Q: Dear SaaStr: What’s The #1 Thing I Can Implement to Improve Sales performance?
Training. Especially, in the early and middle days, when you don’t have a dedicated team to train your reps.
You don't really have to train Sales Reps #1 and #2 that much as CEO.
They usually learn by osmosis.
But you really, really have to train reps #3-#10 and beyond. pic.twitter.com/SCc2VK1YFk
— Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) January 9, 2023
Training the single most important factor you can do to increase sales team performance:
- Onboarding properly.
- Initial co-calling and co-selling.
- Thoughtful review of Gong / Chorus / Salesloft calls and emails sent by reps during scaling period.
- Building collateral the team can use.
- Creating scripts for calls for them, and training them on using the scripts.
- Creating a key questions and objections list that is dynamically updated.
- Helping them understand the competition.
- Using the SDR position as a stepping stone to AE (and training grounds).
- Etc. etc.
Yes, this is a lot of work. And yes, for your first few reps, you can get away with sort of not doing it and training them by osmosis.
But everyone falls apart after reps 2–3 or so if you don’t train them. Both initially, and continually. And when the team is tiny, it also helps you course-correct faster. If you do the above, you’ll know which reps are just slower starters … and which reps will never get there. You don’t want to waste any precious leads in the early days. There are never enough of them.
More here: You Have to Train Reps 3-10. They Won’t Train Themselves. | SaaStr
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