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hi my name is couch one and welcome to selling palette TV today we have the pleasure of meeting with Nick Kane he is managing partner with the Janik performance group welcome Nick Thank You Gerhart so let's talk about onboarding salespeople I'm not very passionate about that it's a very important subject what are the challenges that sales organizations experience when it comes to onboarding yeah onboarding is a is one of those topics that's a little tricky and certainly is something that is very specific to each organization we actually recently conducted a survey and and read some research and partnership with selling power and found some interesting data on onboarding some some of the more interesting facts that came out of the survey results was as a in total sales organizations really lack three key areas that ultimately helped them put together an effective onboarding program number one there's a lack of formality to the onboarding program right it's just sort of their winging it or not really putting a lot of structure in terms of their onboarding programs number two was the type of training that's being delivered right and we could talk about that a little bit more but an overemphasis on certain types of training and a lack of emphasis on other type of training and then lastly was a key component how does coaching from the management team ultimately help support new hires that are being brought on and those are very very important components do you suggest that sales organizations develop a process to integrate those three yeah absolutely yeah I think what we saw is most organizations that have formality to their onboarding process tend to ramp up their sales professionals far faster than those that are that are more informal I'll give you an example what we saw for organizations that reported that they had formality to their onboarding process at six months on the job 60% of their new hires were at full performance for those that were informal it was less than 40 percent so it is a substantial difference right there needs to be formality to the onboarding process the challenge is sales leaders what we saw is they tend to have a strong focus and an overemphasis on hiring experienced sales professionals and let them lead let them mentor and coach and they don't really put any formality to the training program so when you what do you mean by formality what are some of the elements of formality there's there's a consistent approach there's a consistent process right there's a schedule there are there's a variety of topics most organizations what we saw there were more informal primarily focused on product training and systems training they lacked real selling skills training because again they were focused on let's hire experienced salespeople they can help support mentoring new hires and there was an over-reliance on that type of on that type of hire but the challenge with that as you know is the sales landscape has changed right right over the last 10 or 15 years just because you were good at sales 20 years ago let's say or 15 years ago doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be good today right so it is important that organizations consider not only the formality in terms of structure but also what topics are they actually covering in the sales training so what what is your recommendation when your sales organization you want to improve the onboarding process what obstacles do you need to be prepared for and how can you overcome those obstacles I think number one consider how much time that you're lending to the onboarding process it shouldn't be a one or two day session I mean it should be something that it continues for a longer period of time again that could vary based on the organization and how intricate or technical the sale is so that's one component is consider and analyze the time second is how can you involve the managers in that process right well are they effective coaches do they have the time to coach do they have the tools to coach I think those that's another key area and then lastly there should be a strong emphasis and focus on what are the topics that are included in your training program it can't just be product training yes that's important that's critical you need to know those those key areas but you have to consider selling skills and making sure that you have a consistent methodology that all salespeople adhere to within the organization do you have any recommendations for sales managers how much time should they spend with the salesperson while they're being on board that's a great question that's another key finding that came out of the the research that we noticed and a pretty big discrepancy so when we conducted this research we not only took the viewpoint of sales leadership but we also considered frontline sellers as well to gain their perspective there was a huge discrepancy in terms of from a coaching perspective how much time a manager felt they were spending coaching and how much time a sales rep felt they were being coached as an example sales managers felt the 50% of the managers that we interviewed felt that they were coaching at least 3 hours of more per week compared that to 15% of the sellers thought they were being coached 3 times or more per week or 3 hours per more 4 weeks so I think the the first definition is the first key point is what is your definition of coaching make sure that's embedded in the culture make sure the organization is adhering to that and make sure that you're giving managers an opportunity to have the time to be able to coach in the numbers that you can share when sales managers act as coaches doing the onboarding prompt process how does that impact the new salesperson in terms of performance yeah that there was double-digit improvement right that we saw with that so if a manager is heavily involved and they're actually coaching the sales reps as part of the onboarding process again ramp up time was far faster speed to productivity was far faster so it made a big difference right so how can anyone get their hands under survey it's gonna be out soon actually we're putting the finishing touches on it now and it should be published and available to the public in the next 30 days or so so we are going to put a little new L at the end of the video that you can click on and get your survey thank you and that sounds great thank you good heart you [Music]