A speedy ramp-up of a new sales professional is critical to their ability to hit the ground running and quickly generate revenue. Having been a new sales professional as an individual contributor and sales leader, I’ve learned over the past 20 years there are 9 Things Every New Sales Professional must know and do before meeting customers.
1. Know the hot industries for your products or solutions – Knowing the hot industries in your space will allow them to plan their efforts and efficiently spend their time driving revenue.
2. Know the customer pain points and challenges based on each industry – Once hot industries have been identified, knowing the pain points and challenges of each industry will allow the sales professional to effectively plan their strategy, tactics and pitches for each customer.
3. Know the customers objections to your product or solutions – After knowing the standard customer objections will allow the sales professional to refine their sales pitch by clearly identifying mitigating responses to each of these objections.
4. Know the customers’ Obstacles – First of all it’s important to know the intentions of obstacles. They are meant to slow you down, stop you, funnel you in a certain direction or even ambush you. Knowing and understanding the obstacles allows your new hires to create a plan to mitigate them when presented.
5. Know Competitor’s Strengths and Weaknesses – These should be known and, analyzed with ready responses for each. This information is key to winning deals.
6. Your own Strengths and Weaknesses – Matching your strengths and weakness against your competitors allow the new hire to modify their tactics and discussion with the customer. They’ll know what to talk about and what to stay away from.
7. Know what is and what is not Resonating with customers – When this information is known, new hires know what aspects of your solution(s) to highlight with your customers and which they needn’t.
8. Opportunity Reports\Meeting Recap – This information allows new hires to see an opportunity (won and lost) from creation to completion. It’s more than opportunity notes, it’s the Business Intelligence gathered in all of the customer meetings for each opportunity. Understanding the actions and decisions coming out of these meetings will quickly allow them to anticipate various scenarios and adjust their tactics to win deals.
9. Review current and closed Opportunity Plans – Reviewing Opportunity Plans allows the new hire to see the winning strategies, tactics and value props your most successful teams are employing to win deals.
Here at Point N Time Software we’ve created a New Hire Sales Kit. It’s comprised of:
• Salesforce reports and dashboards of business intelligence gathered in customer meetings.
• Strategy Mapper – Salesforce integrated dynamic opportunity plans.
Since we collect this information natively in Salesforce via Meeting Mapper and Strategy Mapper, it’s quick and easy to present this information to our new hires. This allows them to see up-to-date Customer Intelligence across the entire organization and ultimately allows us to ramp a new sales professional in weeks, not the typical ramp time of 6 months. We all know the faster you can ramp a new hire, the faster they’ll make plan.
