Your New Inside Sales Hires Should Be Producing Leads In 5 Days...
I’m very proud of the training program we have here at AG for new reps. It has been developed and fine tuned over 8+years of doing this, and I’m confident to say that it is one of the best crash courses in how to qualify a prospect out there today. We have our BDR’s (assuming you don’t miss any days due to record snow falls) up and running within 5 business days. This isn’t “on the phone fumbling through dials” ready...it’s “passing fully qualified leads” ready.
We follow three main rules as part of our training process and I felt they would be good to share with all of you. These three rules provide the fundamental backbone of our training and allow us to get reps up and running (delivering forecast) faster than many organizations. Here they are...
1. Every hour counts:
There are few things that make my skin crawl more than the sight of a new hire sitting in his\her cubicle doing nothing...or even worse..updating their Facebook status about how they are doing nothing at their new job. If you want a new hire to be successful, schedule every hour of their first week at your company. Take the time to map out the mix of training as well. While it’s imperative that you keep them on the move with their heads spinning each day, there has to be a method to the madness. We follow a basic weekly format for week one.
Mon-Tues: Company introduction to people, process, and philosophy.
Wed-Thurs: Introduction to skill-set, methodology, client technology, Salesforce.com.
Friday: Role play, role play, role play.
The hours of each of the days above should be spent doing activities that map directly to the theme for that day. We take a different approach to the goal of training. You may say..”our training program is designed to get our reps prepared to be successful on the phones”...good for you, but you are wrong. Your training should be designed to have your reps so sick of training after five days that they are salivating at the thought of spending the rest of their days “not training”. They’ll appreciate it later, but put them through some rigorous and hyper-scheduled activity in week one. It will only make the first jump into live prospecting that much easier.
2. It’s teleprospecting, not sales engineering.
Remember, you are training teleprospectors here. You are not training people to do demos, or to know every bell and whistle of your technology. You are training them to get decision makers on the phone, get them talking about their pains, and to get them in the hands of an expert that can better answer their technical questions and give them specific information on price. They don’t need to know your technology as well as you do, they need to know how you help people. Focus your training on that. Tech training is key, they have to see and feel the product, but only introduce demos after you’ve beaten how you solve common pains within the marketplace into their head. Focus your early training on that and then wow them with a demo of your technology that gives them the “aha” moment they need to launch into a great first week of teleprospecting.
3. Encourage Mistakes.
Every new hire that comes into my office on the first day gets the same speech. While I’m sure I’m ridiculed about it behind my back, I’m willing to bet that it has done more positive for me over the years than negative. A huge part of that speech is letting that new hire know what is expected of him\her in their first week on the phone. One of the main points of that section surrounds making mistakes. Specifically, having a bad call. Blowing a live conversation. I make sure new hires know that NOTHING they do on the phones in that first week is going to bring AG to it’s knees. They have to understand that we can only train them so much and that at some point they have to make that leap of faith and start calling prospects. They have to understand that when that calling starts they will invariably make a mistake, have a bad call, blow an opp, but that it doesn’t matter in the big picture. It doesn’t matter because they can pick up the phone and call a new prospect and make sure that they never make that same mistake again. Most importantly, they can re-call that prospect a week later and most likely turn them into an opportunity because of all the mistakes they made in week one. If you try to prepare your reps for every situation they may face on the phones then you will never actually get them live on the phone.
It takes 5 days to get an intelligent human ready to make outbound calls for a technology company. Be fanatical in their first week’s scheduling, remember what you are training them to be, and give them the freedom to make mistakes and you just might get them ready even faster.