Enablement
The Guide to Sales Onboarding & New Hire Enablement
By Seismic On January 21, 2025
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Enablement
By Seismic On January 21, 2025
Your onboarding process is a critical component in the overall success of your sellers. Here’s how to create a program that onboards new reps with ease, excellence, and speed.
The work isn’t done once a new seller joins your team — the work is only starting. Companies need a strong onboarding and sales enablement program that engages new sellers and equips them with the knowledge needed to hit the ground running. Let’s explore how your organization can build an onboarding process that’s both efficient and helpful to your sales reps.
Sales onboarding encapsulates the entire process of welcoming and connecting new hires on a sales team. This starts as soon as a seller walks into the office or logs on for the first time.
The sales onboarding process, however, is more complex than a simple “hello” and introducing new hires to their teammates. Sales onboarding is multifaceted and includes a number of tasks and items that get new sellers up-to-speed and hitting performance goals as soon as reasonably possible. An effective sales onboarding program includes:
Selling is more challenging than ever before. Deal cycles are increasingly complex and often driven by highly informed buyers through digital channels. As a result, sellers now have to develop new skills and enable them to engage buyers in a new sales landscape. To quickly ramp new sales reps, your organization needs to ensure they have the right skills, knowledge, and tools to engage buyers on their terms. To do these things effectively, companies need to create an onboarding program that acts as a roadmap for new hires.
A successful sales enablement plan needs onboarding that educates sellers on their sales quotas, performance milestones and expectations, and the tools that will get them there. The sales onboarding process is an essential step in this plan. If you don’t take time to train, educate, and guide sellers from the get-go, they’ll fail to properly understand what the organization intends for them to achieve, along with the resources they have to help get the job done.
Sales onboarding goes far beyond providing a few playbooks and training sessions to new sellers.. A strong sales enablement onboarding program paired with a collaborative company culture pays off tenfold when your seller starts connecting with prospects. Effective sales onboarding has been shown to:
Drive Satisfaction
Employees who say they experienced exceptional onboarding are 2.6 times more likely to be extremely satisfied with their workplace.
Increase Revenue
Lower Turnover
Let’s take a close look at how these benefits come to be.
Although an effective onboarding program is critical to seller experience, some organizations still struggle to hit the mark. In fact, 88% of leaders believe that their organization struggles with onboarding.Some of the most common obstacles to delivering a solid onboarding program include:
While companies can face a number of challenges with onboarding new sales reps, there are a ton of great tips to help the process run smoothly.
Despite the benefits, many organizations still don’t have a formal onboarding program. The most common reason is a lack of time. With an economy moving at a pace unheard of just a decade ago, it’s hard to carve out time to bring every new hire up to speed.
In order to overcome this obstacle, more companies are implementing an onboarding tool or sales enablement platform. These tools make it easier to turn important knowledge into lessons, assignments, and assessments that new hires can complete over time. It also streamlines the onboarding process by automating tasks so that leaders don’t have to manually push out training content when a new seller is ready. This type of system has actually been shown to boost retention rate by as much as 16%.
If you’ve started a new job in the last few years, you might recall that a lot of the information you were given was irrelevant to your role or simply too much to remember. You’re not alone in this feeling. In fact, almost 80% of sales training is forgotten by most reps within the first few months on the job. So, how can an organization make training stick?
This is one of the many perks of investing in sales onboarding software. A one-stop digital location for your company’s policies, procedures, and materials makes for easy onboarding and happier employees. A dedicated sales onboarding tool also tracks the progress your new sellers make during their onboarding journey with assessments and feedback assessments.
When you’re ready to upgrade your sales onboarding process, turn to Seismic. Customers like Lower ramp new sales reps 5x faster by creating onboarding at scale with Seismic’s learning and coaching software. Interested in learning more? See how your organization can improve speed to competency and reach goals more quickly with Seismic with this quick video.
