Finding quality sales representatives takes a lot of work and patience. Advertising, screening, interviewing, and training takes up valuable time, energy, and money. What happens when your new hires are introduced to the general population?
For many organizations new sales reps are left to fend for themselves. After a very short introduction period, usually just a few days, new hires are expected to compete for clients with existing sales staff. They are at a severe disadvantage.
Here are a few best practices to help your new reps weather their onboarding to your sales department:
- Assign new sales reps a manager mentor. Charge this person with building tasks for the day, keeping testy veteran sales reps at arms length, and guiding the new salesperson towards potential clients. Do not hand this task off to one of your experienced sales reps!
- Give real leads to new salespeople with supervision. Many times new salespeople are given old leads, or cold calls. They are started out with potential clients with the least likelihood of sale, while experienced reps are given the best traffic. Trust your management supervision and give new hires an equal opportunity to work with high quality leads, such as recent web leads or orphaned lease renewals.
- Put team bonuses in place to motivate the veteran staff to want the new reps to succeed. The existing staff is going to view new reps as taking a piece of the potential client pie. Combat this instinct with a monetary reward that includes having the new staffers sell.
- Incorporate training pay into your compensation plan. While your new staff is learning, and gaining the confidence to compete for traffic with your veteran staff, give a training salary. It can take 60 to 90 days for a new employee to complete basic training requirements, and feel like they are on equal footing with the rest of the staff. Help them financially get to this point.
Hiring new help is expensive, and time consuming. Make the most of your investment.
Click below to read the full article:
DrivingSales
