In my second sales job, I had an amazing on-boarding experience. For the first four days of employment, I had a product manager run me through every detail of our technology. We reviewed the data, applications, customer scenarios, competition scorecards, etc. Another sales person helped coach me through the basic demo script until I had it nailed. On Friday, I was tested, and had a celebration lunch. The next three weeks were full of travel and shadowing other sales people around the country. By week five, I was prepared to go solo.
I’m very grateful the on-boarding was so strong because I didn’t see my boss until Christmas (I started in September). This company invested a ton of resources into ensuring their new sales people were on-boarded properly, but my manager didn’t pick up the baton and take me to the next level. Over the next several months, I scratched and clawed my way to a pretty good rookie year, but it could’ve been so much better. My experience was like an NBA newbie working through rookie camp and being thrown immediately into playoff games. The training was amazing, but the coaching and development was missing.
Unfortunately, this is like many scenarios I see in our industry. We spend a ton of dollars and resources looking for the right talent, investing our time recruiting and signing them, training the heck out of them, and wham – get out there and sell. Regardless of their experience level, new sales professionals need coaching during the ramp-up period, those first 90 days following the official on-boarding process. However, most sales managers are pulled in a million directions and there isn’t a blueprint to follow for that post-on-boarding period … until now.
I’ve developed a list of five activities sales managers should do during those 90 days. Use this list as a blueprint. Keep it simple. As mentioned above, sales managers have enough things to do.
