From Mundane to Memorable: Develop and Retain a Top-Performing Sales Team

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Hi, I'm David Ash, the Director of Sales Development here at Alego and I manage not only how new sales reps ramp, I'm also responsible for how our reps grow and develop over time to continuously increase their skill set and drive revenue for the business. Today I'm here to share from mundane to memorable, develop and retain a top performing sales team and today's theme is all about how to enable your team long after onboarding. So the majority of sales enablement and sales leaders understand the importance of proper onboarding. It is there to set the reps up for success though a lot of balls are dropped after onboarding and that's what I would like to focus on today. How do we improve our sales reps to perform at a high level and stay at the company? How do we enable our team to be successful long after onboarding at a Lego? After you're done with onboarding, you start with Everboarding. It is an approach focused on employee specific training needs that provides learning opportunities, facilitates peer connection and improves employee experience.

So how can your company build out an everboarding plan?

Before I talk about how to build out your own Everboarding plan, we need to understand what may stop reps from buying into improving over time and stop them from wanting to do everboarding. And what we've heard is from from sales and enablement leaders is a lot of training dies after onboarding because the rep doesn't know where to go to find new ways to learn or the information is just scattered all over the place. Most companies have recordings of these great trainings that they did and the best practices they saved. But they're saved in different areas and they're not used after the fact because they're too hard to find. Or these trainings are just way too long and people don't have the attention span they used to have. So how do we get people to take advantage of the material in your system and buy into everboarding? One approach would be to tag the trainings in your LMS to make it easily found and create courses that are bite sized learnings for reps to take on their own time. They can view it on their own time and not have to sit through a three hour training. You can have the live training and then break up the recording of the live training into bite sized videos, then put it into a specific course. This way the learner can view it on their own time and take breaks if needed.

Another approach to helping people improve and buy into Everboarding is to consider including courses in their promotion path instead of of just promoting based on overall production. Add a learning aspect to it. This way you're promoting the best performers and most knowledgeable reps. By designing these different courses, you are showing the rep that you are investing in their future and creating opportunities for them to improve at their job, which in return will help retain them and help the company in the long run.

So they're watching all these courses, they're looking at the information. How do we make sure they're retaining the information and finding value in the courses? One way to help the rep retain the information they just learned is to include quizzes in between the bite sized learning modules. You should create different types of quizzes to keep the rep engaged and entertained. Quizzes are a great way to help get the rep excited to learn more. Now, one piece of advice I'll give you. Do not make the quizzes too hard. You want to make sure they are digesting the information but not push them away by making it too hard and too hard to find the correct answer. We want them to be excited that they're learning new information and are showing improvements. Another way to get them excited to dive into Everboarding is by making sure the system you are using is mobile friendly. The generation that is slowly taking over the workforce is used to having everything in the palm of their hands. Let's meet them where they are and have your ever boarding and onboarding mobile friendly. You'll see higher adoption by allowing them to access the content wherever they are.

All right, so now they've learned the information, we've hit them with reinforcement. Now let's talk about what to do to make sure they are practicing and implementing what they just learned. How do we make this process sticky and have them continue other pieces of onboarding? By making sure their first experience is a good experience.

One way to do that is have them demonstrate what they learned. At the end of the course you could ask the rep to make a short video talking about what they have learned in that course. And here at Alego we call those stand and delivers. We want to understand if the rep can digest information, but more importantly if they can regurgitate it in their own words. This will also give the leader or a coach the opportunity to help them by giving them feedback.

You could do this asynchronously through the video so you can take immediate action and won't have to wait for your next one on one or wait to put time on their calendar. Also, by the rep doing this on their own and not in front of a large group, it can Help build their confidence and we know how important confidence is. Not everyone can handle the pressure of delivering new information in front of a large group or on live on a call. We want to create a place where they can build confidence over time.

So once that rep has completed the specific course, we need to understand how they're implemented into their day to day. We know we've hit them with reinforcement, we've had them do their stand and delivers well. Now how are they actually doing it live? To ensure we understand how they're doing using that new skill they've learned, you could use a call intelligence tool to see how they're putting it into practice. Now for my team, they're customer facing. So I use CI or call intelligence to understand how they're engaging the clients using their new skill and knowledge. And I provide feedback to help sharpen that ax.

For those who aren't familiar with call intelligence, it is a tech that records the reps calls and analyzes different metrics within the call. Now this may only apply to those in a customer facing role, but I'm sure you can see different ways that this could be used to help my team improve. I listen to as many calls as I can while I'm in the office or while I'm driving to or from the office. I want to understand how my reps are using the new knowledge they gain and help them reinforce it. I can give feedback in the call or by using a scorecard. I've built a scorecard into our CI tool. I not only get to hear how they're using the new skills and provide feedback within the call, I can score the rep using the scorecard to help me understand where they need improvements and create a game plan. By implementing this into our ever boarding, we have seen it help us build a better culture of learning and coaching. Our scorecards are used to gather data over time and make educated decision based on that data. We collect no more. Using anecdotal feedback and guessing where individuals need to improve, you have hard data to go off of.

The data is then compiled and a competency model is built for the individual. This will help show them how they're improving over time. And I'm a huge fan of this because it lets me build individual game plans. So to help my reps improve rather than guessing where they need to improve, this is also good for the rep to see. So it's not just me telling the rep they need to improve. We have the data to show them they can go, then go take action on their own to get better and refer back to places when they were in that course that they just took to fill in that gap. The competency map is another great way to get the rep excited about everboarding and help them improve over time.

Now I know I just went over. What I just went over may seem daunting because a lot of us are wearing many hats and it's hard to find time to do everything we need to do. That's where AI comes in for us. At a Lego. We've been fortunate to embrace this technology and it's really helped our employees bloom. Pun intended. It amplifies how we coach, learn and grow as an organization. So let's dig in a little more. I know I have a little time left here, so imagine not needing to go assess every exercise or quiz. Not needing to listen to every recorded call. With AI, it can go into your exercises, quizzes and calls and pinpoint gaps that the rep may be facing and give coaching and feedback to that rep. AI can automatically make recommendations on what content to deliver to the rep. For example, a short video from another rep showing them what good looks like, a guide on how to handle a certain objection, or ways not to use filler words or ask better questions to the prospect. By receiving in time, coaching the rep can quickly improve before attempting that skill again.

What about helping your reps practice? Instead of having reps learn trial by fire or the dreaded get up in front of all of your new teammates and try to embarrass yourself or not embarrass yourself too much, you could have them take a crawl, walk, run approach and use AI simulators to help build up their confidence. Allow them to practice their script or framework with an AI bot until they have built that confidence of delivering new information. As a coach, I love this approach. It allows me to understand where they are in their process and again take action asynchronously. I want to give them enough practice in private before asking them to try a new skill live on the phone. And I love this quote. It's something I live by. The more we sweat and practice, the less we bleed in war. Again, our focus is to ensure that our reps are using what they learned and putting their best foot forward.

All right, we're almost at time here to recap. To develop and retain top performing sales rep, a company should offer ever Boarding. Make sure you are doing the following when creating ever an ever boarding plan, create different courses that can easily be accessed by your reps. Wherever they are or wherever they may be in the world, create ways to reinforce practice and coaching for that new skill the rep learned and use AI to help scale your efforts and help the rep get the attention they need to be excited to learn.

All right, thank you for your time and I hope you found this valuable.