Is your startup or small business thinking about bringing on a new sales person?

Maybe you’ve done so already. If you have, you’ll know that the learning curve for new sales reps can often be a significant barrier to quick contributions. What can you do to help your new hire win business sooner?

Here’s what the team at VA Partners does when our sales reps start work on behalf of a new client. We’ve found this process works wonders in earning new sales faster.

1. Help Them Understand the Solution

Whether we’re providing sales or marketing support, it’s critical for our teams to understand our new client’s solutions to be able to effectively communicate its value. To help our reps, we develop a brief write-up to captures the key elements of the new client’s solution. The write-up should include:

• A description of the solutions with key industry and company specific terminology
• The primary benefits of the solution
• The different options, versions, or customizable pieces of the solution
• The pricing structure for the solution

By providing your new reps with a documentation that contains important information, your sales reps will be able to quickly digest the new information, be able to reference the document for greater detail as needed, and effectively win sales sooner. As an added boost to your sales reps selling power, teach them how to sell the solution, not the product.

2. Clearly Define Their Targets

A great way to help your sales reps prospect for new business and qualify accounts faster is to provide them with a clear definition of your targets. At VA Partners, we look to define the characteristics of the organizations to target, provide examples for reference, and identify the department and position level(s) for the best fit contacts. You should also indicate an order of preference if you have multiple departments or positions levels listed as acceptable contacts.

3. Help Them Create Email Templates

In sales support roles, one of the key elements we include for our team to help ensure their success is an email template. It’s a perfect tool to help ensure your sales team includes important information in prospecting emails and presents a consistent message throughout the sales effort. We typically provide our sales reps with several email templates in order to reflect specific factors like verticals, geography, and contact type. A good template should include room for customization to allow your team to tailor the message to the specific needs of their target prospect based on the research they collect.

4. Cold Call Practicing

There’s no better way to get your sales reps ready for their first live cold call than with a few practice calls. What should you test your sales reps on during the practice call? Try testing these areas:

• Ability to describe the solution
• Ability to probe with questions that can help tailor the pitch
• Ability to communicate the solutions benefits specific to the prospect’s needs
• Ability to handle common objections

To help your new reps succeed, be sure to provide them with information on what probing questions work best or how to handle common objections.  These first few practice calls and the feedback that reps can collect allow them to become much stronger in selling before they’re ever put on the hot seat. For more tips to help you or your reps get ready for cold calls, be sure to check out this post on cold calling from our friends over at MaRS.

5. Help Them With Your CRM

If you’re a regular follower of our blog, you’ll know that our CRM of choice is Salesforce.com. Your sales reps should always have access to your CRM in order for them to enter new accounts, record important information, track client interactions, schedule future activities and monitor their growing funnel. Introduce them early to the reports that your team uses and show them how those reports can be used to support their sales efforts. Some of the common reports that we ensure our clients have include reports on opportunities, activities, accounts and contacts, as well as customer feedback. To learn more about using a CRM tool be sure to check out our post on 5 best practices for utilizing a CRM for sales.

I hope these 5 tips strengthen your sales team as much as they have helped our own over the years. Now that you’re armed with the information you need to get the most from a new sales rep, be sure to check out our Building a Startup Sales Team white paper for even more tips to help your organization keep growing.