Successfully Onboarding Salespeople: A Typical Q1 Challenge
Because many salespeople started a new job in Q1, onboarding salespeople was a typical challenge. Employees see Q1 as an ideal time for a new step.
Companies start implementing strategy, new budgets, and team expansion. Here are some insights from sales science on this topic.
Although in practice it will often be a combination, there are roughly two strategies for onboarding salespeople:
- centralized (with clear processes and guidance)
- decentralized (individual, with more autonomy and self-direction).
Key insights:
- In general, an informal-individual approach is far more effective than a centralized approach (23.5% higher sales performance).1
- The above holds true for companies hiring experienced salespeople (for example, from competitors). The effect does not apply to salespeople straight out of school. This latter group benefits more from a centralized approach.
- An important aspect is the span of control of sales managers. If this is small, the decentralized approach works. As the span of control grows larger, the decentralized approach no longer has an effect on salespeople's performance, and the centralized approach becomes preferable. Managers can play a crucial role through personal guidance, feedback, and opening up networks.
It is therefore important that sales managers have the necessary capacity to be involved in onboarding new salespeople soon after they start, rather than too late to make a difference. However, this often clashes awkwardly in terms of timing with the peak in sales workload many organizations experience. In addition, this often doesn't align well with the 'leaner' way sales organizations are increasingly structured.
If sales managers do choose a decentralized approach, a valuable insight is that it matters how much sales experience people have. In short: coach inexperienced salespeople through feedback, and experienced salespeople through role modeling. Recent research shows that highly experienced salespeople perform better in the short term, but show less performance growth in the long term.2 Research shows that the negative long-term effect of sales experience is, in fact, made worse by coaching through feedback ('salt in the wound', so to speak). Coaching through role modeling is a much smarter approach for this group.
Our advice, then, is to look strategically at how the following factors interact within the sales organization: turnover, recruitment sources, span of control, spread of start dates throughout the year, and last but not least: showing situational leadership depending on the experience level of your new hires.
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Source:
1 Wiseman, P., Ahearne, M., Hall, Z., & Tirunillai, S. (2022). Onboarding salespeople: Socialization approaches. Journal of Marketing, 86(6), 13-31.
2 Bolander, W., Satornino, C. B., Allen, A. M., Hochstein, B., & Dugan, R. (2020). Whom to hire and how to coach them: a longitudinal analysis of newly hired salesperson performance. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 40(2), 78-94.
