How Sales Enablement Can Improve Onboarding

The approach you take to onboarding new salespeople can set the groundwork for their success or be a factor in their failure.

The Past: Historical Approaches to Sales Onboarding

Traditionally, many onboarding programs for salespeople included a company orientation, product training, which was often reading on your own, technology overview, and sometimes selling skills. This part of the program was managed by learning and development or human resources with minimal participants from the sales organisation. After this phase of onboarding, there was often an on-the-job portion that included a ride along with another sales rep, a field trainer, or a sales manager.

The biggest challenge is that these programmes were frequently not as effective as they could be and often left salespeople in a position to try to figure things out on their own.

The Evolution: From Sales Onboarding to Talent Management

As the concept of Talent Management started to take hold with organisations, they started looking more holistically at their employees. Talent Management’s three pillars are to attract, develop, and retain talent.

With attraction and retention now as part of the talent management programme, there was more focus on the bigger picture and the costs associated with hiring and retaining salespeople. This has led to more focus on how salespeople were onboarded and provided training and support in their roles.

The Future: Sales Onboarding as Part of Sales Enablement

The world of work is changing rapidly, technology, automation, digitisation, artificial intelligence, and remote work are impacting organisations in many sectors.

Today’s sales onboarding approach considers these factors to create a programme focused on results. Enter sales enablement into the equation to provide salespeople with the knowledge, content, resources, and tools they need to be effective in their role.

How Sales Enablement Improves the Onboarding Process

Sales enablement strategies have reshaped the onboarding process in several ways. Here we will look at a few key differences in the approach sales enablement teams take to make the sales onboarding process more effective and efficient.

Onboarding Goals

The sales enablement team’s approach to onboarding is much more strategic, and long-term focused, this is reflected in the goals of most sales enablement-led programmes where the goals include:

Provide Personalised and Targeted Training

Rather than having a one-size-fits-all approach to onboarding, a sales enablement team prefers a targeted approach that helps provide salespeople with the specific skills and knowledge they need to excel in their roles.

This approach starts by assessing everyone’s needs and then building a library of learning content that can be customised for different salespeople. A learning path is created that is customized to each salesperson based on their experience level, sales role, and individual goals.

Ensure Content Accessibility

Sales enablement professionals use platforms to centralise and organise sales content, making it easily accessible to new hires.

This eliminates the need for salespeople to hunt for information, saving time and improving efficiency.

Focus on Continuous Learning

Rather than treating onboarding as a one-time skill-building event, in sales enablement-led onboarding skill development becomes an ongoing process.

Sales enablement teams encourage ongoing learning through continued access to resources, investments in microlearning training modules, coaching and feedback, and regular updates. This helps ensure salespeople stay up to date with the latest information and best practices without having to invest a lot of time trying to find this information on their own.

Use Data-Driven Insights

Sales enablement teams have an obligation to demonstrate ROI, to do this they use tools to collect data and provide analytics on how new hires are engaging with content and performing in their roles.

This data helps organisations regularly assess the impact of the onboarding programme, identify areas for improvement, and adjust their training programmes as needed. This approach allows you to continuously iterate and improve based on real data.

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Integrate Useful Technology and Tools

Sales enablement teams use platforms that can integrate with CRM systems, email, and other sales technologies. This integration streamlines workflows, ensuring that new hires can seamlessly transition from learning to using the tools effectively.

Ensure Coaching and Feedback

Sales enablement teams use tools and resources to facilitate coaching and feedback loops. These tools develop a culture of continuous improvement by collecting data from tools and feedback from salespeople regarding the effectiveness of training programmes.

Feedback can be used to refine and adapt training materials and methods over time. Sales Managers can use feedback and data from sales enablement resources to provide real-time coaching to salespeople based on their performance, leading to timely skill development.

RELATED: Learn more about onboarding new sales reps in our comprehensive guide

Onboarding Technology

The availability of technology tools for sales enablement, such as sales content management platforms, CRM systems, and analytics tools, has made it easier to integrate enablement practices into onboarding.

Reasons to Use Technology in the Onboarding Process

There are also several key factors that are driving the desire to integrate sales enablement in onboarding including:

• Evolving Customer Behaviours: Customers today are more informed, digitally savvy, and have higher expectations. These evolving customer preferences and behaviours mean that salespeople need to be well-prepared to engage with these customers effectively. Salespeople need to be better equipped with information and tools that add value to the customer buying process, which is increasingly becoming more complex. Sales enablement can help provide this information.
• Competitive Market Dynamics: Markets are increasingly competitive, and companies are under pressure to differentiate themselves. Sales enablement tools provide salespeople with the knowledge and resources they need to keep pace with the changing competitive landscape, understand how they differ from the competition, and position this differentiation to win deals.
• Technological Advancements: The rapid advancement of technology has transformed the sales landscape. Salespeople need to be proficient in using various digital tools and platforms to engage with customers. Sales enablement tools help sales teams adapt to these technological changes.
• Regulatory and Compliance Changes: Many industries face evolving regulatory and compliance requirements. Sales enablement tools can incorporate compliance training and ensure that sales teams are aware of and follow the latest regulations.

Types of Sales Onboarding Technology Used by Enablement Teams

The ability to adapt to new technologies and stay current with industry trends is a valuable characteristic for anyone in sales. With technology so integral to sales enablement platforms, sales enablement professionals also need this focus and skills. This makes them ideal partners in bringing the approach to onboarding.

Here are some types of sales enablement technology commonly used for onboarding salespeople:

• Learning management systems: are used to create, deliver, and track training content for onboarding purposes. They allow companies to organise and manage various training modules, from product knowledge to sales techniques.
• Sales playbook software: centralises key sales strategies, messaging, objection handling, and competitive intelligence in an easily accessible format that salespeople can use as they interact with customers.
• Internal communication and collaboration platforms: enable salespeople to exchange ideas, ask questions, and share experiences during the onboarding process.
• Mobile applications for sales content, training, and learning: allow salespeople to access and share content and learning from their mobile devices.

The evolution of sales onboarding demonstrates a shift from traditional, one-size-fits-all approaches to more personalised, tech-driven, and data-centric methods. External factors such as evolving customer behaviours, technological advancements, and changing market dynamics are influencing companies to adopt sales enablement tools in onboarding salespeople so they remain competitive, agile, and responsive to the evolving business landscape.