Sales Onboarding Checklist

Managing the onboarding process for new sales hires can be challenging. 

From assessing their potential, coaching them, providing them with proper support and resources, and finding a balance between onboarding new hires and managing their daily sales activities - a lot needs to be done by the managers.

And this can lead to burnout and reduced productivity. 

A detailed checklist can help sales managers stay organized and ensure all necessary steps are taken to set new hires up for success.

What is sales onboarding?

Sales onboarding is the process of onboarding new hires and helping them become a part of your sales team by providing them with the necessary training, resources, and guidance. 

The end goal is to make new sales hires feel welcome at the company, train and engage with them so that they can perform well at their job.

Pre-onboarding 

The real onboarding process starts right after the new hire accepts your offer.

Here, it is important to constantly stay in touch, and ensure they feel welcomed in the new environment. A few things that the manager should do to ensure that the new hire feels easy to join

• Regularly keep in touch with the new hire and answer any of their doubts.
• Ask the HR team to assist new sales hires in completing all the necessary paperwork.
• Give them access to their corporate accounts (Slack, Google, CRM, and others), so they have everything they need to work on their first day.
• Send them a welcome package with all the information they need to learn about their first day.

Welcoming new sales hires

The next stage of the onboarding process is to welcome new sales members. 

Even if the new members have done all the homework and read the welcome packet, they will still need guidance to navigate their first day. 

Introduce them to their colleagues, show them how the business works, and assure them they can ask for assistance at any time.

Role-specific training 

When new members get used to the environment and the work, it’s necessary to provide specific training for their role.

The training should take place during the onboarding process itself, preferably within the first 2 weeks of joining the organization.

The training should cover the following:

• A presentation about the company and its product/services
• The sales tech stack used in the organization, and the reporting structure and format
• How to conduct a demo
• Lead generation
• Different sales cold outreach techniques, cold emails, cold calling, and others
• Sales objection handling techniques
• Sales reporting

During the training,  conduct regular assessments to understand the new hires' strengths and weaknesses, as this can then help in providing specific training in the later stages. 

Nurturing new hires to become successful sales reps

The last step of the onboarding process is to familiarize them with your company and transition them to full-fledged sales employees. 

Conduct a performance review to reflect on their work, identify areas of improvement, and set goals for them in their role.

A sales onboarding checklist to set new sales hire for success

The first three months of sales hire are pretty important. 

1. In the first month, the focus is on learning.

2. During the second month, new sales hires are asked to execute their learnings.
3. And in the third month, the focus is on improving their weaknesses

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