Sales enablement training can help overcome bad hiring decisions

Sales enablement training can help overcome bad hiring decisions:by Corporate Visions
By Tim Riesterer, Corporate Visions

On average, about 50 percent of sales reps achieve their annual quota. It’s like flipping a coin. Your odds are about the same with sales rep hires. Half the time you get it right, half the time you don’t.
But, you can’t turn over 50 percent of your sales force. In fact, turnover is often the sworn enemy of sales force productivity. Most companies want to avoid recruitment time, rep ramp-up time, hiring costs and a range of other hard and soft expenses associated with large turnover rates. Yet, underperformance must be managed.
Keeping the wrong employee in the wrong position can do more harm than good. A territory can go cold. Leads go stale. Pipeline disappears. Client relationships go sour. This creates an obvious decision to cut losses and remove that person. But, most decisions are not that obvious, and the pain of replacement seems harder than rehabilitation. So, in most cases, you decide to give a rep more time.
Here are a couple ideas for how to isolate the challenges and help fix some of your broken hires.
Don’t land short on the ramp-up
I was a big Evel Knievel fan growing up. Some of his most brutal crashes took place when he landed short and hit the safety ramp. While it was put in place to keep him from hitting the last obstacle, it inevitably jarred the daredevil loose from the bike and he’d tumble like a ragdoll down the rest of the ramp and onto the pavement.
Sales rep ramp time can come up short in the same way.
There are so many obligatory items on the new-hire training list that sometimes the most important pieces of information and skills are left out before the rep is turned loose in the field. Inevitably, they flounder and flail the first time they get on the phone or in front of a prospect or customer. Why? Because they were slammed with sales process training, CRM system training, expense report training, product training, and all the other mandatory, check-the-box, administrative and HR-related training. As a result, salespeople aren’t comfortable with, or trained in, the actual conversations they need to have with prospects and customers.
Does this happen at your company? It’s so ironic. In Aberdeen’s annual sales training survey, the #1 training “action” identified by companies looking to improve their performance is “creating more meaningful sales conversations that address the buyer’s overall business needs.” It’s mentioned more than twice as often as standardizing the sales process.
Yet, the story and the skills required to have an interactive, engaging conversation are left to trial and error in the field. Maybe it’s time to consider flipping the training process. Spend the first 90 days giving your salespeople a handful of powerful, provocative visual stories that will give them confidence in front of the customer, enabling them to add value in customer conversations as soon as possible.
Don’t give them stale skills training and tools
I loved visiting my grandparents growing up, but, if I’m honest, I didn’t like the smell of their house, especially their basement. It smelled old, dingy and musty. Yet, that’s where we were forced to play during the long Wisconsin winters.
For salespeople of any reasonable tenure, the ramp-up process at most companies must smell like my grandparents’ basement. Just because they are new to your company, doesn’t mean they are new to selling. They’ve been through multiple sales processes and many of the same training activities. And, they’ve been living with the administrative burden of CRM for many years. It all just seems stale.
Is it any wonder that they might be getting out of the gates so slowly? What you need is a bit of excitement or sizzle in your sales training and on-boarding curriculum. Salespeople are very emotional. They love to be fired up. They took a new job for something fresh. Give them a new set of skills that will challenge them and get them engaged with telling your story right away.
When companies bring in whiteboards instead of slide decks, and expose salespeople to the art of whiteboarding as part of their training, we’ve seen very positive reactions. We’ve heard salespeople, even grizzled old veterans, say “this changes everything”… and “it makes selling fun again”…or “finally, something I can use tomorrow.”
Aberdeen Group recently conducted a sales training survey and we had them ask companies if any of them were incorporating interactive whiteboard conversations as a replacement for traditional slide deck presentations. While I can’t give you exact numbers yet, the results are compelling and will soon be published.
Of those that said yes, they compared performance numbers and found that whiteboarding companies reduced rep ramp-up time to productivity. Whiteboarding also correlated to an increase in the number of first-year reps hitting quota, higher lead conversion rates and shorter average sales cycles.
It’s important to note that these were only correlations when comparing the performance of companies replacing more traditional decks with whiteboards, but the change is impressive enough to consider how you might freshen up your enablement program.

Filed under: Business-to-Business, Deliver Conversations that Win, Deploy Tools that Get Used, Professional Development, Sales, Sales Readiness Tagged: sales enablement, sales process, Sales Readiness, tim riesterer, visual storytelling