This article takes you through the age old conundrum of how do you get sales people contributing faster to an organisation. You know the score, you take on a new salesperson and they it takes ages for them to contribute.
Well I think I found the answer. Social.
No not Twitter and Facebook etc, but using social internally.
The issue that we faced was that new starters were faced with a barrage of things internally, new business cards, new accounts, ways of working. So what we did was take that away from them and let them worry about what was going on in customers.
We did this by creating a channel in our internal social to let new starters talk to each other. There were no managers in the group, no existing employees, it was a place that new starters could go in a trusted environment and share ideas and experience.
The results? We were able to bring forward the sales people's contribution by 2 months. Now this wasn't the only thing we did, but the feedback from the new starters was that this was one of the factors.
For most companies, the sales team is the primary engine of organic growth. So it stands to reason that adding new sales talent and increasing the size of your sales team will accelerate your growth rate. But, if you’re in a B2B market with a relatively long sales cycle, it can take up to a year for a new salesperson to generate significant revenue – even though the cost of that hire starts affecting your balance sheet on day one. As a result, if you want to maintain or increase profitability, there are only so many new salespeople you can bring on board each year. Unless you can get new hires generating revenue faster, this can become a major barrier to growth.
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