5 data-driven best practices to boost sales onboarding success · 5 ways to use data to improve...

5 Data-Driven Best Practices to !Boost Sales Onboarding Success

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Introduction  The economic climate remains bright for 2016. Most industries can expect continued growth, according to the International Monetary Fund,1 and sources predict that hiring overall will remain robust. But a talent shortage is all too real for many sectors and job types, and sales professionals specifically continue to be one of the most difficult positions to fill.

 Faster Sales Onboarding Doesn’t Accelerate ROIIf your company is one of the lucky ones to successfully identify and hire top sales candidates, speeding the onboarding process can have a significant impact on your bottom line. With the cost to hire a mid-level employee at 150% of their annual salary and a highly specialized employee at 400% of that figure2, rapid ROI and long-term retention is essential. Studies show that a satisfying onboarding process can

 

 speed ramp-up time by as much as 34%, translating into millions in revenue for many companies.

 Given the benefits of rapid onboarding, sales enablement teams may be tempted to cut corners in a training process that can often take nine months or more. During this period, reps are not fully productive—nor is it always clear whether your new reps will meet their quota. To get reps out in the field selling, companies may elect to rush or skip parts of the onboarding process altogether. Often they provide just a few days of training during which they drown reps in mass quantities of information before unleashing them on customers and prospects.

1Forbes.com, “Global Economic Forecast 2016-2017;” November 2015 2ERE Media, “What Was Management Thinking? The High Cost of Employee Turn-over,” April 2015.

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5 Ways to Use Data to Improve Sales Onboarding Speed & Success

•  Identify baseline skills to plan the most targeted and successful onboarding program

•  Measure proficiency and improvement of the knowledge and skills that matter most in the first 30, 60, or 90 days

•  Correlate productivity and performance with proficiency over time

•  Ensure appropriate coaching support, and

•  Optimize your hiring profile.

 Unfortunately, onboarding shortcuts frequently backfire because reps fail to absorb the necessary information.

 Research shows that people forget nearly 80% of the information they learn within days or weeks. Not surprisingly, Qstream’s data shows that more than one-third of enterprise sales reps are unable to apply the knowledge and skills they need to drive buying decisions.

 The key to rapid—and successful —onboarding is to establish a data-driven process and implement supporting technologies that can both manage and measure onboarding effectiveness. With such an approach, you can use data to:

More than 1/3 of enterprise reps are unable to apply the required knowledge & skills to drive buying decisions. - Qstream Research

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1. Use Data to Identify the Baseline Skills of Your New Recruits  As part of your hiring and recruiting process, you’ve likely already determined the important skills and knowledge your reps must possess to be successful in their new role. Most sales managers rely on anecdotal evidence relayed by the candidate themselves during the interview process, or perhaps on the references provided by former employers and colleagues. But as we know, this approach can be highly subjective.

 The safe bet is to evaluate your new hires’ baseline proficiency in all of these areas at the start of the onboarding process. With this data in hand, you can formulate the best onboarding program to leverage their strengths, while addressing critical skill and knowledge gaps more effectively at new hire boot camp and during their early weeks on the job.

2. Use Data to Identify and Measure Proficiency and Improvement Over Time  Many sales managers wonder how they’ll know when onboarding is successfully “complete.” As we know, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Therefore, you need to first define what onboarding success looks like—and then evaluate reps’ progress every step of the way.

 SiriusDecisions3 recommends using your company’s formal sales methodology as the basis for determining the activities reps should perform (methods) and the results they should achieve (performance)—then continually tracking reps’ progress toward meeting those goals.

3”Sales Onboarding: Measuring its Effectiveness,” SiriusDecisions Research Brief

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 Methods to define and track:

•  Mastery of content regarding messaging and presentation skills; sales purchase justification; knowledge of CRM applications; social selling; company background, company sales process, the product and solution, the market, and how to perform necessary administrative tasks

•  Reps’ ability to apply knowledge and skills in a simulated sales environment

•  Reps’ ability to execute in the field, and

•  Sales activities, such as number of proposals prepared, phone calls, conversations, appointments, live sales calls and so on.

 Performance goals for revenue production:

•  Pipeline conversion rates and velocity, overall and by individual sales stage

•  Pipeline health, which determines whether the new hire has enough viable deals to produce expected revenues, and

•  Revenue yield, defined as whether reps achieve revenue milestones and first-year quota.

 It’s important to keep in mind that, in reality, the onboarding process is never really finished. Your products and your competition are constantly changing. This means that sales enablement teams need to be agile in how they execute and reinforce critical information and skills for reps, particularly in dynamic markets.

 If you don’t continuously reinforce the skills and concepts covered in your onboarding program, and make it easy for your team to stay engaged, even the best training will fail eventually. Technology platforms like Qstream are helping enterprises address this challenge with adaptive delivery of brief Q&A-based selling scenarios that require minutes a day to complete. This ensures reps stay engaged with the frequency that’s required for long-term retention and behavior change – all while keeping them focused on the core selling tasks that will help them reach their goals.

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3. Use Data to Correlate Proficiency with Productivity and Performance

 Consider the case of new recruit John who has booked only two meetings over a three-week period, versus his peers hired at the same time who are averaging six meetings. By looking at sales performance analytics from your reinforcement program, you might see that John is struggling with prospecting skills and understanding competitive messaging. You now have the knowledge you need to proactively address the root of John’s performance gaps and offer remedial support.

 The aim of any formal onboarding process is to help reps meet or exceed their quarterly and annual quotas. A data-driven approach will show you whether your reps are on track to meet their goals, and help you diagnose the cause of any problems.

 How? Using data from your ongoing reinforcement program to correlate your reps’ topical proficiency (discovery skills, objection handling, negotiating, etc.) with performance data in CRM. This will give you valuable insights into whether they’re running into trouble and the cause of problems long before goals are missed.

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4. Use Data to Create a Sales Coaching Plan!

 Correlating your reps’ skills and performance, as described in the previous section, allows you to more easily diagnose the skills each rep needs to improve, then target your coaching. You end up focusing on the areas that will have the greatest impact. Real-time data means you can take action immediately, before it’s too late.

 The most successful companies use coaches to reinforce onboarding activities for new reps in the field and supplement training until they become established in their territory. A recent CSO Insights study found that in companies with proactive coaching, 68.2% of reps achieve quota versus only 48.4% of those in organizations where coaching is substandard.4

 Yet most organizations face obstacles to effective coaching. Managers are strapped for time, many lack knowledge on how to coach, and executives often fail to deliver support. The upshot is that managers typically provide coaching on an informal basis. They may focus on a single opportunity, for example, rather than help new hires gain the core skills and behaviors they need to sustain success.

4“Sales Performance Optimization Study: 2015 Sales Management Analysis,” CSO Insights

Organizations with formal coaching programs saw 68.2% of reps achieve quota, versus only 48.4% in organizations were coaching was more ad-hoc. - CSO Insights

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5. Use Data to Optimize Your Future Hiring Profile  While the right training is essential to sales success, it’s equally important to hire the right people. A data-driven approach can help here as well.

 Based on your formal sales process, create a profile of your ideal sales rep. Define characteristics you need in terms of education, work experience, job performance, skills/knowledge and personal qualities and behavior. Combining that profile with sales enablement tools that measure mastery and assess behaviors that predict success in the field will help you hire the right people.

 For example, by correlating proficiency and performance data with the background and experience of your top-performing reps, you can update your profile to reflect the skill sets and background most likely to succeed in your environment. Data derived from this process can help you more quickly execute and verify hiring decisions and better understand the ideal qualities and capabilities for future hires.

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How a Technology Solution Can Help  The right sales performance solution is the key to making a data-driven sales onboarding approach a reality. Such a solution will support your efforts to embed new skills, motivate behavior change, and make training actionable in a rep’s daily work life.

 Sales performance technology delivers these results by making it easy for managers to evaluate a new hire’s performance against expectations. These solutions capture critical data that measures reps’ level of engagement (a leading indicator of motivation and willingness to grow), proficiency (current knowledge, skill gaps, and reps’ ability to learn over time), and performance. Flexible tagging capabilities allow managers to analyze sales capabilities in unlimited ways. And by allowing managers to correlate data on activity levels with performance KPIs from other systems, such as a CRM, these solutions map training results with quota performance to simplify diagnosis of performance trouble spots.

Sales performance dashboards display this KPI data in real time. This makes it easy for managers to see critical performance information at a glance. Managers can quickly pinpoint reps’ coaching requirements and hold them accountable for their actions. The ability of these solutions to deliver this data instantly is particularly important in a dynamic market, where products and competition change constantly, and onboarding, learning and coaching never cease.

The Qstream Difference

Predictive analytics and coaching support that address persistent sales management obstacles, such as the lack of coaching time and skill

Addresses the three key elements required to drive sales success at scale: simplicity, convenience and motivation

Ongoing clinical trials, as well as in-the-trenches customer success with top brands, proves it works for long-term retention, behavior change and confidence building

Detailed, data-driven insight about where individual sales reps are today – what they know and don’t know, as well as their specific skill strengths and weaknesses

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What to Look for in a Solution

 Simplified communication. When the solution provides integrated communications capabilities, managers can quickly and easily reach out to individuals or the entire group directly from within the solution’s interface, streamlining the process of sharing best practices and coaching.

 Integration. A solution that integrates with third-party solutions, such as CRM systems, makes it easy to correlate data about reps engagement and activity levels with sales performance KPIs that measure pipeline. Such integration also facilitates management involvement with the training process by allowing execs to use familiar tools to view correlated training and performance data.

 Demonstrated ROI. No level of new information or skills can be effective if reps can’t remember it. A solution that embraces the tenants of behavioral science improves retention and speeds time to productivity. If the solution provides brief, curated sales challenges delivered over spaced intervals, it will be more effective at reinforcing the core knowledge and capabilities necessary to drive buying decisions.

 Ongoing engagement. A solution that incorporates engagement techniques can provide a fun and effective experience for busy reps. For example, the solution might group reps into teams to compete for top scores on leaderboards with up-to-the-minute rankings. Simple game mechanics can provide an easy way to show reps how they’re progressing and how they rank against their peers.

 

 When evaluating technology solutions for sales onboarding, look for one that offers:

 Ease of use. Sales reps prefer to spend their time on sales activities. The tool you choose to reinforce the skills that matter most should be non-disruptive to selling time and easy to use. A solution that uses the rep’s smartphone or mobile device is convenient and simplifies operation. One that requires reps to spend no more than three minutes every few days will minimize time away from customers.

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Maximize Your ROI for New Hires  As you add new sales reps to meet higher revenue targets, you need to get them up to speed as quickly and effectively as possible. A data-driven approach — enabled by the right technology solution — makes it easier for you to achieve this goal.

 With a data-driven approach you can define performance goals and the activities that most effectively drive success within your chosen sales process. After evaluating each rep’s baseline knowledge to tailor the most effective onboarding program, you can measure their process towards their goals and quotas. Should the rep struggle to meet interim milestones, you can quickly diagnose the cause of any challenges and coach them proactively. As a result, you can not only accelerate onboarding and time to productivity, but ensure the effectiveness of your program without cutting corners.

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About Qstream

 Qstream is a sales capabilities platform used by top brands to ignite high-performance sales teams. Combining science and data analytics in an easy-to-use mobile solution, Qstream is the first and only proven approach to building smarter, more successful sales teams at scale – with impact to the bottom-line.

 Qstream is used by leading brands in technology, financial services and life sciences, including 14 of the top 15 global pharma companies, to improve the effectiveness of their sales teams, support front-line manager coaching, and increase forecast confidence.

To learn more, visit Qstream.com, follow us @Qstream on Twitter, or like us at facebook.com/Qstream.

5 data-driven best practices to boost sales onboarding success · 5 ways to use data to improve...

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