Setting Up New Solution Sellers to Succeed

Setting Up New Solution Sellers to Succeed Can Make All The Difference

The first 90 days of any new solution sellers tenure with an organization has a great impact on their effectiveness and speed to productivity. A first 90-day plan sets the pace and expectations for their behavior and their ongoing results. In addition to customized solution selling training programs for their unique situation, you certainly want to invest in getting onboarding for your salespeople right.

Your sales onboarding plan should align with your overall sales strategy and unique sales culture. New employee onboarding processes should highlight behavioral and performance expectations for new solution sellers and teach the key sales processes, tools, and methodologies required for them to be successful. It is your responsibity as sales leaders to ensure that your sales team starts off on the right foot.

5 Ways to Set New Solution Sellers Up to Succeed

Top sellers ensure that their sales onboarding process teaches their new solution sellers how to:

1. Finding New Customers
   Some sales teams rely upon business development and marketing to feed them leads; others consider sales prospecting part of every sales team member’s job. Regradless of which group you are in, be crystal clear about your ideal target client profile where you should win the majority of the time.  Share the what works best in prospecting for new clients and how much time you expect your sales team to spend on this part of the sales cycle.
2. Qualifying Sales Opportunities
   Provide new salespeople with a proven process for qualifying customer opportunities. Give them the weighted rating system you use to sort top tier customers from those with little likelihood of buying from you.
3. Providing Value
   Top solution sellers can clearly articulate your company’s unique value proposition that sets you apart from the competition.  Then provide the sales tools and support they need to stay in contact with target prospects and ways to follow up with touch points that provide real value. It will be the salesperson’s choice of which tools to use to maintain contact with their prospect but there should be a variety of whitepapers, email templates, customer success stories, assessments, and relevant articles from which to choose.
4. Handling Sales Objections
   Identify and share how to overcome sales objections that your team most often encounters. Sales objections usually fall into just a few categories: too expensive, not currently needed, other priorities, etc. Use customized solution selling training programs to help your new sales folks understand and practice objection handling techniques like painting a picture of what could happen without using your service, etc.
5. Managing Their Time
   Be clear about how much time you expect sales reps to spend in direct customer contact, how often in team meetings, what reports they are responsible for, and so on. In short, what activities have spelled success for your highest performing sales team members and how should they prioritize those activities and their time?

The Bottom Line

A 90-day sales onboarding experience can set the stage for a salesperson’s future success. See that it reflects the way you want them to behave throughout their sales days, weeks and months ahead. With a clear road map, they will be well launched toward achieving the goals your company needs for sales success.

If you want to learn more about how to set new solution sellers up for success, download 7 Research-Backed Speed to Productivity Best Practices for New Hires