How Enhancing Your Onboarding Process Can Help Your Sales Team Thrive

Assembling sales teams and bringing on new sales reps can be hard. Not only do you have to find, hire and train them, but you also have to work with different sales personalities, strengths and weaknesses. On top of that, managers have to make sure that the teams adjust to their roles, receive proper sales coaching and stay motivated and on-track, all while making sure that the work environment is conducive to success. If any of these requirements are not met, organizations are more likely to experience obstacles such as slow ROI, high turnover rates and reduced productivity. However, most of these obstacles can be mitigated with simple adjustments to your onboarding process.

Obstacle: Slow ROI

Until your sales people are ready to fully operate within your organization, they are actually costing your organization money! As a matter of fact, the average new sales rep at a SaaS company takes 5.3 months to reach full productivity. Furthermore, three out of five sales reps don’t reach full productivity for at least seven months and one in five sales reps take over a year to gain the skills needed to fully integrate into an organization. If you consider both the time required to train a new hire and the cost of the training itself, your organization can spend large sums of money before your new sales employees even begin working! Implementing an efficient onboarding process can help increase your organization’s ROI by allowing employees to get a head start on training and orientation, which reduces the time it takes for your employees to reach full productivity and integrates them into the workforce more quickly.

Obstacle: High Turnover Rates

Sales jobs tend to have high turnover rates. CSO Insights’ studies indicate that the average annual turnover rate is approximately 25%, with half either quitting or getting fired. Organizations will have to interview, hire, and train extra workers just to compensate for the potential loss, even though the average cost of replacing a sales rep can be up to $115,000! The cost, time and effort it takes to train replacement employees alone can significantly affect a company’s ROI and productivity. Organizations with high turnover rate often put little emphasis on their onboarding processes and less focus on pre-boarding training and orientation.  Poor, inefficient onboarding processes can result in a loss of productivity due to new hire training, which can cost up to 2.5% of the organization’s overall revenues. Unsurprisingly, studies have indicated that salespeople who have been thoroughly coached perform considerably better than those who were not as well coached. Thus, by putting more emphasis on developing your organization’s onboarding process, you can reduce turnover and save your organization time, money, and energy!

Obstacle: Fostering Employee Growth

Failing to foster proper training and orientation processes can have a big impact on the long-term success of your organization’s new sales reps. It is one thing to just hire and train your employees so they can begin working. It is another thing entirely to make sure that your employees continue to grow and reach their maximum potential. Organizations can invest an average of $20,000 on finding talent, but may fail to invest in its onboarding and training processes, thus affecting the success of the organization’s sales teams. Even after training is complete, 33% of sales reps, unable to retain what they’ve learned, will still not have the skills they need to succeed. This is why onboarding is such an important part of the orientation and hiring process: placing more emphasis on orientation, training, and coaching in your organization can help new hires integrate into the company quickly, all while also providing numerous opportunities to them to grow and enhance their skills.  For example, automating your onboarding process gives new hires the opportunity to learn information on their own time and gives them the ability to come back to that information when needed. Encouraging your talent to reach their full potential will also decrease turnover rates and increase company loyalty. Amy Hirsh Robinson, principal of The Interchange Group, a consulting firm in Los Angeles, stated:

"Onboarding is the magic moment when new employees decide to stay engaged or become disengaged".

Putting more focus building an effective onboarding process can only benefit your organization by supporting the success of your new hires. A strong onboarding process is key to the prosperity of any organization and can help your organization reduce any major obstacles in the future, so that you and your employees can focus solely on the success of the organization.