Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

The Key to Sales Success: Invest in Training and Onboarding

7 Aug 2023 · 1 min

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Jason M. Lemkin argues that once a company hires beyond its first two sales reps, it must invest substantially in formal training and onboarding. The first two reps typically learn informally by watching founder-led sales, which rarely scales beyond two; without structured training, subsequent reps are often poorly prepared. He recommends building a training course and actively listening to reps' calls using call-review tools (e.g., Gong, Chorus, etc.).

Chapters

Point two related to the first one. Even before this, you've got to invest, at least after your first two reps, more in training and onboarding. And the first two reps learn by osmosis. They report directly to the CEO, really know the product well, those first two reps. And they basically get trained by watching, by by watching the CEO sell, founder led sales. And that sort of works for two reps. I've almost never seen it work for three, four or five reps. They're mistrained, they're untrained, they're not trained, and they perform very poorly because of it. Invest as much as you can training your reps. Build a course to train your reps. Also, whatever you do with these new reps for training onboarding, you've got to listen to their gong or chorus or salesopter, whatever tool you use to listen to their calls.