Selling skills are key to a sales rep’s success, but research from LearnCore finds that less than 30 percent of all sales reps that complete the typical onboarding program are deemed proficient in key selling skills. Innovative companies know this and solve this deficiency in their onboarding programs through ongoing training technologies that includes skill development, on-demand learning, and immediate feedback. 

Preparing Sales Reps for Success 

Here are three key ways to jump the sales achievement gap. 

1. Individual Benchmarking. Every sales rep joins your organization with a different set of skills. It’s the goal of a well-designed onboarding and sales training process to benchmark these skills and help each sales rep hone them over time. Each rep’s skill development work will be different depending on the company, product, industry, or individual. 

The best ongoing training programs include short- and long-term goals and celebrate successes along the way. Whether incentives are monetary or functional, a holistic onboarding and ongoing training program will help sales reps measure and benchmark their achievements. 

2. Practice Makes Permanent. Sharing top-performer’s best practices can be an effective way to continuously train your new sales reps. Listening to others successfully handling common objections can have an effect on the whole group. Indeed, showing reps that they can overcome obstacles—and how to do it--leads to increased chances of being a productive long term employee. In a study performed by the Sales Management Association, direct manager coaching and easy access to the training program were among factors judged “most important” in an ongoing training program. 

Performing the same ineffective responses to the same selling situation over and over again won’t create a perfect sales rep—just a permanent bad habit. To change a behavior it is sales management’s responsibility to listen to what the reps are doing and evaluate, share feedback, listen for improvements, as well as reward and benchmark success. The most effective sales rep will have practiced different ways to respond in different selling situations. 

3. Key Necessity: Feedback. Regular, constructive feedback is critical for coaches and managers to ensure sales reps are achieving the steps necessary for success. The balance of encouragement and constructive feedback is part of the company’s holistic onboarding and ongoing training process.  

Executives know it’s more costly to “churn and burn” sales reps than to invest in a holistic sales onboarding and training strategy. According to LearnCore data, companies with more effective onboarding programs achieve 14 percent better results in sales and profit objective achievement, and 10 percent improvement in annual firm sales growth. The key is to decide the skill set and goals you want your sales team to achieve, and to build an ongoing training process around that’s executable. 

A Map for a Sales Onboarding Program Remodel 

Well-designed sales onboarding programs share similar fundamentals across industries. Honing in on your firm’s sales goals depends on the size of your organization. Whether you are a start up with five employees or a multi-national corporation with a sales force in the thousands, one thing is true – your customer-facing employees must all have the same message.