5 Ways to Ramp New Sales Hires Faster

This is a guest blog post written by Chris Orlob, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Gong.

This is a guest blog post written by Chris Orlob, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Gong.io

As illustrated by many sales teams before, there’s a dramatic ROI when you ramp new hires faster. The sooner they come up to speed, the sooner they pull in full quota revenue.

This is such low-hanging fruit. You’ve got this.

Here are five tips on how to ramp new hires faster.

1. Show them what ‘good’ looks like

Help new hires understand the strike zone. Make sure they know what “good” looks like in every important sales call or situation.

And don’t just describe it in vague terms. Show them.

Show them what a good discovery call looks like and what a poor one looks like.

Show them a good demo and how to handle key objections, pricing problems, or competitive situations.

Shine the light on these vital aspects of your sales process to bring new hires up to speed dramatically faster.

Have them copy your best reps and model their behaviors. How do you do that?

  1. Create a library for call recordings.
  2. Set up folders for each call and situation your new hires need to master:
    • Prospecting calls
    • Discovery calls
    • Demo calls
    • Objection handling
    • ROI discussions
    • Competitive positioning
  3. Save your team’s best calls in a relevant folder.
  4. Prescribe each folder to new hires using just-in-time learning. The day before a new hire has their first discovery call, have them listen to everything in the discovery calls folder. The day before their first demo, have them listen to the demo calls folder.

2. Make learning available on demand

Most organizations send new hires to boot camp, then ship them off to shadow veterans on live demo and sales calls.

While the strategy of learning from experts is sound, the method is broken.

When new hires shadow as the primary learning method, it takes them longer to produce at full quota.

Why? There’s too much time between shadowed calls.

It doesn’t scale.

New hires have to coordinate their calendars to match the veterans’ scheduled sales calls and demos, and there can be days between calls.

Even worse, if the live sales calls are no-shows, everyone has to start back at the beginning.

Fast forward 30 days, and each new hire has only shadowed a handful of calls.

That’s hardly enough to ramp-up fast.

This process decelerates their ramp time, and defers a new hire’s revenue production into the future.

So instead of having six new reps listen to a live Webex while your best rep puts on a show, let them learn on demand.

You can either build a call recording library or use conversation intelligence platforms

3. Let them demo sooner

Sales managers get nervous about letting new hires demo too early.

They worry that the newbie will mess up and waste a good lead.

But here’s some news for you …

They’re going to mess up no matter how long you wait before throwing them into a live demo environment.

Think about it — You can’t learn to surf by reading about it.

If you don’t let your team demo for a month because you want to train them first, they’ll retain very little.

They’ll be twiddling their thumbs.

A first demo done on day 30 will be just as terrible as on day 10.

But the rep who demos on day 10 will ramp to their full quota faster than the rep who demos on day 30.

An easy way to achieve this is by having your reps practice their demos as soon as possible.

And if you can create a demo environment without your new reps knowing they’re on a fake call – even better.

4. Create a demo certification due date

Consider putting a deadline on how fast it takes reps to get up to speed.

For example, if they don’t pass the demo certification by the 30-day mark, they’re required to use a sales engineer for their demos until they’re ramped.

Having a 30-day mark looming over each new hire injects a dramatic sense of urgency to learn quickly.

Reps who aren’t given that gift of urgency will take much longer to ramp up to their full quota.

5. Review and improve with call coaching

At the end of the day, “onboarding” is a bit of a misnomer, because it never really ends.

Learning is an ongoing process that consistently helps reps ramp up to more revenue.

There’s always room for improvement, especially when you’re rolling out new messaging, new processes, new products, etc.

The best thing you can do post-boot camp is move to ongoing call coaching.

Sales calls are where the magic happens. They contain the most defining moments of the sales process.

So record the calls.

Review them together.

Score them.

Suggest new approaches.

Iterate.

You’ll see consistent improvements and keep your hires ramping upward as fast as possible.

Author Bio:

Chris Orlob is Senior Director of Product Marketing at Gong.io. – the #1 conversation intelligence platform for B2B sales teams. Gong helps you convert more of your pipeline into revenue by shining the light on your sales conversations. It records, transcribes, and analyzes every sales call so you can drive sales effectiveness, figure out what’s working and what’s not, and ramp new hires faster.

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