We all know coaching is an important part of a sales manager’s role, and as a sales enablement leader, you enable them to do it more effectively. However, traditionally sales coaching more often than not ends up being a one-size-fits-all pep talk focusing on what formula worked for the manager when they were a sales rep. But to help a new sales hire the focus of coaching actually needs to be on their needs.
Using a data-driven approach to coaching, rather than relying solely on intuition, can provide your sales managers with direction on what skill gaps each individual rep need to be coached on. You can even leverage technology to make the coaching process more efficient – through video recordings and online feedback forms for example.
This can have the additional benefit of making coaching a regular and planned activity that is in the calendar without the need to sync schedules or travel in the case of distributed teams. By implementing a structured approach, your sales manager can be more effective at coaching and spend less time doing it, leaving them with more time driving sales.
When creating an effective coaching plan for your new sales reps, you need to look at it in the context of the entire onboarding process. I recommend introducing coaching after you have trained and tested the knowledge of your new hire. Sequencing it in this order has several advantages. Firstly, the new hire will get more out of your coaching sessions as they come in prepared with all their baseline knowledge, and you will spend less time explaining the basics of “what to sell” and “how to sell”. Secondly, and more importantly, sales managers can build on the data collected from the first two steps in the process to put together a customized coaching plan that will help address the specific areas that require development and reinforcement.
To coach or to give feedback
Before I get into the details of creating a structured coaching plan, it’s important to clarify exactly what coaching is. Many managers confuse coaching with giving feedback, but in reality, they are two very different things. Feedback is where a manager tells a rep what they think about their performance and what they could do differently. It’s not really about the rep at all, but rather about the sales manager’s perspective on their performance. On the other hand, coaching is all about the sales rep; what would address their gaps, how they can perform better, and strengthen their skills. Coaching is a structured and intentional process to guide your new sales rep to be sales ready so they can achieve their maximum potential. Coaching a new sales rep is a critical step in onboarding them, and when provided in a structured manner, it can accelerate the onboarding ramp significantly. Tactical feedback can then be given once they’re out in the field. For this reason, it’s important that sales managers are able to set aside time for coaching, as Jeff Hoffman correctly states:
Identifying skill gaps
Typically, after the training and certification stages of onboarding have been completed, the sales reps should understand “What to Sell” by this stage, but may be struggling with aspects of the “How to Sell”. Perhaps they need more work articulating the value proposition of the company’s offering or they may be struggling with objection handling or even competitive positioning. But each new hire may have a different Achilles heel and this is where technology can really help you. If you could record and file away voice-over presentations or videos of the reps practicing their pitches, this would be a goldmine of insights for the sales manager, helping them identify where the exact skill gaps are – for each individual.
Creating a structured sales coaching plan
Once you know what needs to be coached, you can then help the sales manager create a structured plan, with tasks and activities that have been designed to reinforce their training. This stage of the onboarding process can be completed over 4 to 6 weeks; 3 to 4 weeks of intense coaching, followed by 1 to 2 weeks of on-the-job coaching. An integral part of the process is to complement the coaching by having the newbie shadow one of your A players. Where possible, the new hire can shadow someone when they are demonstrating the specific skill sets that are being coached. This will give them the opportunity to see how it’s done in practice as
No two coaching plans will be the same. Even if two reps have passed their sales certification process they may still have different areas of weakness so their coaching plan will be different, and customized to address their individual skills and needs. However, there are four main areas where coaching is likely to be required when onboarding a sales rep:
Articulating the product value proposition
Objection handling
Creating the customer pitch deck
Following the sales process
These areas cannot be taught solely through an online training platform, they require coaching and face-to-face time to make sure they are perfected. But before the sales manager does that, you can assign the rep different tasks or activities to complete that meet these objectives and can then be used as part of the coaching process.
For example, if they need to improve how they articulate the value proposition, then they can do some more simulation missions that include practicing, videoing themselves, and then watching back with their sales manager. The coaching can occur as they play it back together and identify areas where they can improve their articulation of the value proposition. If following the sales process is an issue, then practicing with dummy leads will help identify where behavior needs to be corrected.
To make this job easier for you, I suggest putting together some pre-designed exercises that cover each of these areas. You can then select and assign the ones that are to be included in the coaching plan for each individual rep.
Once each of the assigned tasks has been completed the sales rep should be ready for face-to-face coaching. The sales manager can use these recorded tasks and data from the assignments to give the rep structured coaching where they need it the most.
Combine this coaching with a shadowing program, where the newbies can watch your A players in action and see a realistic view of how the coached techniques are applied out in the field. This integrated approach to coaching can be very powerful and will have your newbies ready to get out there and sell quicker.
Today’s businesses – big and small – are under tremendous pressure to deliver profitable growth year after year. Equity markets, private investors, competition – you name it. Add to this, the uncertain elements of risk. It is pretty tough out there for most businesses – global and local.
To address these challenges with confidence, businesses need the dependable lever of high-performing engaged employees. Ironically, this throws up another business challenge, of Managing Talent. A shrinking workforce because of aging employees is further complicating this matter. Never before in business, has it been so important to attract, retain and grow talent, as today – and become an Employer of Choice. Therefore, the increasing importance of new employee orientation.
New Employee Orientation isn’t just an HR initiative, as most businesses think, but a unique opportunity to catapult your new employees into a high-performance orbit in the pursuit of business objectives. World-Class companies and organizations understand the link between New Employee Orientation and Business Execution. The annual “The Great Place to Work” list featuring the World’s top blue-chip companies is a standing testimony to this. These companies have also created stakeholder value consistently over the years, emerging as corporate leaders in their respective industry sectors and beyond. Businesses, across the board, have this incredible opportunity to leverage New Employee Orientation to drive good competitive business focused on profitable growth, employer of choice, risk management.
1. Profitable growth
Businesses exist to maximize profits – an objective they need to pursue in a sensitive, sustainable and relentless manner, in this fast-changing milieu. Simply put, businesses have to grow revenues and minimize costs. New Employee Orientation has a critical role to play in impacting each of these positively, by driving,
Time to productivity of new hires
Employee retention and addressing employee turnover
Employee engagement
Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company and a global thought leader in business research, has been at the forefront of exhaustive cutting-edge business research in the area of New Employee Orientation. Its numerous studies on Onboarding, over the years, have time and again, established how businesses have achieved improved productivity, employee retention, and engagement, through New Employee Orientation. The studies have established that through new hire onboarding, organizations can focus on their biggest asset, their employees because the experience of new hires has a direct impact on profitability.
In the book “The First 90 Days” Michael Watkins puts the break-even point of new hires at 6.2 months, highlighting it remarkably through this graphic.
As can be seen from the graphic, new hires consume value for the first three months and then begin contributing. New Employee Orientation can improve the chances of achieving this break-even on time and at times, even early. Any slippage in onboarding new hires would not only add to direct and indirect costs, it would also result in loss of revenues, especially in the case of top management executives and business facing employees.
Employees and new hires in an organization, given their bearing on revenues and expenses, can be broadly classified into the following:
a) Top management – Employees at a senior level often in leadership roles are the most expensive assets for an organization, but they can be the most productive of the new hires as they will be the one to guide their team to perform up to potential and contribute to the company’s growth. Personalized new employee orientation for leaders that help them is indispensable to get them contributing in a meaningful productive way. They:
Align with the company’s overall business strategy,
Understand short and medium term business imperatives,
Experience the company culture, and
Bond with their team
b) Employees on the Business Front – New hires who are in the marketing and sales departments contribute to the revenue and profits of organizations directly. New Employee Orientation can establish and communicate a ‘line of sight’ from the new hire’s performance to the company’s goal. This can help them see and understand how quickly their productive contribution can benefit the organization, their performance and ultimately their professional careers.
c) Business Support Functions like Human Resources, Accounts – While new hires in these departments do not impact company revenues directly, it is essential that they get productive at the earliest to optimize on costs. New Employee Orientation can help engage and motivate these new hires to become productive sooner.
In one of its studies, Aberdeen interviewed 466 companies that were running some form of new employee orientation. It was found that the top 100 of these companies reported a 24% year-over-year decrease in time to productivity for new employees and 12% year-over-year decrease in cost per employee for onboarding. Another example is to look at the talent management practices of IT and ITES outsourcing companies that have been recruiting in large numbers over the last few years. All the top tier IT outsourcing companies have institutionalized new employee orientation to buttress their off-shoring business strategy that thrives on “cost arbitrage” and “value creation”.
The present-day economy continues to make it expensive and challenging to find, hire and retain talent. The cost and time involved in the recruitment process make employee retention a priority for all business. Retention of employees is critical because hiring employees and training them to contribute directly to business costs. Added is the fact that a new employee makes a decision to stay with the company within the first six months. So, in the initial onboarding phase, the employer is vulnerable with respect to the new employee. Therefore, the necessity of new employee orientation.
Employee turnover is not always about direct costs. It consumes expensive management bandwidth, dampens employee morale and not to mention the loss in revenue opportunities. Worse still, if the leaving employee joins the competition, it increases the possibility of loss in market share. So, new employee orientation assumes significance when onboarding new hires.
An Aberdeen Survey based on the analysis of about 282 organizations, reported that organizations which conducted a new employee orientation program saw a 50 % increase in retention rates. The report also stated that the new employee orientation program was used as a means to reaffirm the new hire’s decision to join the organization and ensure a long-term commitment from the new hire thereby reducing costs of hiring and training. Other than increasing employee retention rates, the study highlighted the opportunity of leveraging new employee orientation to help new employees plan long-term careers with companies. Without a doubt, organizations have experienced higher retention rates and lower turnover costs by having a new employee orientation program.
3 Employee engagement
An exhaustive study by Aberdeen on Employee Engagement pointed out that almost all 466 participating organizations identified New Employee orientation as a means to engage and align employees. The same report states that employee engagement contributes to retention, productivity and most importantly drives customer satisfaction – an important revenue driver. In fact, the top 100 organizations marked engaging employees to drive customer satisfaction as the top objective of their onboarding program, and rightfully so.
Increased customer satisfaction leads to positive word of mouth, loyalty, repeat business, cross-selling opportunities, and high-quality referrals. All these are key revenue opportunities that businesses can capitalize on, by driving employee engagement through new employee orientation.
New employee orientation can drive employee engagement and alignment by focusing on new hire development and performance, taking frequent informal feedbacks, updating them on a company’s vision and encourage leadership where appropriate. New Employee Orientation can work wonders in aligning the new hires to business strategy and execution. Employees who are engaged early, from the word “GO”, are better placed to deliver a quality experience to customers.
2. Employer of choice
The ups and downs of the economy have made, sourcing and retaining good talent, extremely challenging. To counter this, organizations are striving hard to become employers of choice, as part of a business strategy. Therefore, businesses are adopting Talent Management Best Practices with New Employee Orientation being right up there. The reason is simple and straightforward, to make a good solid First Impression. This is also corroborated by the research from Aberdeen that suggests that New Employee orientation can help make that first good impression, which in turn positions the company as an employer of choice.
New employee orientation is a good “first” opportunity to introduce company culture and tradition. Culture and traditions are unique to an organization and give it the advantage which takes them towards successful business outcomes. Onboarding program can help introduce this culture to the new hires at the earliest. The sooner the new hires understand the culture of the organization, the more engaged and aligned they are, to perform. New employee orientation is also an opportunity for employers to demonstrate respect, reward, and responsibility, such that they are able to retain the new hires forever.
It is really interesting to note how Facebook and Google – Best companies to work for in 2013 – communicate their engineering and people culture through New Employee Orientation.
All new engineers – fresh or laterals – at Facebook undergo the Engineering Bootcamp during new employee orientation. This Bootcamp is intricately linked to Facebook’s Scale strategy. Facebook uses the ratio of users to engineers metric, to scale and grow. Through the Engineering Bootcamp, Facebook not only onboard engineers to push code onto the live site, but also germinates an engineering culture of fearlessly fixing bugs and not leaving it to code another day.
The new hires at Google are called Nooglers, no marks for guessing why. Through this, Google propagates its culture to new hires, helps new hires make connections in their workplace and increase their motivation.
Great workplaces are responsible towards their employees. They respect, reward and compensate the employees well enough to earn their trust and loyalty creating a brand name for their company in the eyes of the outsider. Great workplaces are employee focused and judiciously use the new employee orientation to also share the company’s immediate goals with the new hires. They understand that an aligned, engaged employee who trusts the leaders of the company will make extraordinary contributions to the success of the business.
3. Risk management
Remember Enron and Arthur Andersen. And more recently, Lehman. The risk is truly real – whether it is market, regulatory, reputational and operational. New Employee Orientation is a non-negotiable opportunity to sensitize the new hires on the various aspects of risk, whether it is with respect to the organization or the industry sector it operates in. Organizations would do well to customize the New Employee Orientation program with respect to risk sensitization, depending on the criticality of the position of the new hires. Senior management onboarding can definitely feature an exclusive track on risk management.
New employee orientation, so what’s next?
Challenges of the Economy, the positive impact new hires can have on business and many other business imperatives, are putting increasing pressure on organizations to include New Hire Onboarding in their business strategy and with good reason. Business profitability, typical HR challenges like Employee Engagement and also risk management, new employee orientation programs can address it all.
Only having a new employee orientation is not enough. As the wants and needs of each organization are different, the approach to new employee orientation should also correspond accordingly. Organizations have to determine the best practices for their new employee orientation and implement them in the pursuit of their business objectives. Many approaches to new employee orientation are possible:
Formal and informal
Full and partial Automation
Mentoring
and more currently, Enterprise GamificatioN
Onboarding approaches that drive engagement, alignment, productivity and contribute to company growth, have the highest chance of driving business success. This is where the importance of social HR comes to the fore. Jeanne Meister, best-selling author of “The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today” in her January 2013 Forbes article touted 2013 as the Year of the Social HR, wherein organizations would integrate social technologies in recruiting, developing and engaging employees. Of the five social media trends that Meister writes, will impact HR in 2013, Enterprise Gamification ranks at the top.
The World’s leading knowledge organizations like Deloitte and Capgemini have already taken leadership in employing Enterprise Gamification to drive higher levels of employee engagement. Fresh graduates joining the workforce, the now omnipresence of Gen Y millennials at the workplace and the rise of remote teams, are all contributing to heightened interest in the concept of gamification to drive business execution.
Business, it seems is discovering FUN, all over again. And what better than to begin at from the starting line – New Employee Orientation. Get, set, go!
There are many factors that affect sales target achievement. Unfortunately, many of those are beyond your circle of control such as competitor pricing, state of economy etc. The good news is that predictable sales can be accomplished in any environment by adopting a disciplined approach to sales management.
Most sales organizations do a pretty good job of managing the well-known levers of sales management such as hiring the right talent, actively managing the pipeline and CRM reports, and optimizing OTEs and incentive structures. However, the number of organizations that leverage sales enablement the right way is shockingly low. Mindtickle’s survey of more than 40 tech startups with more than $10M in venture funding revealed that less than 25% of those organizations were even thinking about a systematic approach to sales enablement.
Is sales enablement a nice-to-have, or do you really need it?
Most of those sales leaders claimed that they were too small and tight-knit to formalize the enablement function and that they were (somehow) managing to achieve quarterly targets. But the fact that they may have been overlooking is that it is just a matter of time before the ad-hoc approach will start limiting the growth of these companies. What are the tell-tale signs that you could be in the same boat?
Are you consistently losing deals in the last stage?
Is the sales cycle all over the place?
Do your new sales reps take 6–9 months to start hitting their quotas?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, your sales funnel may need fixing, and it would serve you well to get an expert (aka sales enablement manager) to fix it. That is because most fast-growing sales teams start showing symptoms of a broken process, and it is important to plug these gaps as early as possible.
Here are some common examples of what actually might be going on in the sales process that may lead to the above symptoms:
1. Failure to identify the buyer persona and needs
Simply buying and setting up marketing automation and lead intelligence tools doesn’t help. If there is limited adoption of those tools (as is the case in most fast-growing companies), it is likely that the SDRs are not doing enough digging before and during lead prospecting and qualification. If the sales reps would make it a practice to look up the marketing automation system for what actions did the lead perform on the website, or do some basic research on what kind of type of buyer they are dealing with, they could prioritize their leads and be better prepared to deal with the initial part of the sales process. Unfortunately, most sales reps need some hand-holding and nudging to adopt these practices, and this is one of the low-hanging fruit that data driven sales enablement helps achieve.
2. Lack of readiness to instantly respond to customer needs
Let’s take the example of a common sales situation wherein the prospect raises a query about a product feature, asks for a relevant case study or pops up a question about a competitor’s offering. If the SDRs are not truly “sales ready” i.e. they are not equipped with thorough product knowledge, up-to-date information on features, use cases, and customer stories, they will not only contribute to lengthening the sales process but importantly lose opportunities to communicate the value proposition of their offering. Such instances of sales unpreparedness can result in 30% longer sales cycles.
3. Lack of systematic process and tracking
Every single one of the 40 fast-growing tech companies that we interviewed confessed that they did not have comprehensive tracking of sales onboarding and ongoing training activities. Typically content was stored on the document repository, and they had no clue about what content was being accessed and by whom. In most cases, less than 10% of sales training content was accessed even once by the sales reps. The participation in webinars and classroom sessions was either not tracked at all or recorded manually.
How does sales enablement in your organization stack up?
The following table identifies four stages of sophistication and effectiveness of a sales enablement organization ranging from “Undefined” to “World Class.” Source: demandmetric
What is sales enablement?
According to Aaron Ross, author of the book, Predictable Sales, “Sales Enablement is the process of arming an organization’s sales force and everyone else who is customer facing with access to the right insight, experts, and information at the right time (specific sales step) in the right format in order to increase revenue. It is often used to describe a variety of tools, processes, and methodologies that are applied to enable a sales force, both direct and indirect. The range of sales enablement can span everything it takes for a salesperson to do their job more effectively.”
What are the KRAs of sales enablement?
The top five priorities of the sales enablement function are:
Coordinating with sales leadership to define sales support initiatives
Creating written content that educates sales reps and customers, and helps in taking deals forward
Keeping sales team prepared for customer conversations
Managing the content repository and enabling easy access to them
Providing ad-hoc support for sales reps
Do you now think it is the right time for your organization to invest in sales enablement?
Today’s sales training is rapidly moving away from live on-site seminars and classes. Online sales training eliminates the need to gather your sales team in one place. Training materials can be delivered to your sales reps directly on their computers and mobile devices. If your company is looking at investing in an online sales training platform, here are four things that you should consider.
Does the online sales training support diverse sales training formats?
People learn differently so the training material should be available in a number of different formats.
Online video lectures and narrated slide presentation are great for communicating with your sales reps. Videos can also be used to present sale situation role-plays.
Audio recordings are great for sales reps who want to listen to training while driving their car or doing some other activity that does not demand their complete attention.
Some people want to review and study written material. This printed material can be delivered as a PDF file. This is a great way to distribute review sheets and study guides for any assessments and tests.
Does your sales training platform support different instructional modalities?
Your company may want to offer a variety of training options. It is important that the online sales training platform that you select support these different instructional modalities.
On-demand training is great for on-the-go sales reps. The platform should provide the ability for your reps to download and stream training seminars to their mobile devices.
Live online lectures are a great way to get your team together all at once. Your online platform should support virtual conferences where everyone can watch and participate in the same live lecture. This captures the benefits of attending a class without the need have everyone in the same geographic location.
The platform should also support social learning by having discussion forums, chat capabilities and other ways that your sales reps can connect with each other to discuss what they are learning. This kind of social interaction is essential for online sales training.
Is the sales training platform customizable?
Most online sales training comes with a set of off-the-shelf training modules. These modules are great for the basics, but you will most likely want to be able to add your own content to the learning platform. You may have specific techniques that work well with your market or product specific information that you want to communicate. The learning platform should allow you to easily create and post your own training content.
Does your sales training platform have tracking and metrics?
You want to make sure that your reps are actually using and benefiting from the training program that you put together.
A learning platform should track the progress of each sales rep and record the training that he or she has gone through. It should also be able to assess the rep’s mastery of the content through quizzes, test, and other assessments.
The training platform should integrate with other performance metrics. In this way, you can see if increased training leads to increased performance from your team.
Choosing an online sales training platform is an important decision. These are just a few of the factors that you can look at to guide your choice.
