Build your best onboarding program yet with these 9 tips

While there are many ways to structure and deliver an onboarding program, there are several proven best practices.

Follow them, and you'll find yourself delivering a strong, engaging, and successful onboarding experience for new sales reps.

1) Allow for multi-modality learning experience?

To allow for a more immersive onboarding experience, include elements of live learning (virtual or in-person), and self-guided learning (such as on-demand or self-paced learning) in the onboarding program.?

Sections of your onboarding program that are: stable, simple in nature, and don’t need to be updated often, can be put into a self-paced format. Think eLearning, videos, articles, and job aids.?

This self-guided portion can then be turned into prerequisites (if the structure allows) for the live portion of onboarding.

Aspects of onboarding that are more complex, require an expert, need in-depth discussion, are activity-based, or call for high levels of engagement are best delivered live.?

This hybrid approach to designing an onboarding program caters to different learning styles and helps avoid information fatigue.

2) Provide opportunities for real-time practice

Onboarding is not a one-way information street.

Instead, it's an excellent time to set expectations, show new sales reps what good looks like, and have them emulate that in a safe training setting.?

There are many ways to do this:

• Allow top sellers to talk about their experiences and engage with new reps on what “good” looks like .
• Share a customer case study and build in scenario-based decision points around “what would you have done” at each stage of the sales cycle.
• Show the anatomy of a recent win/loss and use that as a discussion forum to identify key learning moments.
• Show an example of a product elevator pitch and have each sales rep build and present their own.

Hands-on activity-based exercises like this not only give sales reps the confidence to be successful in their new role, but also allow them to learn from the best sellers in your team, helping to increase their productivity.

3) Invite key department leaders?

Another onboarding best practice is to incorporate live sessions that expose new hires to the leaders in the organization.?

This means bringing in key leaders as speakers and giving them an opportunity to share their role, strategic vision, priorities and challenges, and measures of success.?

This approach gives new reps the opportunity to interact and build relationships with these critical stakeholders from the get-go. That means better cross-functional collaboration down the line.

4) Include role-based content

To maximize the relevance of content and allow for higher levels of engagement, another best practice is to structure the onboarding program so it accounts for role-based specificities.?

This doesn’t mean that separate onboarding programs need to be delivered across separate roles, but it is more about structuring the onboarding content so that there is:?

1. ?Generalized content that is relevant to all roles and?
2. ?Tailored content that’s specific to individual roles.

A neat way of doing this is by following the 80/20 rule, which involves identifying and organizing 80% of the content that applies to all roles into the generalized content category.

The remaining 20% of content can be structured as role-specific content tied to the specific responsibilities, areas of function, core competencies, and skills for various roles.

Like what you're reading? Check out Neha's article in full over on the Sales Enablement Collective content hub.

5) Supply an action plan

Onboarding is not a one-time activity. After completing their onboarding, new sales reps continue to learn and find their stronghold for several months before they are considered fully ramped.?

To support their learning after onboarding, sales enablers need to support sales reps to help accelerate their ramp-up time, reinforce concepts learned during onboarding, and meet the identified core competencies for their role.?

You can accomplish this easily.

Provide reps with a 90-day or a 120-day action plan that – at a weekly or a monthly level – clearly articulates the tasks they should be able to accomplish and the behaviors they should exhibit at each milestone.

This plan should be complete with links to additional enablement and training that reps can leverage to bridge the gaps in their core competency areas and skills.

6) Ensure personalized post-onboarding support

Besides providing an action plan, sales enablers should also look to secure mentorship and coaching opportunities for new sales reps to nurture their post-onboarding learning journey.?

This can be accomplished by pairing each new rep with a high-performing rep on the team to provide both dedicated and just-in-time support.

Another alternative is to assign each new sales rep a first-line sales manager as a mentor for personalized coaching and guidance.?

If there are opportunities for new reps to shadow existing team members or to engage in peer-to-peer learning with seasoned reps, those are also great ways of reducing their learning curve and increasing their productivity.

7) Make it fun

Besides ensuring a strong content structure and a multi-modality experience while providing action-oriented and personalized support, sales enablement pros should remember to make their onboarding program exciting and engaging for the sales reps.?

Weaving in fun elements such as games, prizes, social events, and networking opportunities can help amplify the excitement of joining a new organization for new hires and enable them to immerse more seamlessly into the overall culture.?

Creating cohorts within the onboarding program is another way of introducing a sense of kinship and camaraderie among the new hire groups and fostering shared learning experiences.

8) Build mechanisms for feedback

To ensure that the onboarding program is meeting the needs of new sales reps and to identify gaps and successes of the program promptly, it’s important to implement multiple feedback mechanisms throughout the program.?

This can be done by:

• Surveying the new hires to get their feedback and opinions on what worked and what didn’t work. Surveys don’t have to be a one-time activity administered at the end of the onboarding program.?
• Scheduling 1:1s or conducting focus groups with sales reps after onboarding to collect and discuss feedback.
• Talking to the managers of new sales reps to assess how well onboarding has supported the day-to-day role of the sales reps and translated into performance outcomes.??

9) Continue to iterate

The world of sales is continually changing as our products and services evolve to respond to the needs of the market. The ever-shifting macro-level conditions and micro-level factors all demand our Salesforce to be consistently dynamic and flexible in responding to the needs of customers.?

A good onboarding program is therefore one that remains similarly adaptable, agile, and attuned to the constantly evolving needs of sellers. Sales enablers should periodically assess their onboarding program to understand what components are still relevant and what should be iterated upon.?

Besides assessing and implementing the feedback received from the new reps, enablement pros should also conduct periodic reviews of their program against the established KPIs and measures of success to identify any gaps and pivots that may be needed.

Final Thoughts

The best sales enablement offerings aren't executed in isolation – each program should form the building blocks of a sales rep's knowledge and expertise.

Therefore, as you work to set up an onboarding program from scratch, don’t forget to assess other enablement programs that may already exist and those that may be in the process of being designed in parallel.?

Onboarding is only the first step in a rep’s learning journey.?

Their continued success is also shaped and influenced by other enablement offerings that they consume post-onboarding, such as competency and skills programs, sales methodology training & collateral, sales kick-off and other enablement events, just-in-time enablement, and more.?

The collective impact of all your enablement offerings nurtures and strengthens your sellers and sets them up for long-term success in their roles.?

Neha's article was originally published in full here on Sales Enablement Collective.

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