Ability - Strategic Sales Development Specialists

SALES INDUCTION PROGRAMMES

Even the best organisations sometimes forget the difficulties new sales staff have in assimilating themselves into their new company and sales team. As a consequence the return on their investment can be seriously delayed.

You no doubt hire competent sales and support people and experienced managers – people who have been successful in other companies. Have you noticed though that it often takes a long time for these previously successful staff to become equally successful in your company? And how many of them move on before they’ve really contributed?

Recently we undertook a study for the European arm of a major software vendor to try to find out why they had a high staff turnover, and why it was taking so long for new sales staff to complete their first major deal. Not only were we able to highlight the problems and help them implement a course of remedial action, we were also able to estimate how much the problem was costing them. Just in summary, we found that:

• New staff were given some specific product training and directed towards their territory. But they were given little about the company, its culture, the way it worked, who controlled and influenced what, the value of other product lines, competitors, partner relationships, customer profiles, et al. They had the sales skills, but lacked the information and knowledge needed to truly represent the company. So it took them a long time to build their own confidence and longer still to build confidence in their customers.

• Several highly regarded new recruits left quickly. We discovered that the excellent recruitment process painted a picture of such corporate excellence that it gave the new recruit the perception that they were indeed lucky to be employed by such a professional organisation. However, once the recruits hade joined, the company, albeit excellent and professional in many ways, failed to deliver the means to assist them to become effective quickly in their new role, and they became disillusioned.

• The cost of failure was enormous. The cash loss of failed recruits alone was in excess of £250K in just one year. The lost sales opportunity cost was in excess of £1.25m in the same period. By decreasing the time it took for sales people to become effective and increasing overall performance by only 5%, the company estimated that revenue could be increased by over £2.0m.

This is not an unusual story. In this case, we built and implemented a sales induction programme to tackle these problems. It started demonstrating results almost immediately. So much so that managers wanted to put existing staff through the programme to benefit from an experience they missed out on when they joined.

So often induction is left to overworked sales managers or delegated to team members to mentor new joiners without a formal, well thought through programme that targets a fast, effective start in the company. Putting a formal, well structured programme together that positions exactly what new joiners need, pays for itself rapidly.