Episode 60
BEST Snippet - Ramp Faster: The Blueprint for Successful Sales Onboarding
Summary
Lucas Price and Taylor Corr dive into building effective seller onboarding programs at Quantcast, a next-generation demand-side platform (DSP). Taylor, with seven years of sales leadership experience, shares insights on developing concrete and structured onboarding processes, emphasizing the importance of clear benchmarks and real-world sales action from day one. They discuss ideal customer profiles, the significance of understanding sales cycles, and data-driven strategies to expedite rep ramp-up time. Join the conversation to learn how to set new reps on the fast track to success. Find Taylor Corr on LinkedIn for more insights.
Take Aways
- Structured Onboarding Programs: Taylor emphasizes the necessity of a specific and concrete onboarding program with clear, standardized benchmarks for new hires, which removes guesswork and facilitates a smoother ramp-up period.
- Importance of ICP and Personas: Understanding the Ideal Customer Profile and the Personas marketers target is foundational for new reps. This knowledge allows them to craft relevant messages and navigate sales conversations effectively.
- Bias to Action: Taylor advocates for a proactive approach where new reps are encouraged to engage in sales activities early on, even if it means stepping out of their comfort zone. Real-life pitches and outbound activities provide invaluable learning experiences.
- Data-Driven Benchmarks: Building benchmarks based on sales cycle data and close rates ensures that onboarding programs are not only structured but also tailored to set reps up for success from the start.
- Continuous Learning and Adaptation: An effective onboarding program evolves over time, with continuous adjustments based on collective data and rep feedback to maintain relevance and effectiveness.
Learn More: https://www.yardstick.team/
Connect with Lucas Price: linkedin.com/in/lucasprice1
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR0BMWoMgPMcHJ4yLLSUhbuafMmdhJTSy&si=tzQz7NFvDdT8Kj8Q
Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk
Full Episode: https://bit.ly/46GFN7V
Mentioned in this episode:
BEST Snippet Outro
BEST Snippet Intro
Transcript
I don't know exactly what that means, but maybe Taylor will tell us. He's been in sales leadership for the last seven years. And his lead, his current channel for the past five years, Taylor, what else should our audience know about you?
[:It's been a really fun ride and I'm excited to chat today.
[:I guess over time with Quantcast, I've had the chance to onboard dozens and dozens. It's not, hundreds of reps into an SMB program where, you know for a lot of SMB mid market programs reps who are either just coming from an SDR org maybe they're coming from out of industry and you want to get them ramped up quickly as possible.
[:They are needing to train up on a bunch of different stuff. And the more you can remove the guesswork for them for what they should be doing week to week, what their benchmarks are, the more clearly you can spell that out. That adds some structure and some certainty for them in what is a really chaotic, fast [00:02:00] paced, moving time for them and in a new org.
Make it specific and concrete, have benchmarks for them that they can really easily follow. And that just helps them get to where they need to be most quickly.
[:[00:02:22] Taylor Corr: If I think back five, seven years ago and some of the early stages of when I was leading this team we aired too much on the side of allowing for. Individual rep styles and creativity and manager subjectivity in the process. Two different reps that were being onboarded by two different managers might have, much different numbers of the curse first month, three months, but each manager might consider that rep to be ramped or say, Hey this person's ready.
wn the line when you want to [:There were two reasons that structure became really important. One was to understand. Hey, who is doing really well those first few months and who needs some extra coaching? Who needs some increased guidance? And the more you can standardize that across teams, there's a common report card to say, Hey here's how we're doing.
And so we noticed that we'd get to the end of that three months or that six months. And the more structure we had, that was common across the teams. Then we could say, Hey, this person is officially ramped. It really helped add some rigor for us. The other piece is reps were asking us for more structure as well.
Hey, what does good look like? Because in most sales organizations, and it depends on your sales cycle, but for us, if it's eight to 10 weeks, for that first deal. You're not going to see revenue for a while. So what is that marker for success? And even, first month, you're learning the outbound motion and maybe not going to be booking that many pitches.
ing the right stuff? Am I on [:So more and more it was rep driven and saying, Hey, we really want to understand what good looks like so that we know we're on track to close these deals and, make a paycheck in those following quarters.
[:What do you think?
[:They have these challenges. Here's how we solve them. Here's how we've solved them with other customers. That's foundational for everything. If you have a rep with a really bedrock understanding of those [00:05:00] elements, well, they can write emails. They can survive in a discovery session. They can, do the pitch.
They can, press add with some of these calls. That's going to be the foundational understanding that, that everyone needs. But it is. Sometimes distracting or tempting to just focus on these sales tools and all the bells and whistles and Hey, here's all the templates we built out.
If you teach a rep templates and sequences and outreach great. They they know how to now add prospects and they can organize their day, but they're really not sure why they're telling this persona, Hey, we're going to solve this challenge. And if they're missing that they're playing catch up from that point.
[:[00:05:49] Taylor Corr: That along with the sales cycle and the expectations are one a and one B, right? A rep should have an understanding of, Hey, here's how we go to [00:06:00] market. Here is our outbound motion alongside how they are ICP. Because one of the big things and a big learning for us. And one thing, one thing I really strongly believe in an onboarding program should have a bias to action.
This falls into the category of when you leave too much subjectivity manager to manager, or, I've been part of other onboarding programs where there's so much emphasis on. Work ramp trainings and, listening to pitches and doing mock pitches and learning, learning, learning.
That's fine, but I set really strong activity standards early on. I want to push reps out of their comfort zone and get them involved in the sales cycle early. The best learnings you're going to have are live with a client or handling an objection on an email or getting in that cold call environment.
I want to teach the sales cycle and how we go to market early on as well alongside those ICP elements so that someone can get going really quickly and get to those really valuable learnings really early.
[:[00:07:13] Taylor Corr: It's a very data driven process. Part of it is, Hey what is your deal cycle and what is your close rate? And trying to work backwards. So for us, for instance first three months, there is a, an activity and a new business meeting expectation that second quarter, you're going to have a smaller goal as you ramp towards a full goal after that six months.
I want to reverse engineer that. I want to understand, hey, if our close rate is X and it roughly takes this many touch points or this much unique activity to get those new business meetings, reverse engineer that all the way back to the beginning, right? And that's something we did early on. And we really built it from, okay, for our reps and not all of our reps, right?
that's going to change over [:How many new business meetings do they have to have on the board? Then you can build in that expectation early on. And for us, yes, there's calls and emails that are an important piece of that. We want people to ramp to that level quickly. But we look at other stuff like how many Unique accounts, people are reaching out to how many contacts and different accounts are adding to sequences and in outreach, for instance, what's the reply rate looking on like early on.
And of course there's qualitative elements. There's always going to be a heavy emphasis early on the coaching, but the things that are more easily controllable and more easily. I guess targetable for a rep, the more concrete benchmarks you can give them again, built from data built from what's going to set them up for success.
Understanding your sales cycle is really important early on.
[:That's exactly it. Let's say you could be a monthly quota, be quarterly, you have an annual quota, but yeah, for any salesperson, the earlier you were getting on the board is going to be, helpful and I tell reps, if you book a pitch day one, that's great, you're not going to take that deal cycle on your own, obviously, we'll get to that point, but that's a good problem to have.
[:And I'd rather, reps were asked. Slightly outside of our ICP or not maybe matching up the personas and challenges right away. We're going to fix that really quickly. You can't wait for perfect and you can't wait for somebody to have everything [00:10:00] fully nailed down and fully understand the messaging.
Even ramped reps are still tweaking with that and getting to that point. So absolutely a bias really is going to help the reps. It's going to help the manager as well. And you're going to be in a learning environment. That's, real pitch versus a mock pitch. That's just going to be so much more valuable.
[:[00:10:22] Taylor Corr: Yeah. So I'm on LinkedIn almost every day trying to share the good word about sales leadership and, chat with people who are also passionate about the topic. So love to connect with anybody who wants to expand on this topic or others. And LinkedIn is probably the best place to find
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