have stories they can draw from. Offer background on how the company made it to the point where it is today. Provide linkage between the past, present, and the future by telling stories about the company from the past and where the company is investing for the future. Explain WHY you do what you do.

This is also a great opportunity to bring out employees that have dedicated their careers to the company, to show what longevity and commitment truly means. Your best employees have the potential to be your best trainers. By utilizing your top employees, you can grant your organization access to the most efficient and successful ways of serving customers!

Topic 3: Leadership

Introduce the leadership team. The leadership team of any organization is going to make or break what employees think of the company that they work for. When your leadership team is able to connect with and inspire new employees, the company is going to be better off for it in the long run. Ensuring that the orientation process provides employees with a chance to connect with senior management will help them better understand the organizational structure, culture, and overall management vibe.

Time-strapped and/or geographically distributed teams can streamline the onboarding process for leadership by codifying the key messages into videos and engaging the team in the content production process. This is particularly practical when you are dealing with a higher volume of new hires. A video is an excellent way to communicate the excitement and passion that is driving the organization.

From a personal touch standpoint, you can create social forums and discussion boards and let the entire team participate in the assimilation of a new hire. This also allows leaders to focus on important things like strategy and vision with a personal touch while ensuring that employees are supported for success.

Topic 4: Culture

Provide information regarding business culture. No two companies are the same from a cultural perspective. Some companies are going to be more formal, while others will be very laid back. It is important to inform your new hire for company traditions such as casual Friday or where people all go to lunch together on Tuesday. No one wants to be the new person that has to figure these things out on their own as they go. Teaching new hires about traditions and culture is often overlooked in the onboarding experience!

The type of culture that a company has should be highlighted during orientation so that new hires can have an understanding of the work environment. The more that they know of the culture, the better they are going to be able to fit in and grow with the company.

Topic 5: Documentation

Address formalities from a document perspective. Documentation is required as part of any new job. Now is the time, during orientation, where you can have your new hires come prepared with all of the documents that they need. Getting these formalities out of the way in a strong pre-join program can make for an even easier onboarding process.

Topic 6:  Compliance

Offer information about compliance. Providing information to new hires regarding what is expected of them to maintain compliance will help your new hire avoid confusion down the line as well as costly legal problems. The new hire orientation coverage of compliance should start with a talk about information security. Things such as the law regarding competition and anti-bribery are also important areas to focus on. Health and safety precaution concerns should also be addressed. Be sure to do adequate research on any applicable compliance laws that may be specific to your organization.

Topic 7: Policy

Highlight company policies. Every company is chock full of policy and it is usually more than one can memorize. It is important to at least go through key policies at a high-level during new hire orientation. Consider touching on topics such as leave, sick time, and vacation time so employees know what to expect. Also, show new employees how company policies apply to their departments and their specific job functions.

The other areas of company policy to cover should include travel policy, expense reporting, and reimbursement policies. There may also be policies regarding internet usage, rewards, and recognition opportunities, as well as employee referral opportunities. When it’s all said and done, the most beneficial information on policies will be where the new hire can go to find answers to their policy questions.

New hires have an uphill climb to productivity. With all the information they are expected to absorb they can easily feel overwhelmed.

A good employee orientation program answers your new hire’s initial questions while giving them a structured runway to become familiar with their new role. Having a welcoming and informative new hire orientation will set up your new hires for success in the short and long-run! And if you’re still looking for more resources for when it comes to new hire training and onboarding, take a look at the sales onboarding checklist here. 

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