Ask yourself, is your new hire training everything it needs to be to prepare your employees for today’s business challenges? If you have a feeling that your new hire training could be even a little bit better, consider these sobering statistics:

• Top executives say that “cutting the time it takes for new reps to close their first deals” is the number one challenge holding their sales organizations back.

• About 3 in 5 sales reps don’t fully ramp up for at least seven months – and about 1 in 5 takes more than a year to gain the skills and behaviors needed to succeed.

The solution to this is planning and executing a perfect new hire training program that helps in quickly ramping up your new hires to close deals.

Why is a new hire sales training program important: A well-planned and an all-rounded new hire training program enables your sales reps to:

• Understand how their department and your company operates

• Learn what guidelines you use and policies you enforce

• Set up workstations with necessary tools and technology

• Familiarize themselves with their position’s requirements

To help you build this perfect training program, here we brought a proven and easy-to-execute model that has been used by many successful companies. This model breaks down into 3 simple phases:

• 1 - 30 days: Learn

• 30 - 60 days: Build

• 60 - 90 days: Do

Month #1: 1 - 30 days (Learn)

The first month should be about the new hires getting started on the right foot. New hires should emerge from this month with knowledge of the product, pricing, competition, and existing collateral.

This is an extremely crucial phase in the new hire training as the employees will be exposed to a lot of new and crucial information. So, classroom training and seminars alone are not enough. In order to help them retain all the information that they learn in the classroom, supplement your classroom training with a digital sales training platform. This training platform essentially breaks down the complex lengthy content into bite-sized information. This micro-content is sent to the new hires at regular intervals through an app. This helps in reinforcing whatever they have learned in their training sessions. Also, it enables the reps to access this information whenever and wherever they want. Also, you can conduct quizzes through the app to help them recall crucial information.

At the end of 30 days, assess your new hires by giving them a task to complete. This helps in determining how effective your first-month training was and how many of your new reps qualify to enter the second level of training.

Consider the experience level of all your reps before deciding on the task in order to keep it fair. Put the details of the task clearly in writing and send it to the new hires. Here is what to mention:

• What deliverables are expected?

• How success will be measured?

• Any resources that will help the new hires get his or her job done

Example task:

Task: Be able to concisely and effectively communicate the value of our product.

Deliverable / Measurement of Success: Pass the company “Pitch Competition,” which you will present in front of the Board of Advisors.

Resources: (Link to Pitch Deck Instructions)

Month #2: Day 31 - Day 60 (Build)

Month #2’s focus should be on putting month #1’s learnings into action. It’s about building practical knowledge around the rep’s theoretical knowledge. Expectations should be reasonable, depending on your new hire’s level of experience. Take this opportunity to expand their company/product knowledge and selling skills through role-plays and mock demos.

Conduct role-play-games and make your reps pitch a product, give a demo or act out a sales conversation with a certain prospect. Leverage video coaching here to automate this process. Make your reps record a video articulating a sales scenario and upload it. The trainers or managers can then review this video and provide their feedback. This instantly helps the reps to rectify their mistakes and improve their performance. This provides a safe environment for the reps to practice and prepare for the real sales world.

Similar to the previous month, set a task at the end of this month as well. This task should focus on developing their strategic planning and implementation. Here is an example of it:

Task: Speak to two existing customers in your territory and learn their pain points and favorite parts of the product.

Deliverable / Measurement of Success: A documented report talking about the pain points of the customers, parts of the product that they love and other findings.

Resources: The customer marketing and account management teams can help to connect with the customers

Month #3: Day 61 - Day 90 (Do)

The third month should see salespeople springing into action. Goals should start to get more aggressive, as the rep should be reasonably armed for success at this point. This is the correct time to give the new hires some real-world sales exposure by making them connect with customers and partners.

In this phase create multiple tasks for the reps and set them as targets to be achieved throughout the third month. They should be measured according to these targets/KPIs, and they should understand they will be judged on outcomes as much as thinking and process. You can make it interesting by gamifying the process of achieving targets for them. The reps who achieve the highest target will be recognized and rewarded. Here are some example tasks that you can set in this phase:

Task #1: Reach out to ## of new contacts, converting 50% into the next stage of the buyer’s journey.

Deliverable / Measurement of Success: ## New Opportunities

Resources: The territory account executive and help the new hires to make new connections.

Task #2: Close one deal.

Deliverable / Measurement of Success: Number of opportunities closed-won or the number of opportunities that have come close to closed-won.

Resources: The territory account executive can help the new hires with the paperwork and negotiations.

Want to gamify your onboarding?

Games for new Hire Onboarding

Gamified Onboarding: The Secret Sauce to Effectively Onboard Millennials and Gen Z

Looking for strategies to make your new hires productive very quickly?

5 Strategies to Reduce Ramp-up Time for Your New Sales Recruits

Want to know how sales enablement helps to drive the new hire onboarding successfully?

How can sales enablement help to drive new hire onboarding?

Want to know how you can partner with your HR to streamline your onboarding process?

Read: How to partner with HR to streamline your onboarding process?

Customer Success Story: Poly

Learn how Poly runs its new hire sales training program successfully through SmartWinnr

Looking for a sales gamification software that will run your new hire onboarding with gamification?

Explore SmartWinnr’s Learning and Gamification features and learn how to run a gamified new hire sales onboarding program that’s repeatable, and takes only 10 min of your time.

Curious to learn more about it? Book a demo today!