PRIME+ Selling System Blog

You've likely heard the term sink or swim sometime in your life. It comes from the old-fashioned practice of throwing kids into the water to teach them to swim or, well, sink. Not only is this a terrible idea for teaching people to swim, but it's equally ineffective and ill-advised for alcohol sales training and onboarding new reps to your sales team.

Building a high-achieving sales team can be achieved with a continuous learning culture that supports and empowers them with the skills to be more productive and close more sales. 

What Happens When You Don't Have an Effective Onboarding Plan 

Challenging your salespeople with goals is a common way to inspire them to achieve new levels of growth and success. However, simply dictating expectations without providing effective onboarding is the epitome of a sink or swim mentality. Today's employees expect a culture of learning and development, starting with a formal onboarding program. Ignoring that critical step in your hiring process can inadvertently create new risks to your sales team's strength, performance, and longevity, and new employees are twice as likely to look for a new job if they have a negative onboarding experience. 

When managers believe they are above training new hires, you have more than just an onboarding problem. Proper onboarding is the company's opportunity to set expectations for each role. This is particularly critical when hiring people into management positions. If your managers don't invest time in their teams, ensuring they are adequately onboarded and prepared for their role, the employee can feel that they aren't valued or part of a team, and even worse, that the promises made in the recruiting and hiring process were deceptive.  

Onboarding shouldn't be a one-and-done proposition but should be part of an ongoing culture of learning and development to ensure engagement and retention. Studies show that failure to provide adequate onboarding over the first year results in: 

• Approximately 33% of new hires seeking a new job within the first six months. 
• An astounding 23% of employees leaving before their first hiring anniversary.
• Almost 90% of new hires knowing they want to leave within six months, even if they don't leave immediately. 

In contrast, those companies who invest in formal onboarding processes show a 54% improvement in employee engagement. But what is adequate onboarding? What it is not is simply orientation or an exercise in compliance. What onboarding should focus on is ensuring the employee understands the role and their expectations within it, the organizational culture, and the information and interpersonal networks within the company.  

Having formal onboarding, training, and coaching programs don't just help with engagement, retention, and job satisfaction. They can also help attract talent. Millennials state that the top characteristic they look for in an employer is career progression, while excellent training and development programs followed closely in third place. Understanding what motivates your new hires can help you craft an attractive, compelling perks package featuring structured onboarding with ongoing coaching and development programs over their career progression.  

Setting your salespeople up for success with alcohol sales training doesn't simply benefit them. Investing in a culture of learning and development starting with a well-crafted onboarding process can result in significant ROI. New hire retention is improved by 82% and productivity by over 70% in organizations with a robust onboarding process. Retention is a significant cost-saving factor, as turnover costs companies 100-300% of the employee's annual salary.  

Institute a Learning Culture to Create a High-Performing, Engaged Sales Team 

Numerous studies show compelling evidence that employees increasingly seek out and expect companies to invest time in their development, and they are willing to leave very quickly if the companies don't deliver what they promise. The younger job candidates are, the more they seek a position that offers a way to develop the skills that will propel them to success. If your company fails to develop a compelling growth and development training plan, it could lose out on and fail to retain top talent. The numbers tell the story: in the last year, an average of 47% of high-performers left their jobs.  

You can turn the tide by giving your sales team a process that gets consistent, predictable, repeatable results AND inspires engagement that makes employees want to stay longer. 

Alcohol sales training can help you build a sales team that is committed, productive, and successful. Fox Selling System provides both a live and eLearning sales training and leadership coaching platform that can transform your organization with a culture of continuous learning. You can grow your salespeople and increase your ROI by teaching and reinforcing essential skills like selling with professionalism, empathy, and profitability in mind using tools like our sell sheet builder, scorecarding system, and sales training curricula.