Having to hire new sales to your team is a great indication of growth at your company. However, onboarding new reps and getting them fully ramped up to speed can be a long process. Nevertheless, it is critical that your sales management tactics take this onboarding process into careful consideration – after all, the longer they take to get comfortable, the more you’re missing out on an optimal sales process.

The way you structure your weekly sales meetings can be a big boost to your onboarding process. Here are 4 tips on how to structure sales meetings with a cadence that greatly benefits new reps, without giving up the productivity of the meeting for other seasoned reps.

1) Discuss bookings

This is an obvious sales metric to discuss at the meeting – how are your team’s bookings in this time period (typically a month or quarter). Have each rep present how much they’ve booked thus far and, most importantly, how this compares to the goal-to-date. If some reps are falling way short of where they should be at this point in the month, that warrants a broader discussion of why this might be happening. Is this a pipeline issue (not enough opportunities to close) or an issue having to do with the close itself?

2) Talk about how you arrived at the bookings number

While the above is a good primer for new reps, this next step will be of even more use to them. Talk about how each of your reps or the whole team arrived at the bookings figure. You can use a simple view of:

[Closed opportunities] x [Average sale price] x [Win rate] = Bookings

This will get your new reps thinking more about the key sales metrics they should be tracking. Again, a valuable exercise for new reps at these meetings is to compare progress, both against to-date goals and compared to last month. If your bookings figures are comparing unfavorably to last month, your team might need sales coaching emphasized in a few key areas, or you might need to provide more pipeline for them.

3) What will you do next month?

Stress to your reps that it’s never too soon to get ahead for the next reporting period, be it next month, next quarter or next year. First, look into your pipeline. Are there enough opportunities in there to meet your pipeline coverage ratio? If not, what do you need to do to generate more opportunities?

Additionally, you want to apply any lessons that you learned from this month’s sales review. Older more seasoned reps should talk about unique cases or additional information gleaned about their ideal customer profile. Sharing past lessons with new reps will skip the step of them having to fail fast and learn from their own mistakes, hopefully getting you to a more optimal sales process and sales force quicker.

4) Talk about tests / experiments

Each month should be used as a chance to try and potentially learn something new, especially for older reps. Maybe one of your reps tried out some new messaging, a new process or a new initiative? Which ones worked and which ones did not? What does the data and the appropriate sales metrics say about these tests?

This can set a good tone for your new or onboarding reps – that it’s ok to try new things, as long as the thinking behind the experiment is sound and that the final results are properly measured and analyzed after the fact. With this influx of fresh talent could come some winning new ideas too, so keen an open mind during this part of the sales meeting.

 
A big part of onboarding new sales reps during these sales review meetings is getting them in the right frame of mind. Let them know that sales metrics are important to track and analyze, that there is a team-wide expectation of always benchmarking themselves against goals and that all employees are encouraged to experiment, within reason. With this type of expectation-setting at the team meeting, your new reps will be fully onboarded and thriving in no time!