Turnover in a sales team is expensive. It often takes 6 months to recruit a new sales rep, 6 months to train them, and 6 months to help them become top-performing. Team productivity will improve if teams can shrink their on-boarding cycles.
One of the keys to doing so is having real-time, auto-generated, comparative trends on sales efforts and how efforts compare to the scope and velocity of their impacts on buyers journeys.
Consider an example. Amacus’ Return-on-Effort metrics revealed an on-boarding performance issue then shrank the time it took for a new hire to hit peak performance in setting 1st sales appointments. In the new hire’s first six weeks, their conversion rate from first conversation to first sales appointment was lower than the conversion rate of the top-performing rep. As expected. Then, around week four, the new hire’s conversion rates began to plummet. Not expected.
A sales meeting was convened. The new hire and the top performer participated. Their comparative results were reviewed. Everyone agreed the numbers were clean, comparison was fair, and the situation was clear. Many questions were asked. Turns out the new hire was hitting objections and wasn’t clear on how to handle them. The top-performer gave clear instructions on how to do so. The meeting adjourned.
Within 2 weeks, the new hire reached all time highs in their conversion rate, and their rate began to approximate that of the top-performer. Six weeks in, the new hire was a winner. So was the sales team.
