If there is one inalienable truth to businesses — all businesses — it’s that growth depends on sales. You could have the most seemingly useless product imaginable, but if you put that product or solution in the hands of a well-trained, well-versed, and well-incentivized sales team, your business will grow.
On the other hand, if you have an outstanding product but an unproductive sales team that doesn't understand your market and can't appeal to your buyers, the business will flounder. Thus, one ongoing goal for every company should be to consistently train and educate their sales team to help drive business growth.
What to Consider When Onboarding New Sales Development Representatives
A solid in-house sales team requires more than one Sales Development Representative (SDR), and it needs them to be effectively trained. Your goal as a business leader should be to efficiently onboard them to start generating positive cash flow shortly after hire.
To do this, businesses must create a solid timeline. Consider how long it will take to transition a new hire into selling at a desirable capacity? A good rule of thumb is to anticipate one full sales cycle plus 60 to 90 days of sales training before a new hire can reach their peak productivity. But what if we said that there is a way to ramp up your new hires' selling ability so that they could bring in qualified leads and your businesses can generate revenue faster and without interruption?
This last part, no drawbacks, is the key. Trying to push new sales hires too quickly can cause frustration and backfire with high turnovers, leading to higher expenses and lower profitability. The key here is finding a balance of time, morale, and skills learned.
The Four Effective Ways to More Quickly Ramp Up Your SDR Team
You may be tempted to simply forgo the shortcut and continue with your current extended training period. After all, if what you have works, why rock the boat? The answer is for sales. When you optimize this process, you generate revenue, and revenue drives business growth. And once you have the ramp-up process down, you can implement it for every new hiring season or session; soon, the time and effort will offer noticeable, exponential returns.
Get started now by implementing these four critical milestones into your onboarding training sessions:
1. Show What "Good" Looks Like
The most critical writing advice is to ‘show, don't tell’ the audience. This means communicators should use sensory details and actions rather than rely on rote exposition to create a more immersive, engaging experience. Follow this same advice when crafting onboarding materials.
Use activity data from your successful sales representatives to detail the exact benchmarks you want out of new hires. Internally analyze the amount of time your top performers spend on pursuing a specific lead or responding to emails. Compare these numbers to your poorest performers to create solid benchmarks you want and expect from new hires.
Most importantly, don't simply list out tasks you want from new hires. Create a detailed daily schedule and go through that schedule step-by-step, showcasing exactly what you expect from new hires. Eventually, reliable sales professionals can have more leeway.
2. Make Structured Learning Easily Accessible
The benchmarks, detailed daily schedules, and other critical components of your sales and business curriculum should be located in an easily accessible place that new hires can readily access and review as needed. Knowledge is power.
3. Always Develop Training Around Metrics
Having benchmarks that new hires can understand and work towards is essential, but focusing on tangible metrics should not begin and end here.
Consider utilizing a cloud-based learning program that will track what training materials sales reps are using and when and how often they are utilizing them. Compare these metrics with how well various new hires are doing to improve and adapt future curricula for even faster onboarding. These metrics can also help you identify hires who are unlikely to work out before investing significant resources.
4. Offer Call & Contact Coaching
At the end of the day, it is important to remember that you will not have perfect sales professionals at the end of 30, 60, or 90 days because learning is a continual process. It takes years for sales professionals to truly hone their craft. But you can give your new hires the tools they need to succeed, such as ongoing coaching.
There are two easy and effective ways to provide direct coaching. First, if you have SDRs making sales calls, ensure each call is recorded and schedule regular reviews of those calls with each sales personnel individually.
Review an established SDR's sales calls as a comparison to show (not tell) what you're looking for. Established reps go with new hires for training and reviews when it comes to in-person sales.
Partner With Purple Sales
Building an in-house SDR Team is difficult, time-consuming, and costly. Consider outsourcing your SDR team to Purple Sales. Our turnkey SDR Team solution ranges from 2 to 20 SDRs supported by a fully operational support team using a proven outbound sales methodology, to constantly grow your pipeline value.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you identify gaps in your inside sales process and get you the tools you need to ramp up your business growth.
