{"id":4546,"date":"2021-08-13T02:33:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-13T06:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/?p=4546"},"modified":"2024-04-16T18:41:48","modified_gmt":"2024-04-16T22:41:48","slug":"removing-barriers-to-sales-productivity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/leadership\/removing-barriers-to-sales-productivity\/","title":{"rendered":"Removing Barriers to Sales Productivity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Sales enablement professionals<\/strong> and consultants are often asked to evaluate the \u201cnew hire experience.\u201d How can the process be improved? Typically this includes reviewing the content, skills training, and tools provided to salespeople as part of the on-boarding process of a new hire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This request is usually in response to specific nuances occurring within the organization. Sales and business unit leaders are asking learning and development teams to create more globally consistent new hire training programs. They require programs that drive costs out of a fragmented process that has multiple stakeholders, no clear-cut owner, and a lack of accountability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking a step back, sales trainers can look at new hire training and the overall on-boarding process. They will often find that there is too much work going into creating new hire training content. Or, they may build more distributed methods to reach and teach remote salespeople. For example, there may have been some recent work to build \u201cramp-up tool-kits\u201d and create communities that newly hired salespeople can use to get the help they need. There is a genuine challenge that newly hired salespeople face, and it looks something like this:\u201cHow do I (as a new salesperson) meet with buyers who will buy from us and then sell them something so that I can hit my quota?<\/em>\u201d Unfortunately, more often than not, the new hire training process doesn\u2019t get close to helping salespeople answer this fundamental question. Instead, we often find an altogether different reality in existing new hire sales training programs. Many sales VPs are faced with something that usually looks more like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Forrester Research, only 15% of this content is about what salespeople actually need to talk to the buyers\/ customer to \u201csell them something.\u201d Yep, that\u2019s right, 15%. Removing these barriers can dramatically affect the speed to which new hire salespeople get up and running in their role.<\/strong> Sales enablement professionals and consultants are often asked to evaluate the \u201cnew hire experience.\u201d How can the process be improved? Typically this includes reviewing the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":10204,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,44,128,74],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4546"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/96"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4546"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10894,"href":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4546\/revisions\/10894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orchestratesales.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
However, the question is, \u201cwhat is the business benefit of this new hire sales training work?\u201d Better yet, \u201chow will we measure the new hire sales training program to ensure it is effective?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, to make matters worse, this lack of focus on customers in the new hire training process increases the burden on internal subject matter experts and sales managers. Often sales leaders<\/a> find that salespeople have to navigate to 10 different subject matter expert functions or people. This is just so that they can figure out how they can add collective value to clients. Yet these internal groups are largely ignored in the new hire training process?
So, let\u2019s recap…<\/em><\/strong>
New hire training isn\u2019t about customers. They do not design the training to help newly hired salespeople to reach the internal subject matter experts who can help communicate value.
No wonder the executive team is often wondering what the return on investment is for their new hire sales training program. Having worked in this space for a while, it\u2019s easy to see how new hire programs can evolve to diffuse customer focus. Increased executive expectations and pressure by product\/business unit leaders creates a web of complexity. The executive team needs to make sure product knowledge is pumped into the heads of new hires. In turn, an environment is created that assumes salespeople need to simply \u201cunderstand\u201d to get up to speed more quickly.
Suffice it to say, sales trainers often find that new hires face a steep learning curve \u2013 especially within the first 90 days. The good news is, some learning and sales leaders are looking at the sales new hire and on-boarding process as an area of targeted improvement. They are beginning to work cross-functionally to upgrade, optimize, or even transform the unique hire sales training experience.
If addressing the new hire training challenge is on your radar screen, here are some of the barriers that get in the way of new hire productivity. No matter the path forward, these barriers need to be addressed. This situation is especially true when you look to apply more than just a temporary Band-Aid to the sales new hire training challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By addressing these barriers, you are well on your way to decreasing new hire ramp-up time and giving new hires a leg up by reducing the slope of their learning curve. By working cross-functionally to remove these barriers, you can also build a solid new foundation for new hire sales training. As a result, you start focusing on decreasing the time it takes to achieve quota.
To do that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n