Let’s face it.
Onboarding is broken. The average ramp time for a new rep is 4.5 months, while the average tenure is a year and a half. That means that 25% of a sales rep’s total time at a company is spent getting up to speed.
At the same time, boot camp-style training (more on this in a minute) has abysmal recall rates. 84% of what reps learn in a sales boot camp is forgotten within the quarter, which means the so-called “onboarded” reps end up spending their time learning on their own – eroding their ability to close business.
To cap it all off, hiring reps is getting harder. Sales is now the second-most in-demand role in the US, and the cost of hiring continues to spiral accordingly.
The current format of onboarding is not sustainable, and there’s a huge incentive for sales teams to crack the onboarding problem.
But that’s not going to happen with onboarding as it’s run today.
If onboarding is fundamentally broken right now, then what are enablement teams supposed to do? Here are my five tips to tie onboarding to revenue and some of the benefits you get if you do.