As we all know, the new decade has come up with a lot of restrictions. When it comes to business, most organizations are running with close to half the staff, while a majority of the workforce is operating remotely. It has been quite difficult for organizations to progress with such restrictions. The biggest impact is on the most vital part of a business, which is the sales. Newly hired sales reps are unable to visit the office to get their extended coaching and sales onboarding training doses, and without proper onboarding, it’s difficult for them to achieve the required level of productivity.
The entire sales performance suffers when you are unable to provide appropriate onboarding. That’s why the leaders need to focus on quickly converting the onboarding programs for the virtual business model. A hi-tech virtual sales onboarding would be the best sales onboarding program in the current situation. It will allow you to continue operations and sales without being impacted due to restrictions.
So, if you are in a rush trying to optimize your onboarding programs for the virtual scenario, here a few tips that could help:
1) Sales Managers Enablement
Before you start with your sales reps, you need to look at your sales managers and their enablement. You just cannot implement digital and remote working solutions on your sales reps while the managers are still working in the old system. Sales managers are the leaders who will be handles the sales operations going forward. So start by enabling your sales managers well. Invest in professional solutions and provide your sales managers with the required software and tools to tackle tracking, analytics, documentation, communications, knowledge transfer, and other necessary management operations. Once the sales managers’ enablement is taken care of, the sales managers can now perform according to the company’s intentions of improving the onboarding program.
2) Digitalize the Post-Training Process
The next crucial factor is to digitalize the entire post-training onboarding system so that it can be carried out remotely. Start by centralizing all the information, so that the sales reps can access the information whenever they want. It eases the pressure on them as they no longer have to memorize everything. They can simply log in from a device and information will be available in a few clicks.
The next step is to make use of various modern learning methods like elearning, video learning, gamification, challenges and other methods. It will allow you to impart the onboarding sessions remotely, which the sales reps can access from any device anywhere. Relying on multimedia and digital solutions is also quite profitable for a business. You don’t require infrastructure, and the managers don’t have to dedicate hours every day. Videos, presentations, and learning modules once created, can be used over and over again, saving time and money for you.
3) Turn Onboarding into Digital Coaching
The traditional onboarding system refers to the process of getting the sales reps ready for the actual working culture on-floor. But with modern technological solutions, you can reduce the span of onboarding by integrating it with coaching. The new elearning and micro-learning methods give the sales managers the ability to communicate and transfer information very quickly, allowing them to solve issues and challenges as they occur. So now you can integrate the onboarding program with coaching, and provide bite-sized, remotely accessible, and personalized coaching programs to your sales reps so that they can get adapted to the working culture.
4) Define New Expectations
It’s obvious that the company interests will observe changes, as the working model, sales cycles, and customer demands have changed massively. Business would now require sales reps to achieve goals according to the new remote working model, and therefore, it is important to define the new goals very effectively. As a business, you may now want better interaction, longer communication sessions, better content engagement and various other parameters to define success. So, make sure that your sales reps are well aware of what success means in this new remote working scenario.
5) Improve Tracking and Reporting
The operations come to a full circle now. As you started by sales management enablement, an ideal sales process completes itself by returning valuable information back to the managers. So you must invest in modern tracking and analytics tools that allow you to track sales performances and other relevant metrics according to the new system. The digital platform relies on constant data collection, analysis, development, and implementation. So your modern onboarding program has to incorporate similar qualities to achieve promising results. The sales managers must continuously track sales reps’ performance, their coaching, and all other activities to keep implementing new progressive solutions.
6) Bring In The Professionals
This is the most important solution of all. Instead of hastily trying to make changes in the sales onboarding program, and increasing pressure on your sales managers and reps, you can just take professional assistance for the task. Professional service providers are well aware of the modern challenges and their solutions, so they can provide you with the required software, training programs, and onboarding programs. Professionally developed solutions are tailored according to your requirements and are also perfected to provide the best possible quality. In other words, professional onboarding solutions are more effective and have a higher success rate than amateur solutions. When compared with the amount of time and effort saved, and considering the promising results they can offer, partnering with professionals is the most profitable choice for a business.
Conclusion
Sales onboarding is a key factor that’s affecting businesses greatly in the current times, and if you don’t act quickly, it can get too late for you. These are 6 tested and proven tips that successful businesses are already implementing to handle the new pandemic situations.
So don’t grind anymore with your traditional sales onboarding training, because it is simply no longer as effective as it used to be.
Just contact a reliable and experienced sales readiness solutions provider now and develop the best sales onboarding program for your business.
