Last week, Litmos’ Chief Revenue Officer, Jeff Griggs and Litmos’ Director of Global Talent Management, Pam Ramsbott hosted a webinar titled “Rev Up Revenue: Strategies for Better Sales Onboarding.”

The presentation covered many topics, including the challenges and best practices of sales onboarding, securing manager ownership, cultivating cross-functional alignment, and assessing employee strengths and skill gaps during the sales hiring process.

Read on to review a summary of the discussion or watch a full recording of the webinar here.

Why sales onboarding matters

At the beginning of the webinar, Ramsbott presented compelling stats about the impact of effective sales onboarding, including the fact that effective onboarding has been reported to improve win rates by 14% and quota attainment by 6.6%.

The most competitive organizations understand the importance of comprehensive onboarding for sales success. However, implementing truly impactful onboarding requires a lot of communication and planning: from identifying and integrating organizational goals, to getting manager buy-in and measuring impact.

In their discussion, Griggs and Ramsbott address each of these concerns, and discuss how to leverage technology to achieve better sales onboarding results.

Weaving organizational goals into hiring, onboarding, and continuous training

After illustrating the importance of onboarding, Griggs and Ramsbott explored why continuous training is a must for sales teams and the critical role that managers play in learning and development. Griggs especially stressed the necessity of ongoing training and development for salespeople, even after they have been in the role for some time.

Getting cross-functional alignment on the skills requirements and goals during the hiring process is also something that can’t be overlooked, as it can have a lasting impact on the ways in which new hires develop and grow into their sales role. Sales teams need to form strong partnerships with every function of revenue enablement to create effective yet personalized sales training, according to Ramsbott.

Clearly establishing business goals across all functions can help sales teams hire the right people and keep them on track to close deals, as Ramsbott explains:

“Having this kind of rigor around a process and very detailed goals and expectations for what you want people to know and do helps the learning and development organization effectively build the training, effectively assess your new seller capabilities post-training, and it really does help your manager [with] ongoing coaching to continuously improve those capabilities and skills.”

Incorporating assessments into the sales hiring process

Having thorough assessment practices in place for hiring can be helpful for identifying the strengths and skills gaps of new hires, according to Griggs. In discussing his own rubric for sales candidates, Griggs listed industry knowledge, business acumen, and sales skills as qualities that he looks for during his interviews.

Focusing on both behavioral and skills-based assessments during the interview process can help leaders identify potential areas of development and can also inform the onboarding process. Simulations, Ramsbott added, can also be used during onboarding to help managers assess whether new hires can deliver on what they displayed during the interview process.

Promoting practice and feedback through gamification and social learning

Taking a creative approach to sales training with gamification can encourage frequent practice, leading to long-term retention of new skills and capabilities. It can also be leveraged to make learning more social.

Griggs explained how his team at Litmos hosts a “March Madness” themed event where sales team members are paired up to handle common objections they might face on sales calls. Participants then vote on who gave the best response. This approach not only encourages practice and learning but also fosters a sense of fun and camaraderie among the team.

Griggs was quick to clarify that his March Madness exercise isn’t meant to make anyone feel bad. Rather, this form of gamification is meant to encourage team members to learn from one another and enhance their skills. “It’s not a time to beat somebody up. It’s actually a time of learning where people can learn how somebody responded to that objection in the best way. Or they can use that little nugget themselves for the next one,” he explained.

Leveraging technology to enhance sales onboarding and training

Griggs and Ramsbott discussed how technology can be leveraged to augment the sales training and onboarding process. Ramsbott explained how the Litmos Learning Management System (LMS) facilitates continuous learning through features like AI video assessments and the Boost feature.

The AI video assessment feature promotes practice and feedback by enabling salespeople to record and upload videos of themselves delivering pitches, demos, or other presentations. Their videos are then assessed through AI functionality on keyword usage, rate of speech., and sentiment. When asked whether he uses this feature to train his team at Litmos, Griggs replied enthusiastically in the affirmative: “I have! I love it.”

The other tool that the panelists considered useful for practice and information retention was Litmos’ Boost feature, which can be used to reinforce key learnings from training. “The boost feature allows you to send questions out following a training, to keep that content fresh and top of mind. Then it guides the learner back to the actual content if they don’t answer those questions correctly,” Ramsbott explained.

Key themes and takeaways

During the webinar, attendees gained many insights about sales onboarding, from both an HR and revenue perspective.

One topic that emerged throughout the presentation was the impact of manager ownership and leadership buy-in. Ramsbott highlighted how important it is for HR to establish and communicate clear organizational objectives for manager, while Griggs explained sone ways in which revenue leaders may encourage ownership – such as folding training into Management by Objectives (MBOs) for sales managers.

“We have a theory or philosophy around extreme ownership, ” he explained, referring to Litmos. “You as the leader, are responsible for owning and developing a plan for continual learning.”

This session also illustrated the true investment that impactful onboarding requires. Throughout the presentation, Ramsbott and Griggs discussed how creating, delivering, measuring, and optimizing sales training requires investment from both sales managers and leadership across the organization. Successful companies have to be ready to invest in onboarding if they want it to make an impact.

Ready to dive into this dynamic discussion? Watch the webinar here.