The Sales Rep Onboarding Hack

Many companies selling complex, technical products spend weeks, or even months, training new sales reps before they let them interact with real prospects.

You don’t need to do that because today, you’ll learn how to train sales reps to make calls from day one. Turn new hires into product experts at the speed of startup so they can answer any question immediately.

It’s a scalable strategy for quickly training and onboarding new sales hires.

Practice Trumps Theory

Don’t just shove training materials down their throats; expose them to real-world scenarios.

It’s like learning to swim - you can’t learn by reading about swimming. You need actually to get in the water.

The documentation you give them is just a life jacket to keep them afloat, not a boat that prepares them for getting in the water.

Create a New Sales Rep Training Manual

What are the 20 percent of questions that prospects ask 80 percent of the time? What are the 10 to 20 most common things they want to know?

Write down these questions.

Then, write down the short answers.

(Involve the most successful members of your sales team in creating this training guide for new sales hires). You’re creating a sales objection management document.

Have your new sales hires study this document so that they can confidently answer the majority of prospects' questions.

Don't Know the Answer?

What if a prospect asks a question the new sales rep hasn’t been trained on?

Train your new sales reps to say this:

1. That’s a great question.
2. I don’t know the answer to this,
3. but I will find it out for you. I will go to a person in the company who’s the best person to answer this, and I will get back to you with an honest and accurate answer today. Is that okay with you?”

This accomplishes two important things:

• It enables your sales reps to get the right answer from the prospect and learn more about your product.
• It creates trust because it’s authentic and truthful.

We called hundreds of thousands when we were still running our outsourced sales force, and nobody was ever upset about this. People often appreciate getting such an unexpectedly candid answer from a salesperson. They'd rather have honest answers later over bullshit answers now.

But What if it’s a Super-Simple Question?

Some questions are so basic that it can be almost embarrassing if a sales rep doesn’t know the answer. For example, “How long has your company been in business?”

How should a new sales rep respond if he can’t answer such a simple question?

The same formula applies, but you should add these words after “I don’t know the answer”: “...because this is my first week. I just got started here.”

Nobody is mad at people who are new at a business. Everybody has been in that position and knows what it’s like.

What’s Your Company Culture?

Don’t expect your salespeople to be perfect and know all the answers. It’s going to create pressure for them to bullshit when they don’t know the answer.

They will say,

You know what's embarrassing? Having to make up lies instead of giving forthright replies.

Just be honest. It’s an opportunity to stand out from the crowd, starting with how you onboard new sales reps.

Don’t require them to have all the right answers - require them to have the right attitude.

Flip it, and Reverse it.

Here’s how you take this to the next level. Have your sales reps respond to questions they can't answer as follows:

1. Great question.
2. I don’t know the answer (because I’m new here).
3. But I’ll find it out for you.
4. Meanwhile, let me ask you: What would you want the answer to be in a perfect scenario?
5. Why?

That fourth and fifth step is where the magic happens.

Have them tell you what they want, and then ask them why.

Turn the question around and turn it into an opportunity to learn more about your prospects, to understand them better, and to qualify them.

Here are some questions that will be helpful for this step:

• What would be your ideal answer?
• How are you going to use this? / What’s the use case?
• What is the workflow when this is relevant and important?
• What do you want the answer to be, and why is that important to you?
• Tell me a little bit more about your company/team, and I will make sure to return any missing information by the end of the conversation.
• Why do you want that to be that way? Why is this important to you?

Typically, what happens with new sales hires who don’t ask these questions is that they don’t provide enough context.

They’ll go to the engineer and say:

And then an engineer can’t give them a good answer because they lack context.

Most sales leaders teach new reps to give the right answers, but great sales leaders also teach new reps to ask the right questions.