Posted by Tom Rothrock on Thu, Mar 11, 2010 @ 01:56 PM
Given the current reality of an "employer's market" you thought it was going to be easy to hire a new sales rep.
You and your recruiting team spent hours scanning resumes. For a few days, you were getting around 100 a day in response to your online posting.
Undaunted, you plowed through them to select ones for initial phone and later face-to-face interviews.
The interview process was lengthy and time consuming and your hire decision was challenging. You had to choose between several strong candidates who had winning track records in sales as well as glowing references. You wanted to hire them all.
Finally, you chose one who you believed had the smarts, energy, skills and drive to be your next "A Player." In the following weeks, your new rep was put through the paces learning the 4 "P's" - process, product, procedures and practices - in your new hire training program. After that, your new rep will be equipped and ready to hit the ground running and start bringing in the sales.
This period, the timeframe following when a new sales rep has completed their training and starts calling on accounts, is generally referred to as the "ramp-up time," where they're still finding their way around. It is a crucial transition period when your new rep is absorbing and mastering your sales practices, environment and culture, all of which will impact the rep's future success or failure.
It's also a timeframe requiring as much of your time, if not more, than the recruiting effort did. You will need to be observing and coaching your new rep as closely and frequently as possible.
Where do you get the time to do that? You can't be on every call but want to be sure your new rep maintains the momentum toward attaining their sales goals.
You may be thinking about using one of your top "A Players" to mentor your new hire, but that unfortunately takes them away from their primary objective of making sales.
A very strong and time-effective solution is to instill pre-call planning throughout your sales organization. Your pre-call planning effort should incorporate the "best practices" of your sales process and identify all of the steps and activities that will furnish your new rep with a road map to success.
Your first step in accomplishing that is to download our free Guide to Pre-Call Planning which will introduce the benefits of pre-call planning across your sales organization.
Photo Credit: Jack Rothrock