How To Quickly Create Content for Sales Onboarding Programs

How do you quickly create sales onboarding content so you can get your team ramping faster?

Now, I know the challenges that live with building onboarding programs and I'll tell you a couple of challenges that are probably coming to mind.

Number one, you might not be sure exactly what content you want to have. Don't worry, you're not alone. Most people aren't sure exactly what content they need to start their sales onboarding program.

The second thing is, where do you even get this content? Once you know what you want to do in your program, where do you even get it from?

I'm going to share a couple actions you can take which will help you figure it out quickly.

 And lastly, you're probably a small team. Depending on the size of your company, you might be one person building all of the onboarding content and rolling it out, and have two other jobs on top of that.

So how do you do this effectively? 

An Easier Way To Create Sales Onboarding Content

Imagine you were able to create a full-fledged sales onboarding program in 30 minutes or less. I know it sounds crazy but imagine having all the content you need and having everything auto-update as the company continues to grow.

 Today, I want to show you how you can do this at your SaaS company.

 Let me tell you a quick story.

 We're a smaller company here, and I remember when we hired our first BDR. We had nothing, we had nothing in place, and we had to quickly put together content for an onboarding program. We didn't have any formal content, but luckily for us, we had things that existed elsewhere.

 What I mean by that is we recorded some calls, we had different demos we had done and recorded through GoToMeeting, started off with using those as content.

 And what we've continued to do is add things as we go by taking existing call recordings, and then we also checked out our CRM, Salesforce. We looked at who we were talking to. We were looking at figuring out who our personas were, we were figuring out how long the deal cycles were, what type of companies we were talking to.

 So we really figured out key information in order to make our sales onboarding content really effective internally, and it continues to expand today.

The Sales Onboarding Content Loop?

 Now that I've told you a little bit of background, I'm going to give you a framework that's going to give you actionable tips to walk away right when this video is done. It's called the Sales Onboarding Content Loop?.

 The first step I'll walk you through is the audit. Now, audit, I kind of alluded to it earlier. Audit your Salesforce CRM to figure out your personas, who you’re speaking with, and what industries you’re targeting, to really have a good idea of where you need to create content. That's the first thing you want to do, is figure out the who and the what for your content. 

The second step is to build. What you want to do is build your content library.

I talked about finding different call recordings, or finding demos that might be on file somewhere. Most companies haven't done this, If you haven't, do it this week. Just start recording some of the top people, and by the end of this week, you'll already have some great content.

The third step at the bottom of the framework is the creation piece. The idea about creating is you want to continually create new content. Get your top reps to record their win stories. At the end of a quarter, at the end of the month, capture these win stories on video to share with other reps. 

As reps are closing more deals, as they're making more calls, the content loop is now in motion and it will allow you to continue to build out your library over time. 

Don’t Overcomplicate Your Content 

Many companies overthink their sales onboarding.

 There's no question it's super important. We know how important it is to kick of anybody's career at your company. You want to get them up to speed quickly, you want them to hit their ramp numbers.

 But you don't have to over calculate the actual content you need to make this happen.

 What I mean is just get it going, take existing material you have right now.

 Take calls that have been recorded, take demos that have been done. If you don't have them, quickly make it happen, capture them this week and start using the Sales Onboarding Content Loop? to get your flywheel going.

 Before you know it you'll have a massive list of content and exercises to help build your onboarding program at scale.

 Audit, Build, Create

 If you're struggling with creating content for your sales onboarding and it's locked up in some Excel file, or very basic type of experience that you yourselves wouldn't want to have, here's what you want to do.

1. Audit your best opportunities, look in your CRM, and the deals people can really learn from.
2. Find the assets around those opportunities. What can you learn from those? Have you recorded calls? Have you recorded demos? Start putting that content together.
3. Get your content flowing, capture win stories.

From there, you will watch your content grow and really have an onboarding that's focused on the most important thing at the end of the day, which is your customers. Have the content such that your new sales hires understand what your customers want, what they need, and I assure you things will start growing way faster.

This post first appeared on the LevelJump blog here.