New hire sales training on products and regulations

Published by Andrea Day on January 24, 2022January 24, 2022

New hire sales training

Recruitment gets a lot of attention because it takes valuable resources away from your core business. A simple online search yields millions of blogs, articles, studies, and more aimed at helping you to recruit better. Amazingly, most of the advice seems to stop after recruitment finishes. However, if you’re in the position of needing to onboard a large new sales team, when recruitment finishes your work has only just begun. Given the investment in time and resources required to onboard great new team members, you need to think about how to keep them engaged and happy and how to quickly onboard them. New hire sales training is a critical next step. You’ve invested substantial sums of money in advertising the new jobs, interviewing clients, and evaluating them. You need to make sure your new hires get off to the best possible start!

As mentioned above, after recruitment we need to think about how to successfully onboard. This is critical to really see the ROI on your recruitment. If your new hire sales training only consists of giving them the employee handbook, it’s not going to work. Failed onboarding schemes lead to high employee turnover, poor customer service, and missed sales opportunities.

So, it’s important to understand what you need to keep in mind when you build your new hire sales training.

Complex products require custom training & behaviour

This is a particular challenge in the software space. If you’re selling a complex B2B product with a unique sales process, you can’t just give salespeople generic training. Instead, you need sales training that educates them on:

Product: What do you sell? What problem does it solve ?
Qualify: Ask leads the right questions to qualify leads them.
Overcome objections. What objections do you face?

A custom-built training program is the only option for your new hire sales training if you want to get into these levels of detail. However, all custom solutions aren’t equal. We recently wrote an article looking specifically at onboarding and what you need to look for in custom solutions.

Evaluation and oversight: If you have a long sales cycle, you can’t afford to wait

The B2B tech space faces the unique challenge of long sales cycles. Depending on your exact space, you could be faced with between six and nine months-long sales cycles. You can’t afford to wait nine months to see if your new salespeople can sell!

Digital training can help here. The best digital experiences use situations to train employees. For example, they might show a customer saying something then ask the new employee to choose a response.

This can open a world of data for you to use to identify and track emerging talent in your organisation or part ways with those who aren’t the right fit.

The best digital experiences not only help your salespeople learn the information they need to sell they also focus on the behaviours they need to do to sell your product. They allow your employees to engage in real-life situations with real-life customers, validating the customer touchpoints needed to sell.

This allows their manager to focus on specific skills and if the new hire can’t improve them, you can both agree to part ways much more quickly. This saves the company money, stops poor hires from derailing growth goals and protects the company culture. Company culture can be undermined by massive churn, which can easily happen if you hire a new large sales contingent and then wait nine months to see if they can cut it.

A highly regulated sector needs ongoing training

If you sell in a highly regulated industry or your software manages or processes sensitive data, that changes how you train your employees.

New hire sales training must be significantly more complex to address compliance and, as mentioned above, must be custom. For example, if you work in health tech, you don’t want generic training about HIPAA. This is because HIPAA is incredibly broad and touches on many different aspects of the patient data of Americans (even if that data is collected in Europe).

Instead, you need your employees to understand exactly how GDPR impacts your software and how you sell. But it’s not just about GDPR, that’s just an example.

If you work in finance, your salespeople could face different regulations depending on what financial products they are selling and to whom. This could mean you need different training for different sales departments.

Regardless of the regulatory environment in which you work, there is one point in common. Regulations are constantly evolving and are often complex and therefore hard to remember. That’s why your new hire sales training needs to be custom (to reflect your compliance risks) and ongoing. Even after your new salespeople are onboarded and trained, you will want them to take refresher courses throughout the year.

Custom digital experiences are the best for new hire sales training

Fast-growing B2B companies face unique challenges when onboarding a new sales team. They need to train on complex products, a detailed sales process, a long sales cycle and with compliance in mind.

Given all these challenges, the best approach is custom digital training experiences. The custom aspect makes sure that the training teaches salespeople about your products and how you sell.