Today a sales team must not only be able to sell a competitive advantage; they must be a competitive advantage. In most companies, it is increasingly difficult to sustain a competitive advantage by traditional means. Traditional factors such as: superior products, scale, and innovative manufacturing technology may provide short term advantages, but unfortunately they can be replicated in relatively short order by an increasing number of agile and aggressive domestic and international competitors.

Although a great sales team is difficult to craft, it has the potential to provide a significant competitive advantage and, perhaps more importantly, one that is difficult for the competition to quickly copy. So optimizing sales performance matters more today than it did yesterday and it will matter more tomorrow than it does today.

On-boarding

The process of training and acclimating sales people into a new position is one of the most significant factors for a sales person’s success. Unfortunately, it is also historically one of the most understudied and underemphasized aspect of sales performance development. Great on-boarding programs for sales people are still the exception.

This lack of emphasis is part of the larger problem that companies are having with Talent Management. "Companies like to promote the idea that employees are their biggest source of competitive advantage. Yet the astonishing reality is that most of them are no better prepared for the challenges of finding, motivating and training capable workers than they were a decade ago" (McKinsey Quarterly, 2008).

With the increased awareness of the importance of developing a world-class sales team, this neglect has not gone unnoticed by everyone. It is suggested the companies who seriously address this issue today will celebrate tomorrow.

What’s different?

If you are a company that put in place an on-boarding system for your sales force more than five years ago, it is likely a reexamination is worthwhile. A number of changes and shifts have significantly impacted what an optimal system looks like.

Some of these factors are:

1)Success matters more. As previously noted, the number of sustainable competitive advantages has decreased and the importance of having a world-class sales force has grown with that decline.

2)Job demands are greater. In sales there is a "book of knowledge." In many companies that book has expanded from a fairly common, well defined set of chapters to a tome that is encyclopedic in scope. Today in order to be a top performer, a sales person has to know a lot more and know it at a higher level of proficiency.

3)Specialization of the sales function has increased. If the various sales positions in most companies were examined under a microscope, they would be greater in number and diversity of challenge than in times past. So, as a sales person moves up the hierarchy of positions, they are faced with different buyers, different buying processes, and differing points of view on what constitutes value.

4)Generational differences are significant. New people coming into entry level sales positions are from a generation with a different set of expectations, learning preferences, and experience sets. This shift provides a huge opportunity and a new set of challenges.

Getting off to the right start

The good news: significant advances have been achieved in the last several years in designing and building sales selection methodologies and in sales training curriculum for on-boarding salespeople. Today a company has a better chance of hiring the right people in first place and a better chance of systematically improving their performance over time.

It always works out better if you can hire people who have the performance potential, attitudes, and motivation to get off to the right start. Today, the selection tools available to Sales Managers to hire the right people bear only a slight resemblance to their earlier cousins.

For example, selection testing can now be accomplished with significantly greater accuracy than in times past. Assessment instruments designed specifically for selecting sales people engagement in competitive business to business sales are now available – at an affordable price. You can have the applicants take a 60 minute battery of online tests and 24 hours later have the results back.

As the selection process improves, bad things like turnover tend to decrease and good things like leveraging your investment in sales training tend to increase.

Recognizing on-boarding is a process, not an event

As previously referenced there is a "book of knowledge" in sales. If one could return to an earlier decade, and observe the time it would take for an average rep to come to grips with the contents of the book, the amount of time was manageable.

Now …fast forward to the present. Immediately, two shifts can be observed. First the amount of knowledge and the diversity of the skill sets are exponentially greater. Secondly, the level of mastery has been redefined – you really have to know what you are doing to be competitive.

Today, if you want a world-class sales team, you need to define on-boarding as an on-going training process, not as a one time event. Sales training programs are needed not just for on-boarding new hires to the company but also for on-boarding your existing sales team to deal with an increasingly changing buying environment. As your company enters new markets, launches new products, deals with keener competitors, and copes with ever changing demands within customer organizations, sales training is one of the answers for executing a superior response to these changes. You simply cannot maintain superior sales force overtime, if you don’t invest in skill development overtime.

In times past, sales training had a questionable report card. That was then…this is now. Today, leading edge sales training companies have crafted a new generation of sales training – they work, they makes a difference, and they are affordable.

Summary

In today’s business environment, it is difficult to overemphasize the potential payoff of developing a world-class sales team. If that’s a premise that rings true to you and you accept the challenge, then building a state-of-the-art on-boarding process is an inherent part of the solution.

The good news is many of your competitors seem to be sitting on the side lines – that’s good for you and bad for them. Secondly, although historically on-boarding has been understudied, in the last several years enough has been accomplished to provide a starting set of best practices for getting the job done – and getting it right.