When you hire a new engineer, they don’t start working with clients on Day 1. First, you must onboard them. The same is true for sales representatives.
Many topics must be addressed when MSPs bring on a new hire, including which technologies you use and why, how you handle documentation, who are your clients, and so on. The time spent onboarding an engineer helps get them up to speed and productive infinitely faster. MSPs more often than not spend time developing the processes and systems for an engineer to succeed at their job. Once they learn the systems, they thrive.
Through this process, you understand that onboarding is routine, planning makes it better, and engineers require onboarding. Why, then, is it so hard to successfully hire a sales rep? Because you don’t onboard them.
Sales Reps Are People, Too
Similar to engineers, sales reps also need onboarding to be successful.
Sales reps need specific technology to do their jobs, like CRMs and marketing engines. They need to be familiarized with your team, your technology, your processes, and your culture.
Ian Richardson
They need to learn your customer base intimately. They need to know what hurts a customer’s operations. How do they make money? What’s important to them? How did you acquire each client?
Sales reps need to know what your company does for customers. What promises can be made and kept? What are good expectations for the experience? And what is your process?
They also need to know how you have failed in the past. What didn’t work? Why? What were the biggest lessons learned? How did the MSP adapt after failures? Why are things done the way they’re done?
What Makes a Streamlined System
The most important of all things a new sales rep must be provided: a system through which to do their job. That system can include:
- How to develop leads
- What is qualified
- How to discover pain points with customers
- What “pain” the company can solve
- How it is solved
- Why your services and products are important
- How your processes and standards impact your clients
Processes, technology, systems, documentation, training — all of these things are critical for a sales rep to succeed. Like an engineer, they need a system built for them to be able to do their job.
Setting the Stage for Success
When it comes to onboarding new sales reps, you’re the one who needs to build the system — not the sales rep.
This may be the reason you haven’t seen ROI on previous attempts. You didn’t do the work, set up the system, develop the training, buy the technology, nor create the documentation.
Sales reps can’t do that for you any more than engineers can.
Ian Richardson is a partner at Fox & Crow Group. He is a nationally recognized leader in managed services. If you’re an MSP struggling with setting up sales engines, reach out to Richardson and his partner, Carrie Richardson at foxcrowgroup.com/contact. For more great insights, check out Fox & Crow Group’s author page here.
Featured image: iStock
