You may have noticed I've been quiet/absent the past two weeks...and that's because I've been onboarding 3 new AEs to my company. One of the many hats I wear at a small company is onboarding and employee enablement. I learned quite a bit from this round of onboarding, and I'd like to share some specific items with the following WR user-segments: Individual Contributors (e.g. S/BDRs, AEs, AMs), Leadership, and Ops (there are a few of us here).
First Up: Individual Contributors (ICs)
Listen up, and listen good: your creator gave you two eyes, two ears, and one mouth for a reason. Watch what we do, listen to what we say, and drink from this fire hose as much as you'd like...but if you're going to speak during a group training that is lead by myself or a leader from our exec team, then DO IT SPARINGLY.
There are very few things that drive me crazy than "quick questions". If they were quick then we wouldn't spend 10 minutes answering the first one and all of the little follow-ups that come from it. We want to provide you with clarity because our entire world revolves around getting you to production as quickly as we possibly can, but most of the time your questions will be answered if you let us get through all of the material in the training session rather than you butting in after every bullet or screen.
Here is my tip to ICs: make notes, lots of them, and leverage our 1:1 time or end-of-day wrap-ups to ask your questions. Doing so not only allows you to review your questions to see if they were answered already, but it will also give your fellow onboarding classmates the ability to focus on the sessions rather than context switching over and over again.
Second up: Leadership
Let's make one thing clear: I, as your RevOps leader, do not exist to do your job for you during the onboarding phase of new employees. You need to do your part in preparing for training YOUR new employees. The number one mistake I picked up on from this past training class is that the sales leader wanted to sit back and let me do all of the work...but at the end of the day, your training team should not be in charge of introducing things like your sales process or sales management cadence. You will be executing these tasks and holding the reps accountable for the execution of the sales narrative/cadence once they are out in the world doing the job.
Here is my tip for Leaders: Onboarding is the first impression for the new AE, so you have one chance to show them how involved you are in their experience at the company--make the most of it. Take an active role in the training process, and if you have a training/enablement resource, treat them as the coordinator of your sessions, not the sole delivery resource of all of the content. Work with the training team to develop the content, clearly communicate what you would like to present, and ask for others to help deliver the content that can be more universally communicated via another AE, ops leader, etc.
Lastly, Ops (Sales, People, Revenue, etc):
Your job is to ensure that the full onboarding experience is mapped out from day one to the graduation session. Yes, each hour of each day should have a purpose, and here's my trick for that: If you use Google Calendar go create a new "Onboarding Calendar" and start creating your training sessions there. Once things are finalized, add the new reps, the training proctors (who is delivering that session), and all the conferencing or in-person venue information for each session. This will eliminate the "what are they doing today?" question you'll get from leadership if you decide to just "wing it". Be purposeful, be organized.
As I said for the Sales Leader: you should be a partner to the rest of the people in your organization that are going to help train and onboarding these new hires. Prepare them with context, but ask them to bring the content they want to use to train folks with. If they don't have content read, then ask them to help you brainstorm what would work best. If it's simply a product demo then you're not going to have to do much, but if it's an ICP or Customer Journey Mapping session then you should figure out the best way to visualize the content for easy consumption.
Here is my tip for Ops: leverage an AVOMA/Chorus/Gong type platform, to record each session. Helps with recall for current onboarding reps and can be put in a library for future consumption. This not only will save you time in answering "what did we talk about" questions, but will perhaps make future sessions easier by providing reps with a recording of a great session rather than trying to recreate it.
Anyways, if you got this far, tough loss for the Pats this past weekend...and very sad that Max Verstappen tried to murder *Sir Lewis Hamilton rather than yielding some space on the track at Monza.
51 comment