SellingPower.com has released their monthly sales management newsletter which is usually filled with insightful articles. How Long Are Ya€™ Gonna€™ Be New Here? is a client study on one company’s efforts to shorten their sales ramp time.
One of the universal problems all sales managers face is getting new hires up to speed quickly. It€™s simple math: the longer it takes for a rep to learn the €œins and outs€ of your company, your product, and your sales process, the longer it will take him to stop dragging down the average performance of your sales team and start producing meaningful results.
Another universal problem is sales managers hiring salespeople with whom they are unfamiliar. A new salesperson from outside of the company brings a unique skill set, motivation pattern and natural aptitude. The fastest method for learning these traits is to assess sales candidates before you hire them. Not only do you get an objective view of their abilities, you have the basis for a sales development plan to expedite their on-ramping time frame.
In regards to this article, the sales manager took the correct steps to accelerate the on-ramping of new sales hires:
First, he formalized his sales process. Aethon, like many companies, had a €œgut-feel, informal process€ that always worked for them, but it wasn€™t formalized anywhere, says Saman Haqqi, VP Marketing for Landslide, the company that worked with Aethon on this project. If you want new hires to catch on quickly, they need documentation showing each step of the sales process.
This step is often overlooked. Unfortunately, “gut-feel, informal process” describes many of the sales processes we encounter when first working with our clients. A sales process should not be cast in stone since each salesperson has his or her own style. But the absence of any sales process leads to confusion about where prospects are in the sales cycle. This confusion leads to unreliable forecasts. Unreliable forecasts lead to revenue surprises (usually of the negative variety).