Does your sales onboarding program prepare new hires for the tough challenges that lay ahead?

They need to be ready to persist in the face of rejection after rejection after rejection. Then, after all the stress, they need to be ready to put on their game face for more conversations with prospects, referrals, and existing customers. Otherwise, you won’t get enough sales.

Yet, salespeople often feel unprepared. In fact, 55% of salespeople lack the relevant skills to be successful.

But they don’t have to feel unprepared. If you invest in an advanced onboarding program  (defined as 6-12 months long), they’ll soon be using their training to make more sales. Only 20% of companies invest in year-long or greater onboarding. But employees that receive year-long onboarding have an advantage —they experience many cyclic firsts with a mentor allowing them to never feel lost.

Of course, a year-long onboarding process is intimidating. Luckily, technology like an LXP can make the process easier. Check out the four ways an LXP can supercharge your sales onboarding and automate some of the challenges.

Personalized Pathways

Since 92% of their interactions happen on the phone, sales reps don’t have the luxury of looking things up. They need to do it the old-fashioned way—by memorizing it.

How can they learn all the information they need to sell complex products?

They need personalized learning pathways. This way sales reps can review the material they need to learn at any given time.

Also, unlike hard technical skills, sales reps require fantastic soft skills. An LXP can make recommendations to your team about the soft skills training they need to meet their sales quotas.

Search Navigation

Even with the personalized pathways available through an LXP, sales reps can’t learn it all. They’ll still run into situations where they don’t know the answer.

Where do you think they’ll turn?

Unfortunately, the answer might be Google since 70% of people use search engines when a problem arises at work. Sales reps shouldn’t turn to Google though because they often need access to proprietary information. Imagine an unhappy customer calling in because a sales rep failed to explain correctly an integral feature. You need them to use the information provided by your company to make sure they get it right.

Instead of Google, an LXP with search navigation allows sales reps to double check their information quickly and ensure prospects understand the product perfectly. By introducing your sales reps to a searchable LXP during onboarding, you’re setting them up for success in the field.

Engaging Content for effective Sales onboarding

Employees often complain about onboarding because it’s long and boring.

You need highly engaging, bite-size content that employees can access from anywhere so you get them out of the classroom and into the field making sales faster.

Microlearning fits the bill because learners only need to pay attention in 5 to 10 minute bursts.

This form of learning can also take advantage of spaced repetition. Unlike photographs, our brains memorize information by building the neural pathways, but we need to review the information multiple times over multiple days to create these pathways. An LXP can help learners review information to gain mastery over the content.

By taking your learning mobile, sales reps will be able to access microlearning modules on the go when they’re traveling or waiting for meetings to start. Easily accessible content builds engagement and motivation.

Finally, you can make engaging content by gamifying it. Gamification improves engagement by 48%.. Salespeople often tend to be competitive so by gamifying their learning systems with digital badges or learner experience points, companies can tap into this source of motivation and keep them on the platform during onboarding and beyond.

User-generated content

Have you ever noticed when you start a new job that you’re constantly leaning on your colleagues for support? Often those employees aren’t even your manager. Sometimes they’re even new just like you.

Human beings learn with other people in collaborative and informal ways.

What if you could harness this instinct in your learning technology?

With an LXP, you can because it allows for user-generated content.

Instructional designers often talk about scaffolding learning. How can you scaffold learning if you’re not sure of all the steps? Learners often find tiny steps instructional designers hadn’t even considered, but prove necessary to the learning journey.

An LXP can also create supportive online forums for your learners to help them share the tiny, learning steps they’ve discovered through practice. These forums can be moderated by other experts within your company or provide safe spaces for new hires to talk about their fears and anxieties.

At the end of the day, you want to make onboarding a safe and empowering process. User-generated content is a great way to do it because it shows their voices matter to you.

What else can your LXP provide?

Unlike an LMS, an LXP puts the user experience at the heart of the learning process. Sharing, accessing and finding content become easy by design.

Imagine two different sales onboarding experiences:

• Traditional onboarding

 A new sales rep starts her job with impersonal, standardized e-learning modules that explain company policy and culture to her. She continues training by sitting through long, in-person sessions that dump a bunch of knowledge about the product on her for a few days. Then she’s sent out into the field with an inattentive mentor.

• Onboarding with an LXP

This time the same sales rep starts her job by using a platform that assesses some of her soft skills and records a few of her preferences immediately.

The learning platform generates recommendations to help her learn the skills and product information necessary to succeed in her new role. She’s reassured that she doesn’t need to learn everything now because she’ll have access to an engaging learning experience from her phone as she continues training with her mentor. She still has in-person sessions, but they’re focused on developing the soft skills necessary to make the sale and a social network to help all of the trainees learn together. They’re introduced to online forums where they can support each other and access experts to answer any questions they need moving forward. Just like before, she’s sent out into the field with an inattentive mentor.

Which trainee do you think had a better onboarding experience? Which will develop the skills he needs to succeed and make the sale?

Both onboarding experiences include both technical and human resources. The difference in the second case is that the technical resources include personalization and continuous learning. The second also leverages technology to create multiple human connections, rather than relying on one mentor.

The question for many organizations—how can you best leverage technology to create deeper, human connections, and more personalized learning experience?  At Origin, we believe our Fractal LXP can do both. It can provide a personalized learning experience, while still creating deep, human connections for an onboarding experience that makes new hires feel empowered and secure. Contact a representative today to schedule a demo.