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Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
One of the things that I have seen sales organizations really drop the ball on when it comes to onboarding and training is the repetition and practice of key actions. The irony of this, of course, is that sales teams are usually full of former athletes and often analogize themselves to sports teams. But somehow they forget that practice is as important—often more important—than the actual games. Presenting information from slides, even with testing, is not sufficient. No way. Drilling and repetitions, paired sparring, and shadowing are all critical to ensure your reps develop muscle memory before they go live.
The biggest thing your reps are going to need to drill is their demo and presentation. They can (and will) learn on the job, but there’s no reason to burn through actual, valid opportunities as they do so.
During your presentation and demo onboarding, you went through each chapter of the presentation and demo, step by step. Now, have each rep do the same thing. I prefer to do this in the class setting, with each person presenting each chapter of the presentation or demo, and then stopping to get feedback from the instructor (you) and the rest of the team. It’s a slow process—that’s why you only do it once—but it really drills the heck out of the material.
When you’re done with the group drilling and repetitions, split the class up into groups of two for what I refer to as sparring. Time-intensive, per-section drilling is good as a baseline, but after that, it’s going to take a series of mock presentations to really nail the material. I have each pair trade off as presenter and prospect. And while you might think that the individual playing the prospect is really just there as a static foil, it’s actually a very important part of the training; they are being forced to think and react like a prospect—to inhabit the mind of their eventual counterpart in the sales cycle—which will in turn make them a better consultative sales professional. This can be done both with presentations and negotiation calls (account executives) and with pure cold-calling for lead generation (market development reps). And, of course, run your sparring in full “game situation” mode, using whatever tools reps would use in their day-to-day—not sitting in a room looking at each other, but using the phone, presentation software, and so forth, that they will use when facing prospects.
Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of the notion of riding along on calls to learn. This can be done outside of selling hours (or even ahead of onboarding) with recorded calls (as assigned in the pre-work). However, there is something to be said for following along as a full cycle workflow is executed. One of the things we do for onboarding is pair programming, where a new hire is paired for a day with a seasoned individual in their role and follows key workflows in a production-like environment. For market development reps, this would be sitting at the desk with other market development reps as they go shopping for prospects to call, review and execute their tasks for the day, or rip down a calling list, firing off follow-up emails or setting an actual demo. For account executives, a ride-along could be sitting in on an initial or follow-up call or participating in pipeline management and maintenance.
All the training and drilling in the world is great, but when new reps come into contact with live opportunities, it is by no means the time to let up on your onboarding focus.
There are three things I recommend to ensure that all the investment you’ve made to date pays off as the rep goes live: bluebirding, proactive call review, and KPI tracking.
When account executives are just getting started, assign them “bluebird” opportunities—these have a high likelihood of closing. Usually these will be ones that come inbound (through lead-capture forms, which naturally have the highest purchasing intent) and have strong qualification characteristics.
But putting these bluebirds on the rep’s plate isn’t sufficient. Generally, I like to team with reps on early calls, or have another senior rep team with them—not to run the call, but simply to offer backup in the event that they run into something that they don’t think they can handle. Often, the pure availability of backup, coupled with the strong prep to date, makes it unnecessary.
But be sure not to jump into a call if the rep just isn’t hitting messaging at an A+ level; you’re there only in the event that the wheels come off, not to correct slight wobbles. I also find it very helpful for reps to have a printed script of the sales presentation and demo on their desks as they execute calls, even if it’s just the major buckets—not so they can follow along in minute detail, but so they can make sure they don’t miss any key parts. And if they get knocked sideways, they can quickly look down, see where they should be, and regain their footing.
The converse of this strategy is throwaways. There are all manner of leads that will come inbound that are unqualified. In TalentBin’s case, these are organizations that don’t have sufficient technical hiring requirements or don’t have recruiters in-house to do proactive, passive-candidate recruiting. Generally speaking, assigning these unqualified opportunities to a sales rep would be a waste of time, as compared to the other valid opportunities on which they could be working. However, in an onboarding use case, these can be helpful practice demos; the rep knows that it’s not a qualified lead and isn’t under a ton of pressure for fear of losing a potential sale.
This can cut both ways, though, in that it’s important that the rep treat it as a real call—go through discovery and qualification questions and discover that the opportunity is not qualified. In these cases, I recommend that reps offer to do an abbreviated presentation for the prospect, in the event that their situation changes down the road (for instance, they move to an organization more focused on technical recruiting). As you can see, these presentations are an expensive form of practice, as they not only consume rep time that could be spent on valid opportunities, but also occupy the time of a customer that is unlikely to close (it’s not 100% respectful of the client’s time). That said, a few of these can be helpful in getting the rep set up for success.
After these initial bluebirds and throwaways, though, teaming is an extremely expensive form of training and audit, and one that I believe sales managers use far more than they should. It robs sales leaders of time they could spend actually managing—consuming product and program materials, distributing information to teams, building and managing leveraged processes, and auditing and enforcing existing processes. It’s often a form of managerial laziness that masquerades as productivity. However, there are strategies for achieving the goal of call review without the time cost of sitting in on new hire sales calls.
In our organization, we would record all sales calls using ClearSlide’s online presentation system (join.me, WebEx, and others have similar functionality—the modern versions of these are Chorus and Gong). This way, at any point, we can pull a recording and listen to it, after the fact. Even that would be time costly, though, so instead we require reps to surface to the team (at standups) when they’ve had a particularly awesome or particularly heinous call—institutionalizing the practice of sharing. For the awesome calls, we pull the recording and put it in a hall of fame, to be used for future onboarding; for the heinous ones, we discuss them and, if needed, listen to them to see where the wheels came off.
Beyond formal reviews, there are the ambient ones: As a sales manager, you should situate your desk centrally in your org so you can hear what’s going on. Or walk around; take your laptop or smartphone and sit in a different part of the office, listening while you work there. Most of the time, you’ll just go about your normal tasks. But you’ll be attuned to oral distress and pick up any issues, which you can either note for coaching after the fact or address in the moment with a helpful Post-it note dropped on the rep’s desk, pointing out a direction they can think about going. (It’s important to characterize to reps that these are suggestions, and not mandates, lest they become flustered over including something that isn’t relevant if your assumption is wrong.)
These proactive and ambient reviews, coupled with a culture of sharing and learning, will ensure that you catch issues early. Don’t risk leaving them hidden (whether from lack of visibility, or actual obfuscation driven by embarrassment). You’ll see that rep confidence ramps quickly through early wins.
Lastly, as your new hires ramp, you can dial down the amount of high-touch monitoring and coaching and start relying on the core set of KPIs you use to monitor performance across your entire sales team. These would be things like hold rates for demos set by MDRs, win/loss ratios for account executives (although, depending on your sales cycle, this may be a lagging indicator of problems), and signifiers of health or concern at the top of the funnel, like activity levels and stuck opportunities.
While your team cadence should already pick up these indicators of health or distress, take extra time to check in on new reps’ KPIs to make sure they’re tracking correctly. And always cover these, and get rep feedback on how they are actually feeling, in your standard (ideally every-other-week) one-on-one meetings.
One thing about onboarding is that it can feel like when you’re done with it, and a rep or class of reps is up and running and successful, you’re done with the learning and training. While onboarding is the most intensive period of learning and development, ignore ongoing investment in that at your peril. Not only can reps continue to get better with better coaching, it’s key for professional development, retention, and promotion. Further, it’s unlikely that your product and the market will remain static. As your product changes, and the market in which it operates changes, your reps will need to be updated and then tested on this new information, so they can be just as sharp as when they exited onboarding, however many months or years ago.
Just like you had a structured calendar for onboarding reps, whether SDRs, AEs, or AMs, you’ll want to do the same for ongoing learning and development. At TalentBin, we had an hour blocked at the end of the day on Friday that was specifically for this. SDRs took the time to do drilling with their management and each other to work on objection handling, messaging review, or demo practice (which wasn’t something that was important for their day-to-day, but was part of professional development, and had the added benefit of making them more confident and competent in their prospect-facing interactions, regardless). AEs would use this time to work with their managers and teammates on different parts of their sales motions, whether it was discovery, presentation, objection handling, negotiation, and so on. But the important part was that the time was on the calendar, and as such, would be prioritized.