Is It Time to “Reboard” Your Sales Team?

Sales Onboarding is a critical element of building an effective sales team. Good sales onboarding ensures that your new hires become familiar with your company, your customers, and your sales process, and that they know how to execute on your unique way of selling.

But what happens when your way of selling changes? High performing sales organizations update their sales strategy, process, methodology, and other elements of the sales system regularly to keep up with changes in the market, as well as new understanding of what works for their team.

And when you update your sales system, you also need to update your sales team. That’s when you need reboarding.

What Is Sales Reboarding?

Sales reboarding is similar to sales onboarding, in that it’s a structured approach to helping salespeople become more successful with your way of selling. While sales onboarding is for new employees, sales reboarding is for existing employees who are already familiar with your organization and competent in the basic skills and activities they perform on a daily basis.

Sales reboarding is a structured way of training, coaching, and reinforcing changes in your sales strategy, process, and methodology, so that your team stays up to date on the latest and best ways of engaging both externally and internally, with prospects, customers, and teammates.

When Do You Need to Reboard Your Sales Team?

High performing sales teams update and optimize their sales strategy and processes routinely in response to win/loss analysis, process analysis, changes in the marketplace, new or updated offerings, or simply to improve skills and effectiveness. Sales reboarding is a good idea any time there is a substantial change in your organization that impacts the way your salespeople are expected to work.

Some simple changes, such as moving steps into a different order or adding an easy data collection step, may be easy to implement and require only that you tell the team and then reinforce the new behavior in your CRM.

For larger changes, simply telling the team isn’t enough to ensure that they actually make the changes. Any time there is a substantive change that requires your sales team to work in a different way than they have previously, reboarding is a good idea.

When your way of selling needs an update, reboarding is a good idea.

Furthermore, it’s a good idea to perform routine reboarding periodically, to bring everyone fully up to date on the small changes that may occur over the course of a quarter or a year, as well as to reinforce any areas of change they’ve been struggling with.

How to Reboard Effectively

Sales reboarding provides the training, practice, reinforcement, and coaching necessary to ensure that significant changes in your sales strategy, process, or methodology are executed across the organization.

Like onboarding, reboarding is most effective when it is performed within a structured framework that includes training, coaching, and daily reinforcement.

To be effective with reboarding you need to:

• Understand where your team needs reboarding. This requires that you have a solid strategy, a milestone-based process, and a platform within which to track how your salespeople are executing on your process. Use these tools to identify when a boarding initiative is called for.
• Train the team in the specific new skills and processes that you want implemented.
• Reinforce the new skills and processes in the salespeople’s daily workflow, using a tool like Membrain to embed the new behavior and offer on-demand content to help them understand and implement it.
• Coach the new skills and processes individually as needed.

In order to coach effectively, your managers need access to information and insights like those that will be available in Membrain’s upcoming Elevate (formerly Coaching Cockpit). They need to be able to see at a glance how individual salespeople are performing with their new skills and activities, what training they have completed, and where they need help. Additionally, they should be able to establish cadences with their team during the reboarding period to check in and ensure they’re supporting each salesperson in embracing the new skills and activities.

When you enable your team to quickly and effectively execute upgrades to your way of selling, you enable your team to continually perform at higher and higher levels. It’s worth getting this right.