What are sales onboarding best practices?

You need to make sure that sales and marketing teams are aligned, and I encourage you to be maniacal and disciplined and really passionate about building those relationships and having frequent touch points with those teams. That cross-functional collaboration is critical to onboarding – whether it’s sales or anything else in the company. But prioritize marketing, product, and actually a feedback loop from the field.

We’ve now automated our onboarding process. From the moment that new hire signs their offer, we know about it: when they’re going to start, as soon as access is live they get pushed into our 12-week rapid deployment training. And those things are gated and there are assessments associated with each of these gates. The thing that we’re most proud of is the last thing we’ve just done, which is to then close the loop with the manager. So we’ve now instituted a process whereby the managers get triggered for their weekly reflection. If you’re in week one or week two or week ten, the manager gets triggered that your person who’s onboarding, in week ten these are the things that they need to know this week. In your weekly reflection, you need to validate whether that skill is present or there’s still a gap and they need to go back.

One of the things that we actually build into our onboarding is looking at our top reps and having new sellers listen in on each of those different calls so you get to understand different styles. That way you can start to adopt things – ‘I like that they did this piece; I would never do that’ – and craft your own piece.