What are the key metrics and indicators to measure the success and impact of your sales onboarding program?

Key metrics and indicators to measure the success and impact of our sales onboarding program include time-to-productivity, which tracks how quickly new hires reach full performance; retention rates, indicating the program's effectiveness in retaining talent; sales performance metrics, such as quota attainment and revenue generated by new hires; and feedback from new employees, assessing their satisfaction and confidence in their roles. These metrics collectively provide a comprehensive view of the onboarding program's effectiveness and areas for improvement.

Monitoring the time to ramp is a critical metric when evaluating the effectiveness of your sales onboarding program. This metric measures the duration it takes for a new sales hire to achieve full productivity and meet their quota. While the time to ramp can vary based on factors like product complexity, market dynamics, and sales cycle, it serves as a valuable indicator of your onboarding program's readiness to equip new hires with the necessary skills to navigate real-world challenges. A shorter time to ramp indicates an efficient, effective onboarding process that swiftly transforms new hires into valuable contributors who drive sales team success and revenue generation.

One approach is to consider extending this ramp to pre-employment, to reduce the run rate of investment in the sales team by having them up to speed sooner when employed. Pre-employment engagement could be as simple as paid-for-engagement during which they learn the products, systems, processes, internal stakeholders, partners, clients, etc by asking them to perform some form of analysis e.g. SWOT or review and feedback.

In my experience, employing a sales-specific multi-measurement assessment proves highly effective in evaluating the competencies of new hires. However, it's worth considering the potential scenario where the assessment reveals a lack of desired skills in a new hire. Therefore, I suggest pre-assessing candidates before making hiring decisions. Additionally, it's essential to verify the predictive validity of the selected sales-specific multi-measurement assessment. How can you accomplish this? Simply request the technical manual of the assessment.

For AI, GPU, and Neocloud sectors, where technical complexities are high, sales onboarding success hinges on specific competencies. Metrics such as time-to-productivity, technical comprehension, and the ability to articulate industry-specific solutions are critical. Competency in these domains requires an understanding of complex technologies and the ability to communicate value to tech-savvy clients. Assessing how quickly new hires grasp sector nuances, identify client pain points, and provide tailored solutions can indicate if they're equipped to drive business outcomes in highly specialized fields.

In addition to tracking time to ramp, another vital metric to consider is sales competency, which assesses the knowledge and skill level of new sales hires in different sales process domains like prospecting, qualifying, presenting, negotiating, and closing. Evaluating sales competency can be accomplished through quizzes, role-plays, simulations, feedback, and performance reviews. Interestingly, benchmarking data reveals that top-performing companies typically have new hires who demonstrate higher sales competency within a shorter period. By measuring sales competency, you can pinpoint strengths and weaknesses, enabling targeted training and coaching to enhance the sales capabilities and confidence of your new hires.

Salespeople are naturally more engaged with the outside world (beyond their company) and their nature leads itself to the current recruitment environment we find ourselves in (grass is greener, quick time-to-hire metrics being an objective), SO they will leave! Perhaps the retention metric needs to be updated for today's world, rather than a Salesperson staying 9-5 being counted, those who remain connected to the business even 1 hour per month for example are considered "retained" This form of retention could build more momentum in a company's growth because experience gained is not so easily lost when someone moves on.

Lots of companies have 20%+ attrition. In my opinion the answer is simple. There compensation model is just not competivite. If you offer 50 fixed/50 variable with 70k OTE (yes lots of companies do that). Obviously people will leave if they get 80/20 with 90k OTE.

In general I think being a hands on leader in onboarding is crucial. i) Check in with your people everyday ii) Let them shadow as many calls as possible iii) Let you top performers help you train the team These things all make the odds of an onboarding working high for you!