How do you prepare a brand new rep for success? If you’re like me, you’ve made tons of mistakes and lost thousands and thousands of dollars and many sleepless nights.
That’s why after I help you recruit people who can sell, I want to teach you to coach them in the best way. I want to help you develop a sales culture of people who love to work in your company and who sell tons of stuff. It all starts in the first few days.
The world is changing. Reps are different and you can make a difference for them and they can make a difference for your business and the customers you serve.
Let’s start them out in the best way possible and avoid losing them early in their career.
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How do you prepare a brand new rep for success?
Parents love their children and spend thousands of dollars making sure they get the best chances to be ballerinas or sports superstars. Equestrians put in hours of training time with young horses on the ground prior to first mounting them. They do this for competitive reasons or to ensure safe and enjoyable rides. In the same way, universities invest millions on weight trainers, coaches and residence hall nutritionists. They want to win championships. They want to be profitable.
None of these administrators or teachers would think of throwing children against the wall to see “if they would stick.”
Only foolish riders would entrust themselves and others to a young mare or stallion without proper training. Yet, sales leaders across the nation do just that because of poor leadership development or a culture that models a hands-off approach to newly recruited reps.
The first ninety days are important if you care about people – if you care about performance – if you care about turnover. The reps you hire believe you thought them right for the job. You hired them and you have a large part to play in their success. In their past lives, Generation Z and Y have already have experienced enough anxiety and depression from the last recession and a lack of dedicated role models.They don’t need more.
First, get to know your new reps. Teach them how to make money. Teach them a sales process. Teach them face-to-face skills. Teach them how to make a deal. Work to make them successful for their benefit, for yours and for your customers.
To do this well, use the tools that help you understand each rep’s unique differences and their motivations to succeed. With this knowledge, design individualized approaches to their training while you realize the universal need among young sales reps for financial advice and a stable income.
They want to master what they do and if you work to accommodate this desire from the beginning, they may stay with you. Making this investment begins the second step to an outstanding culture (the first is recruiting the best talent). In the first few weeks, bring them onboard with mentors or sales coaches who help them find significance in what they do and a practical path to a better life backed up with the product knowledge and sales skills to attain it through your sales position.
To coach them well, get familiar with the science of personalities. The big five are: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Extraversion and Openness. Test them them during recruitment with a validated sales profile and use this information when recruiting and coaching. Identify how each rep prefers to communicate and learn to adjust to their needs. Be kind and direct. Remove a judgmental attitude. Listen to them. Prepare yourself for high levels of skepticism, fragile egos, challenging and creative rule breakers and the need for personal or group recognition. From their “personality bent,” predict what stresses they might experience based on their traits and tendencies and your sales job requirements. For will they prospect best through networking and farming current customers or do they have what it takes to “hunt” new business and develop new relationships with a cold contact.
I want to be your guide and help to learn how to do a foundation interview and find out the motivating “why” for each of your reps. I want you to learn how to identify or inspire ambition and then attach it to money and then to sales activity levels and performance numbers. I want you to learn how to teach reps the relationship between financial stability and consistent work effort at the right levels of the right activities.