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Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
In early-stage B2B sales, once you’ve hit product/market fit, your biggest cost is the opportunity cost from missed, or even just delayed, sales. This is especially true in greenfield markets, where the competitive landscape is only just forming and it’s a true landgrab. The salesperson you haven’t hired yet, and haven’t gotten productive yet, isn’t generating the ~$50K, ~$100K, ~$200K a month in sales they could be. Consider the future value of those customers as they recur, proliferate, and refer other customers, and that lost revenue looks even more troubling.
Moreover, if you are losing 30–50% of each sales hiring class to flameouts, in part due to faulty onboarding, you are eating this terrible opportunity cost again and again—not to mention the pure cost of the time, treasure, and energy put into recruiting those flamed-out reps.
This is why the lack of rigor around sales onboarding in so many organizations astounds me. You’ve ideally done an excellent job (and presumably spent a lot of time) screening and interviewing your new hires. Why would you then half-ass their liftoff? Why spend the time and money to get a great race car, but not tune it up, fill it with premium, and top off the tires? Why risk a failure to launch?
Yes, there is a temptation to get new hires facing customers as quickly as possible. See previous comment about opportunity cost of lost and delayed sales. This is a false economy. You will simply be burning good leads and injuring new reps’ confidence and, ultimately, their chance for success. Mitch and Murray paid good money for those Glengarry leads, and they would be wasted on your poorly onboarded staff.
If you are hiring experienced staff, there is also a temptation to rely on their ostensible expertise and let them do their thing. But you are making false assumptions, and it will bite you. You have no idea what bad habits their past organizations have instilled in them, or what gaps there are in their knowledge of the market.
Resist the temptation to shortcut onboarding. In an evangelical, consultative sale—the kind your staff is most likely engaged in—business and product expertise is vital. Equally important are high-impact presentation and demonstration skills, persuasive objection handling, and the basic blocking and tackling of CRM, calendar, and email excellence. Relying on your staff to simply know this is a losing proposition.
Instead, design the right sales boot camp for your team—a week to two weeks of rigorous onboarding—and implement it with your newly hired classes. Every time. Depending on the complexity of your offerings, you might find that you need even longer. This boot camp should include pre-onboarding homework and acclimation to your company culture, lessons in business and market subject matter and product, tooling and process training, drilling and repetitions, and eventually ramp and monitoring.
Hire right. Enable right. Position your human capital for success. You won’t be sorry.
So what should your boot camp look like? I prefer a university-style onboarding for new hires, with a singular focus on imparting the knowledge required for high-impact selling conversations. You will be hiring smart; now the goal is to fill those brains with the necessary information, and then run them through enough repetitions that muscle memory takes hold and your hires’ confidence grows.
Remember, like a university, you want to be conducting this training with cohorts and classes. The traditional thinking in sales management is that you’ll lose 30–50% of each class within six months of hiring them. That statistic is frightening; I believe that with proper screening and onboarding, you can have a much higher yield. However, even if you’re amazing at hiring, it’s a similar amount of work to onboard four salespeople as it is to onboard one. They’re all sitting there, listening to the same instructor (you), so why not force multiply? You can even give them team names and use training cohorts as a chance to foster a sense of shared identity. TalentBin classes included Gryffindor and The Three Amigos, underscoring a notion of shared identity. Onboarding a class creates a sense of both competition and camaraderie that pays off: one person may miss something, but his teammate didn’t, and they can help each other out. And when it comes time for sales drills, you have natural sparring partners. Hire in classes and run your onboarding as classes too.
As for your curriculum, obviously as your go-to-market strategy evolves—and you learn as you go—you’ll fine-tune it. When you start out, it could simply be a really big Google Doc that you fork with each new class, highlighting sections in green as you cover them. That may eventually turn into a series of Google Docs, each linked to a Google Spreadsheet checklist to track the execution of each class. We started this way, and after a couple iterations our sales ops lead, Manny Ortega, codified a pretty curriculum in Google Docs. From there, you can go all the way up to onboarding software, like Parklet or Kin, that tracks (in a much fancier way than a spreadsheet) the execution of each step. The important thing is to have a holistic set of topics to cover, and to work your way—exhaustively—through them each time, adding and removing as you go.