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Sales Enablement: Recruitment through Retirement

Published on Jul 26, 2017

Learn how your sales enablement strategy should evolve. 

We’ve discussed the importance of having a sales enablement strategy over our last couple of posts. Specifically, we talked about how your sales enablement strategy creates a process for providing your sales force with information, content and tools to sell more effectively. It is the foundation for the customer experience with your company’s sales cycle. As sales enablement continues to evolve, we know it’s important to review your sales enablement methodologies at each stage of your sales reps’ career, recruitment through retirement.

Recruitment


Ongoing growth of the US economy has lead to an increasing number of sales jobs.  However according to the 2017 HireRight Benchmark Report, 62 percent of the human resource professionals surveyed reported “finding qualified job candidates” as their top business challenge. (“It’s hard to find good help these days,” right?) This is partially due to the need for sales reps to not only have successful soft and sales skills but also problem-solving and technical knowledge.

Proactively pursuing candidates can be an effective way to recruit top talent to your sales force. But data-driven analytics partnered with traditional candidate screening methodologies can assist companies in predicting a rep’s performance and organizational compatibility.


Onboarding

“Onboarding may be the most critical time in an employee’s experience at a company – one that has a long-lasting impact on engagement, performance and retention,” according to research from Harvard Business Review. This is spot on. We know successful onboarding programs include training on company and product information, sales resources and processes, customer acquisition markets and company tools.

We also know that out-of-the box training programs are largely unsuccessful due to their failure to address unique skills and organizational sales processes. The onboarding program ideally should be a combination of online, instructor-led and hands-on practical training to facilitate a sales rep’s success.

Early Career

As your sales reps’ career matures, it’s important to have formal mentoring and coaching programs in place for ongoing feedback and support. If you don’t, processes become too loosey goosey. We’ve seen this happen, and it basically sets the rep up to fail. Mentoring and coaching allow reps to develop competencies and proficiencies in a helpful, positive environment. A sales performance evaluation during this stage of the reps’ career can help to identify their strengths and weakness to determine what skills to focus on to maximize results

Mid Career

We know from experience that it can be difficult to continuously provide what reps need to succeed, especially if you’re a smaller business or you’re wearing too many hats. But ongoing observation, evaluation and communication with your sales reps are important even after they are seasoned. Ensuring that reps continue to have access to relevant customer data, industry reports, online content and tools is important to successful customer interactions. Periodic evaluations of your sales team, processes and systems will help to maximize effectiveness and maintain a winning sales culture.

End Stage Career

What’s interesting about this stage is the number of clients we see who drop the sales enablement ball because there’s the assumption that sales veterans already know what they’re doing. Why waste time and money? Besides, they are going to be leaving soon, right?

The truth is, using sales enablement strategies not only creates a better customer sales experience and process, it also has an added benefit of positively impacting retention. Ongoing training, periodic evaluations and sales performance reviews ensure seasoned reps remain in top form. Top sales reps are more likely to remain with a company invested and committed to their ongoing success. Veteran reps appreciate how the sales enablement strategy helps them exceed quota and close rates.

Adopting or refining your sales enablement process can improve sales performance and accelerate revenue growth. If your company’s sales are stagnant or declining, Revecent can evaluate your sales enablement lifecycle to determine where efficiencies can be made. Request a consult now and start seeing powerful results. 

Revecent experts recruit, train, equip and manage high-performance sales teams to accelerate revenue growth. Contact us today to see how we can help your organization’s sales team exceed expectations.

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