How To Onboard and Ramp Up Your Sales Team Faster

Even after the weeks to months, it takes to hire a new salesperson, it can take your new sales hire another couple of months to ramp up and start generating expected revenue. In a previous study on hiring superior salespeople, the largest percentage of respondents indicated that 3-4 months was their typical ramp-up time, but when executed correctly and efficiently, organizations can cut this time in half at about 6-8 weeks. 

We recently posted a cheat sheet to hiring sales professionals faster covering the best practices in the hiring process and the impact on company revenue from our ebook Faster Hiring Means More Sales that was developed in collaboration with Betts Recruiting. But the hiring process isn’t truly complete until a new hire is fully ramped and confidently performing and meeting sales goals. That’s why proper onboarding that cuts down ramp time is crucial not only to individual sales goals but company revenue as well. 

Before They Start

Training schedules and prep start before a new hire’s day one. You’ll want to use the time between offer acceptance and a sales hire’s first day to start building their training program, putting together resources, and setting them up with company logins for the tools in your tech stack. 

Getting as much paperwork, logins, and consolidated resources out of the way as you can before a new hire starts can accumulate to several saved days in your onboarding calendar and decrease overall ramp time.

Week 1-6 (The Onboarding Calendar)

For efficient onboarding, we recommend a 6-week detailed calendar that tells a new hire exactly what they’ll be doing every hour and with whom. Set blocks of time for each activity, schedule time with people in different departments that will be beneficial for new hires to talk to, and leave no gaps in the calendar. A well-organized onboarding calendar will also show new sales hires by example how to manage their time once ramped. 

Theme each week around what a new hire should be learning. For example:

Week 1: Company Mission & Values

Week 2: Product Training

Week 3: Pitch Deck Training

Week 4: Sales Process

Week 5: Training & Practice

Week 6: Training & Practice

Every onboarding calendar should also build-in time for email/prospect research, role-playing, shadowing, market research, handling objections, practice demos, and daily debriefs.

The example onboarding calendar below is meant to be a simplified example of the progression in responsibility of a new sales hire and again should include no gaps.

Download the full ebook to get our Onboarding Keys to Success

Remember SMART Goals

The onboarding calendar is just a piece of your full onboarding and sales ramp program. Goal setting and expectations also need to be weaved in throughout a sales hire’s first six weeks so they have a clear cut view of what is expected of them during their ramp period and at full productivity.

Set your expectations based on historical team data and check-in frequently. But most importantly, set SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely.

A good onboarding experience will set a new sales hire up for success and accelerated ramp time. Combining a detailed calendar and achievable and clear goals is how you set them up for success.

Improve Your Onboarding Process | Contact Skaled

Skaled is a pioneering sales consultancy dedicated to helping small to large sales organizations put the right people, processes, and technology in place. Developing a detailed onboarding process to efficiently ramp new SDRs and sales reps is important when building up sales teams and maintaining the performance of established teams. Send us a message below and just tell us what your challenges are. We’ll help you identify the gaps in your process and speed up new employee ramp.