Teach the Basics: Onboarding Sets Sales Teams for Success with Hana Elliot

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Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management, and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExCexcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready, and let's dive into the good stuff. What up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host, Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And I am so excited for the topic today because it is something that is not only near and dear to my heart as a sales leader, but it's actually one of the places I think most companies get things wrong, which is how to onboard their salespeople. For whatever reason, in the sales industry, we have this weird idea of sink or swim, right? Figure it out, throw them to the wolves, throw them to the deep end. And I think we forget that people die in those situations. That's not how it should be done. And no other career operates this way besides sales. And that is why I'm so excited to have Hana Elliott on the show today. She's the VP of sales over at Vendition, but she's gonna be diving into how to onboard your people the right way. Because how you start is how you finish. That's my belief. Hana, welcome to the show.

Kd, thank you so much. Glad to see ya. Right.

This is a long time coming. I don't know why it took this long for this to happen, but here we are.

Here we are.

We did it. So. All right, well, we're going to dive right into this because I want to make sure we cover as much as possible. Right. So why, why was this the topic? Like when I asked, like, what you want to talk about, and it's SDR onboarding, sales reps, onboarding. Why is this a topic so near and dear to your heart?

Well, you know, the easiest answer to that is because it's what Vendition does. Right? So I'm thinking about it 24 7, seeing thousands of SDRs go through it every year. But I think, you know, the next level to my response is what you just said. It's that a lot of people get it wrong and they don't mean to. Everyone's heart is in the right place. Everyone wants their team to win. It's just a lot harder, I think, than most of us give it credit for.

Sorry. My dog's about to go nuts in the background trying to keep me quiet. He's got to keep me safe. So let's talk about this. Right? So where do you think a lot of companies go wrong? Like, I don't know if I fully agree that. I think they're all their hearts are in the right place, but maybe that's a different conversation. But where do you see a lot of companies go wrong with their onboarding? And then we can flip the script into, like, what are the things that they should be doing?

Man, I think it's really simple. I think it's not setting aside the time to do it right. You know, especially with SDRs, you have to remember that a lot of these folks are entry level. They're coming straight out of college, straight out of high school, straight out of a technical career. Maybe they're a total career switcher who just hasn't had the experience. Experience of working in a sales environment before. And especially I think it applies across the board, but especially in remote environments, they don't have that benefit of being able to look over at the nest next desk and see, oh, Katie's doing it this way. That's what I should do. Right? Like, they just don't have that opportunity to learn that you and I had coming up. Right. And so I think the answer is super simple. It's just the. The intentionality of setting aside the time to be there every day, twice a day. Quick responses while someone's in that very critical first 90 days. And I can't. I can't blame people either, because while you're onboarding a new sdr, you're also held accountable to a number. You're also trying to manage the, you know, your existing team and trying to be there for them as well. You've got so many other things going on. You know, I can't. I can't blame people who don't. Who aren't able to set aside the time that's needed, but that's what it is.

So let's touch on that then. They're busy. I don't think that's an excuse. So what should they do? All right, I'm busy. But you're also responsible for these people. So what should they be doing to either get it done or to free up time to make sure that their people are getting onboarded? The right way because it's one of those chicken or the egg things, like, I'm so busy that I can't onboard my people. But if I'm not onboarding my people, they're not going to succeed, which is only going to make me more stressed and more busy, and it's that never ending. So, like, what could they do to free up time or to make it work if they are strapped?

You know, first of all, I think it's a worthwhile exercise to look at the pipeline or revenue impact of not having a fully ramped SDR and seat, because that's what's going to help you prioritize your time. It's too easy to get caught up in the daily whirlwind, you know, to your point, and say, you know, I'm too busy. I. I just don't have time to do it. I have all these other things I'm doing. But once you see the financial impact of not having an SDR in seat, that's part of your forecast, that's part of your model, that's part of your, you know, revenue delivery for the rest of the year, then it makes it a lot easier to prioritize because. Because it's very, very significant, I think most of us will find. So I think that's the first thing I would do, and then the second thing I would do too is again, it's simple. It's. Before you even start hiring, make sure you have your first 90 days laid out. Go ahead and block your calendar for the first 90 days. Don't let other things creep up and take priority. And I say this because I've seen it, but I know how hard it is because I don't get it right all the time either. I'm onboarding people right now onto my team, and I don't get it right all the time. It's really hard to do, but it helps have it, you know, before the whole thing's even started blocking your calendar. Going ahead and setting up mentor relationships, going ahead and setting up buddy relationships. Because when it comes down to it, the whirlwind's gonna take over.

Absolutely. Something that rolled out actually, when I was at service time. Cause I was in a very similar situation where I had a team of 20 and grew it to almost 100 people in a year. And I was like, how on earth do I onboard this many people? Right? I didn't have an enablement team at the time, was still ramping that up. So we implemented something called tribal training, where the first 60 to 90 days were fully mapped, but individuals on the team were responsible for different activities. And so we were able to like scale out like a heavy onboarding program, but everyone was only responsible for like an hour ish per week to make it run. And it really helped to scale things out and it touched on one of the things that you were mentioning. But I never figured this out really well remotely. And so I'm curious if you have some thoughts on this because it helped with the culture, right? I'm learning from my peers, it helped with connection. I'm hearing it from people in my role. But that on the floor, hearing things that on the floor coaching, right where in the office you had disappeared remotely. Have you seen things to help bridge that? Have you done things or seen things? Best practice of like how do you recreate that a little bit And I'll share this point and then pass the back mic over. Ramp time was the only metric. I could not get back to its original form. Ramp time was the only metric. Once it moved fully remote, I could not get back to its original form. And that was with all the things and all the tactics and all the things. I could never get it back there. And I think this was part of it. What have you seen around that kind of on the floor learning remotely?

There are a couple. I mean, I'll be honest, I personally haven't cracked the code either. But here are some things that we know and have seen work. Again, we're working with thousands of SDRS a year. We're working with hundreds of employers and hiring managers a year. Here are some things that we do know work. So I love that like tribal learning that you mentioned that matters, right? And ideally your SDR is on the floor listening to all the calls going on around them. And then same thing, you as the manager are walking the floor hearing the conversations, able to drop in feedback on the fly. But when you're in a remote environment and it has to be one to one and it has to be intentional and scheduled, that gets a lot harder because you know, you just don't simply have the time. So of course, like a call conversation intelligence software, call recording software is important for that Gong, chorus, exec vision, whoever, when it comes to delivering feedback as a manager. And then when it also comes to SDRs, listening to how other people are doing it. But you do lose the element of being able to shadow on the fly. And so that's another place where, looping back to what I was originally saying, that's another place where I think the rest of your. Your team can play in is having more experienced AES or some of your senior SDRs who have done it and are showing great results, have them listen in and shadow and give their feedback. Chances are if you've been coaching them all along, they'll also know your mentality and be able to pass that along and re emphasize. And honestly, like, sometimes it helps to hear it from somebody else, not just your direct manager. Right? Like, that's how it is drilled into your brain, is when you hear it on repeat, is when you hear it from multiple sources. And so, you know, kind of along along with that, I'd say, and I mentioned this really kind of in passing earlier, but I'd say making sure that your new SDRs have a buddy on the team, which is not only great for shadowing, feedback, coaching, etc. But just when it comes to human connection. Right. And having someone that they know they can go to, whether it's like a personal thing or a work thing, that's not you, I think is important. And then I think similarly, and additionally it's not either or. I think you need both. Is making sure that they have a mentor, again, who isn't you. My first job out of college was teaching swim lessons. And actually I did it through high school and college, but I'm maybe minimizing it. I ran the aquatics program at a local facility.

There you go. Say it all.

Yeah, I taught swim lessons, but creating the curriculum and teaching them was definitely part of it. And we always said, parents, you can be here, but we don't want you to be the ones teaching the lessons because your kid is maybe gonna act out in front of you. Your kid is maybe, like, too attached to you, and they don't want you to see them fail. So let. We're the unbiased third party that's gonna teach them how to swim because you need that support. We're helping you teach your kid how to swim. And so having that, like, unbiased third party, I think, is also really important. And, you know, one cool thing about being a sales leader is we're all super active on. You know, many of us are super active on LinkedIn and in our networks and connections. Like, those are your people that you can ask to help, mentor to check in once in a while on your reps, who may be too scared to say something to you, no matter how trusting your relationship is, who can look for red flags that maybe you're not able to see. So, sorry, I went a little off topic. I got. I got up on my.

You were on all the topics. What are you talking about? Right. It was there. You're just connecting dots from different industries, which I think is important because if sales looked at literally any other industry, swimming lessons, nursing, like, whatever, like the amount of practice and structure that they get to learn a skill is immense. And then in sales, we do the opposite. So I actually love the correlation of like running an aquatics center.

Right.

Teaches you how to build out training, how to deal with difficult people, AKA parents, how to deal with different skill sets, because they're all different. Right. Put me in the slow lane for sure. You know, you got differing, varying experiences there. But like, I think it's important because I wish people in sales thought about onboarding the same way they thought about other skills they've built. You would never, ever throw someone into the pool and then expect them to win a race in three weeks.

Right?

And that's how we train a lot of our people. So, like, let's talk about the elements of a good onboarding program because you've talked about, okay, like the first 90 days block the time, right? But what are the things that a good onboarding program should have over those 90 days to. To get the most impact? Because there's plenty of people listening right now that go, oh, yeah, we have a 90 day onboarding program. You know, they learn the product the first week and then, you know, they have a mentor meeting the third week and then, you know, we check in on them. That doesn't pass it. What should a great onboarding program have, include or be done?

Great question. I'm just trying to think of, like, how to concisely respond, which, as you've seen, I'm not great at the concise responses.

So give me the first one. First thing that popped in your head when I said, what does a great onboarding program need? What's the first thing that pops into your head?

Man? First thing is remember again that a lot of the majority of SDRs are entry level. They may not have been in a sales role, a tech role, a business world. They don't have the person next to them to learn from. So start from the very beginning. Be aware of the jargon that you're using. Be aware of the language that you're using. Start before you ask them to get on any kind of phone call. Just make sure that they understand their surroundings. They understand what your tools are and what they're used for and how to use them. They understand deeply who your Personas are and not just what a Persona is. But like actually who yours are, make sure that there's some element of tying them into the company culture too. Right. That can't be underestimated. Again, particularly in a remote environment where you can't just see it. You have to live it and feel it and be extra intentional and go the extra mile to make sure people understand what your company is all about. If they haven't been in this kind of work environment before, they don't know the cues to look out for. And you know, the other thing I think and hope is kind of a duh thing but is making sure that you're abundantly clear on expectations from metrics, through activity, through professional behavior, meeting etiquette, Slack etiquette, email etiquette. Again, those are things I think that sometimes get over. You know what I think most people do have is month one, here's the number of meetings you set. Month two, here's the number. Month three, here's the number. But I don't think we're supporting our SDRs enough and like how to get to that number with those other expectations. Like this is what your month one is going to look like. This is when you need to be at every single meeting on time or early. You know, this is how you respond to someone who helped you out. This is, you know, this is how quickly I expect responses on Slack. All those little things that add up to not only making sure someone really understands their job, but they understand the company and they understand what you're definition of a successful employee is because it isn't always just about the number. Right. Obviously that's a enormous part of it, a thousand percent.

Right. And that's where I do think people forget, especially with SDR is like for a lot of them this may even be their first job job. And so like teaching them how to be a professional, right? Like what professional communication sounds like, what it means to have a full time job job. Right. Like you have to teach all of that. And I think that's where a lot of people miss is they forget all the things that they need to know in order to succeed. Like it's overwhelming the amount of, if, if anyone listening, if any, y' all sat down for just a second and wrote down all the things a rep on your team needs to know in order to succeed. You would change your onboarding tomorrow because if you're not teaching it. And then also the next point I want to get into here, which is practice, right? If you're not teaching it and you're not practicing with them, how are they supposed to learn it? Like no wonder it takes five, six months to ramp them up because it takes five, six months to learn these things if it's just happening through the grapevine or like you know, randomly versus being intentional. So so where's.

Yeah I think you know, I think too it's again it's hard when you're in the whirlwind to do this but man really think deeply about it too. Right. And because I think there's so many things baked in there response times on slack that we take for granted maybe but you know just keeping keeping in mind that there and that a lot of them are entry level and that you do it's not just teaching somebody how to pick up a phone and call.

Even then I think it's hilarious how little training they actually get on how to do that. And that's where I want to go in this next one which is practice. Right. Because same idea. Did you do an instrument or sport.