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Do you know what your Rep’s onboarding experience is really like? In this episode, Stephen will discuss how to take inventory of this process. (Video link in description)
Learn tips for getting your reps to finish training, complete onboarding, and start selling faster! With over 12 years of experience working with direct sales companies that train 50k reps annually, Stephen Rhyne's perspective is proven to get results.
What's up everyone? This is episode 7 of The
Reps Journey and in this episode I'm gonna
do something a little different. I'm gonna go
solo. I'm gonna really quickly go through and
show you something that we've been doing with our
customers initially, when they initially joined
with ConveYour that has been hugely valuable
for them. That's why I want to share it. We call
it The Rep Journey Audit. I know I talk about
the rep's journey a lot. It's the name of our
podcast but I think this is super super valuable
so I just want to share with you how it works.
This is The Reps Journey
podcast with Stephen Rhyne.
TRJ exists to help you recruit,
train, and retain your reps.
This is going to be a
[notion.so](http://notion.so/)
template that you can use in your own company
if you want. We're going to try to set it up
as a template so that you can grab the link
and create this for yourself. The first thing
that we do with our customers is to try to set
some baselines. What kind of stats do they have
right now with their rep funnel and what are they
shooting for? What are their goals? Surprisingly,
a lot of times these numbers are arbitrary.
They're not tracked but we want to just start,
you should start thinking about these numbers
even if you're working with smaller numbers.
Even if you're working less than 100 reps or you
really have no idea how many actual candidates you
had because all of your managers have their
own little lists on their phones of who the
candidates are and you only get an email saying
on board this rep, okay? Don't worry about it.
Just try to ballpark and get in your current
numbers and ballpark your percentages even
if they're guts around your conversions between
recruit to onboarded, onboard to fully trained,
and then fully trained to actually going out and
doing the job. Maybe, you also have one that is
around three months later, around six months
later, like your retention numbers. Just get them
in. I think that no stats or having some stats
whether arbitrary or not is better than no stats
at all because at least you're starting to move
towards tracking this. So we do that first. We can
set some expectations and figure out what the
customer wants. The next thing we do is log all
of the systems and tools that a company uses. What
is their canvassing tool? What is their proposal
tool? What's the HR tool? Is a rep using this
or not? Does a rep interact with it? The reason
why I want to know if the rep interacts with it
is because that is part of the rep experience
and how you onboard them into that remote product
and when they receive an email **matters**. Is it
going to be super obtuse that they got onboarded
in this thing before they got training on it?
Maybe. We try to get all those out on the table
and then we also go through and look at the rep
systems. We bring them down from the systems and
we go which of these tools are a must-have for the
rep and by when. Where is it going to fall into
the rep journey? How are they getting into it?
Is it manual? Who does it? Why are they doing it?
How does that person, Jane, for example, know when
to add this person? Is that clear? Is that defined
and can we automate it? Could we get it where the
rep is only added to your proposal tool the minute
after they finish their training on the proposal
tool? Why do they need it beforehand? So, that's
an example where we want to know about all those
individual tools that you have. Now, we're at
the rep journey audit section. Most of the people
that come to us start with training. That's the
first thing that they want to focus on which is
kind of in the middle of the stack. We do like
to start really comprehensively and start with
recruiting. Here are some of the questions that
we ask. This is all going to be in the template.
How do people initially hear about the company?
How does a manager intro the opportunity?
How does the manager save recruit information? Is
a manager storing that in their own phone? Do they
use their own little recruiting system or is there
a centralized location where anybody that's heard
about the opportunity, that you provide, is
getting added to a system so you can nurture
those people? Does that exist? If there's quasi,
document it. Document all of the things that
managers are doing to get this done. How does the
manager share rep info with the company to start
onboarding? Is that an email to some mystical
person that does all the manual onboarding
or is that some documented process where managers
hand off to that person? I'm gonna guess there
are a lot of manual processes. There an email
goes out, ‘this person wants to get onboarded’
then the person's plugging all that stuff into a
form. Do you have job boards or different systems?
Document the places where you're collecting new
potential recruits and figure out where what
those systems are. Make sure everybody is aware
of those systems and how you could potentially
integrate with them. Communications, how does a
candidate receive a message? Is it sent directly
from the applicant tracking system? Is it sent
from a system you send? Is it the manager? Again,
just write it down. So, this is a good little
outline for you. Let's go to onboarding. How is a
decision to hire made? Who makes that decision? Is
there a system, a quality check system, that the
manager should go through? Is there an opportunity
for you to provide tools to the manager,
to share with the potential recruit, and
help the potential recruit understand
the expectations you have before the manager
tries to recruit them? Does that make sense?
There's a checklist for those things as well.
Here's an example of a very specific question.
Does a rep need to meet with someone to complete
onboarding before moving to training? If so, why?
Sometimes that’s, ‘Of course, they can move on
to training’ and other times, ‘No, we need to do
this, this, and this other thing before we can
actually turn on training for this rep.’ Again,
document. I know I'm just kind of beating a dead
horse here, with regards to the documentation, but
it is so valuable. Later on, what you're going
to do with this outline, you're going to take
it and you're going to put it into your rep
journey model. You're going to use something
like whimsical and you're going to lay this out in
a map. You have all of your answers here, through
the outline. Then you can take those answers and
start laying out what is truth, visually. You can
see the places that are inefficient, where you can
say ‘Wait a minute. We don't have to immediately,
manually, add somebody to spotio or solo, as soon
as we get a signed contract. We could add them,
maybe, automatically right after they finish
their initial training!’ Less stuff coming at
the rep. The rep can focus on only the thing that
matters which is getting ready to sell then they
get access to the tools. Again, that might not
work for your business but the point is to get
it documented so that you can start laying it out
as lego bricks. This is the lego brick purchasing.
If you've ever built legos, you go to the lego
bin first. You don't start immediately building.
You start looking for the black piece that you
need. You look for that really cool piece of glass
that will be the front of your spaceship. You
get all those pieces on the table then you start
building the lego set. So, what this journey,
this audit, here is laying out what is truth
and what should be truth. Then, you take those and
you lay them out in a more dynamic way. Training,
what's initial training? What training do
they absolutely need right away to even be
part of your sales force? Why do they need
this right now? Is there stuff you can defer?
If you defer it would be more valuable? When must
have been completed? How are you going to convey
completeness and are there trainings that are
required to be done before they show up, say, for
a boot camp in two weeks? How long do you have to
train that person? Would there be times when you
only have two days to train one rep and two weeks
to train another? Have you thought that through?
There are just a couple of bullet points for the
second training level, and third training level.
Just laying out what you envision those trainings
to be. Whether that be advanced training to move
from in solar, you might be a setter and you want
to move people to become a closer, an advisor.
Maybe the third training level is training
someone on how to build their own team or
start their own location, or more ‘working on
themselves’ type of training than just working on
understanding the business. Then, you have your
on-demand training. What training is not ‘you
need this right now’ and prescribing it to the
rep and is more product resources pdfs, videos,
cool interviews with other sales reps that you
want to put in your on-demand training. Next up
is retention. I think two things about retention.
If reps don't feel like they're being supported
and they don't get help, they will quit. They
don't feel like they have the necessary tools.
So, how does a rep know where to go to get help?
Is that something that is is driven by just
culture? “Hey, can you help me tell me who I
should email or text to get an answer about this?”
or are you proactively giving them, pointing their
face, pointing their head, towards the place that
they need go to get support? One thing I always
do, initially, when we sign up a new customer,
is I point out how they get support inside the
product and explain to them that they're gonna
get better support there than reaching out to me
directly because I might be on doing one of these
things right now. Sounds obvious but it's not
done all the time. How does a rep know where to go
and where do reps go to get help? Do you have a
list of frequently asked questions that you could
document? Actually, a lot of questions come up
once you start really mapping out your journey.
You start to realize all the different
places where reps might have questions
that you can address into a frequently
asked questions list and use that in your
messaging platform as saved snippets or saved
replies. This is something ConveYour does well.
Next is promotion, belief building,
motivation building. I'm a huge believer that
most of the time, when you're onboarding
reps, there's training involved but you're
also belief building. You're keeping them
warm until they're actually doing the job.
So, here, it's figuring out where you drop your
messages, where you you share your promotions,
in context to where they are in their journey.
Sometimes things might be sound a little tone-deaf
if you send them too early or too late in their
journey. How are you how are you thinking about
what's going to drop based off of them? All that
really matters is, really, them, in their world.
Everybody's a little selfish and it just matters
what they receive. They don't care that when you
send it, it's better for the team to send it at
this time. They care about them. No offense. Also,
I like to say is somebody, a rep, is walking
along a hiking path and they might go around
the wrong path. How can you cut them off on the
path and take them the right direction based on
red flags you see in their performance or
whatever? Could you set up automations to address
issues that you see happening whether that be
slow to finish training, not coming to meetings,
things like that? Usually, most people just say
“Well, they're not gonna cut it”. But, I believe
sometimes it's just a matter of a disconnect
between what they believe is a great opportunity
and then they see another opportunity
over there that they might want to go to.
Again, write down all of your promotion, belief
building, motivation building exercises that you
already have. Write down and document when you
are sending them. Is this just a mass message
that you send and a brand new rep gets it right
away, and a veteran rep gets it or a rep that's
been around for three weeks gets it at three
weeks? Anyway, point of this document. Then
once you have all of that in place, what I
start to do here is, before I draw any lines, I
start to put my lego pieces out here on the board.
What I'll do is I'll give you an example like
one here. Manager sends email to onboard so I'll
just write that. “Manager sends email to onboard”
onto my board, my whimsical board here. Let's
say I didn't have any of this already built and
I was just trying to lay it out. So, the next
thing I want to do is say what happens next.
“Jane sends contract”. I'm
just putting them out here.
Next thing, I want to make sure
the rep signs the contract.
I'm just putting all of my milestones, my
events out here. I know I need to get them to
do pre-boot camp training. I want to do the
welcome course. I'm literally just putting
out bricks, lego bricks, out here and then I'm
arranging them in the order in which they are
occurring in the real world. Once I have
all those in place, I highly recommend you
have almost two versions. Start with a version of
your journey that is the current journey and then
make a copy. Start messing with what you want
your journey to be. I think that's best. Do not
just have a journey that is the ideal journey. I
think it's best to have one that is the current
state of things and this is what we're moving
towards. It's going to help your engineering
and your development team, every team, to see
what's truth and where you want to go. So, there
you go guys. This is how we do the rep journey
audit and then how we help lay out a canvas for
our customers to use as a backstop, something
to look back at, an artifact, to use to move
forward and build out this in ConveYour and the
other systems that they use. Thanks for watching!