Businesses have a serious series of hurdles to overcome when it comes to sales onboarding. Many of their personnel may be inexperienced in the areas they are meant to handle. Others may have set ways of carrying out tasks due to training from previous employers. More still have the tendency to rapidly forget essential information imparted on them during sales coaching sessions, making it difficult to put them to work as quickly as possible. Overcoming these issues means spending more time figuring out the techniques and training options that work best, but this process can provide significant return on investment as compared to working with outdated or ineffective solutions.
There are a wide variety of issues that businesses will have to handle right from the onset with sales onboarding, not least of which is overcoming the time constraints associated with this process. According to Data Informed, some companies have to ensure that their representatives pass a number of set training and qualification guidelines before they're even allowed to communicate with customers, presenting significant downtime that can have extreme negative impacts on productivity and revenue.
What's more, if retention issues arise during the sales onboarding process, it's likely that organizations will lose out entirely on the time and money they put into trying to train a new hire. As the source stated, this was a common problem with one telecommunications organization that required a mandatory 12-week training process and a lengthy 6-hour test. Many personnel did not make it through the essential sales coaching period, and fewer still were able to pass the exam, resulting in low return on employee investment.
Delving into employee data
The source went on to discuss an analytic approach that a number of firms have adopted, wherein companies compare the metric values of performance, job history and other factors of potential hires against histories of their own hiring styles. In many instances, businesses can identify the characteristics of people who are most likely to successfully complete sales onboarding, thereby reducing the chance of a failure by avoiding applicants who exhibit risk issues.
Assessing workforce effectiveness can serve a major benefit for a wide variety of firms. As Forbes wrote, this has been a key strategy for Xerox, as the firm helps isolate activities that don't need as much focus and teach employees to redirect their time and effort. Creating more automated responses to sales onboarding and reducing wasteful processes will help entities hire smarter and retain employees better.
