The Top Floor Flat

For the second time this year, I’ve just said goodbye to staff members who spent less than two weeks in the marketing department. No, I’m not talking about employee churn, I’m talking about our newest sales reps.  For 2011, we’ve begun a new program for inducting new members of the sales team into the company by requiring they spend two weeks with the marketing team before they hit the phones. With the second batch of new hires through the system, I wanted to take some time to reflect on what our goals were going into the induction plan and how well we’ve achieved them.

What we hope to achieve from a two week induction period on the marketing team for new sales reps:

1) Company and departmental knowledge

One of the challenges we’ve faced as a company as we’ve grown is in keeping our company culture in tact as we scale the team. On the face of things, this should be quite simple as our hiring processes make team fit a number one priority for any new hire however things have changed since we were all in a one room, open plan office together. Now, with clear divisions between departments, there are literally walls keeping the employees of the company from interacting and communicating in the way many of us are accustom to. Each department struggles to overcome these barriers and the sales team is no exception – and with the added competitive nature of a sales role, building ties with the rest of the office can take some extra resources.  The induction process includes seminars from different department heads, an overview of each department’s role within the company, introductions to the staff and an overview of the company’s history. As the marketing team has to produce a lot of related material for resources like the blog and website, they are ideally placed to facilitate these intros.

2) Product knowledge

Content creation for product support pages online and support documentation is managed by the marketing team, as is QA and bug testing. Such in-depth product knowledge is an asset to any member of the team, regardless of department, and seeing the product through the eyes of the marketing team hopefully provides further understanding of the benefits the product provides, not just a list of features. A product induction also allows time for more detailed questions about how the product works and what features are in the pipeline.

3) Industry knowledge

The marketing team has produced market research about the industries with which the sales reps will be communicating. Rather than provide paper print outs of this research, the induction period allows a more indepth discussion of what we know about different verticals, the challenges different subsets of our clients or potential clients might face, and how our product and specifically address those challenges.

4) Respect for the lead generation system

The sales process within our company is a highly consultative one – partially due to the nature of the product and our business and partially due to the initial qualification of sales leads. Throw out the phone book – this isn’t endless cold calling. The marketing team spends a minimum of 50% of its resources on direct lead generation channels including highly qualitative research into potential new clients which are then evaluated for the sales team (the rest of marketing’s time is spent on indirect channels and creating research and collateral for the rest of the company). Our aim is to build in each sales rep a healthy respect for the lead generation process and the thought that goes into warming the leads before they reach the sales pipeline. Confidence in this process leads in turn to more confident and effective sales reps who don’t feel they’re facing an endless day of unqualified cold calls.

5) Expertise

Finally we hope that two weeks of thinking like a company marketeer will help new sales reps begin to think of themselves as experts in the events space where our product is sold. In-depth vertical insight, highly thoughtful application of the product’s features and benefits to particular clients, an understanding of the customer journey before and after that individual customer interacts with the sales rep and an appreciation for the company culture all contribute to a successful sales rep within our business. Projects like contributing to market research and case studies, and composing blog posts about topics relevant to the industry help in the consultative sales process and, we hope, encourage our sales reps to continue to contribute to these projects in the future.

So, how did we do?

The two weeks are up and sales reps back to the sales department. While this was the second such induction I’ve run, the primary difference was that in our first round we had a single sales rep and over the last two weeks we had three all taking part at once. In some ways, having more than one person involved in the process was beneficial – they were able to split up the work during projects related to various marketing tasks about which they had learned and seminars with various other people in the office were more engaging as there were three participants to ask questions. On the other hand, it was more difficult to give the individual attention that really seemed to benefit our initial induction test case. There was physically a difference in the room as well – with a group of three and due to space constraints, the three inductees were sitting together on one table, instead of in the previous session where the inductee sat next to me, so I was easily accessible for direction or to just chat about what I was working on and how it was relevant to our marketing and company strategy.

Difference in group size aside, I still believe this is an incredibly effective and valuable process for bringing new sales reps up to speed. In particular I felt that the product knowledge marketing was able to provide, including in-depth discussion around the advanced usage and the benefits to different subsets of our clients, was something that would have taken an extraordinarily long time for the reps to learn on the job. Likewise, having an opportunity to instill some respect for and knowledge of where leads come from will make a difference in how the reps approach each call – with the knowledge that someone has done quite a lot of work to get that lead to them and not with the defeatist attitude of someone who expects to be hung up on.

If our three inductees left the marketing department feeling more confident in their product knowledge, more aware of the people and departments within the company and with some level of expertise which they can share with potential clients on the phone then these two weeks have been an incredible success. I look forward to seeing their progress over the next few weeks to see the answer for myself.

Top Floor Flat Takeaways

• As our company’s grown, we’ve no longer been able to let new hires absorb company culture and knowledge the way we did when we were all in one open plan room
• We first identified what it was that we wanted new hires on the sales team to learn in their first few weeks with the company (company knowledge, product knowledge, industry knowledge, understanding of the sales process and the expertise for consultative sales) then recognised that the place for new hires to learn all of that was with the marketing team
• We find it important and a valuable use of time to run a two week induction for sales reps where they sit on the marketing team to learn those pre-defined skills which can quickly get them better prepared to sell the product.