Onboarding sets the tone for a rep’s experience and performance at your organization. In fact, 70% of new hires decide whether a job is the right fit within the first month — and 29% know in just the first week.
Yet too often, onboarding falls short in preparing reps to be successful. Before Highspot, 25% of customers struggled with sub-optimal rep ramp time. Reps weren’t learning quickly enough, and they were taking too long to start closing deals consistently.
Hiring new employees is an expensive investment that organizations make with the hopes of quickly seeing a high return on that investment. By helping new reps become productive faster, you can accelerate their path to driving revenue for your business.
An ideal sales onboarding program not only enhances rep ramp time – but also ensures sellers have a positive experience and stay successful long-term. How do you create an effective onboarding program that expedites sales productivity? Here are three data-backed strategies to build onboarding that engages sellers and delivers results.
Keep Content Fresh, Relevant, and Connected
Outdated or disconnected onboarding content not only disengages learners, it prevents effective knowledge transfer and delays ramp time. The best onboarding programs don’t just centralize content — they contextualize it, keeping sellers focused and confident. To ensure your learning material stays top of mind for reps, govern it regularly and update it as needed. As your business grows, go-to-market initiatives change, and new solutions are launched, the material reps digest when they first join your company should evolve as well to reflect those changes.
Keeping your onboarding content fresh and easy to locate will help increase rep adoption of the material – and ensure it stays top of mind for sellers. By surfacing onboarding assets in places reps will see within your enablement platform, you can reinforce learning and increase retention. For instance, highlight your onboarding courses on your reps’ homepage in Highspot so it’s one of the first things they see after logging into the tool, or embed courses directly within relevant Sales Plays.
When sellers repeatedly interact with onboarding content in their flow of work, they’re more likely to engage with the material and apply what they’ve learned.
TIP: Link your training courses to Sales Plays in Highspot to boost in completion. Customers who include courses in their Plays report a 10% higher completion rate. This small shift creates a more connected learning experience and helps sellers better understand the “why” behind what they’re learning.
Make Learning Paths Personalized and Practical
When onboarding turns into a monotonous activity, sellers quickly tune it out. But when learning is relevant, concise, tailored, and reinforced, it sticks.
By designing role-specific Learning Paths, you can deliver highly personalized onboarding courses that guide reps through every phase of their experience and keep them engaged with materials they’ll actually use in their day-to-day.
The other key to designing effective Learning Paths is brevity. Evaluate your courses – do you have too many lessons and too much content with each lesson? That’s a fast track to seller dropout. According to Highspot research of customers’ training courses, the most highly-completed courses shared some specific design traits: they contained two lessons, two embedded presentations, and two Knowledge Checks to quiz sellers on the material.
TIP: Keep onboarding courses brief to avoid overloading new sellers. Aim for short, structured lessons with a mix of video, assessments, and practice opportunities. Our data shows that the sweet spot for lesson length is 5-6 minutes to complete a lesson, with completion dropping at the 7-minute mark. Creating simpler, interactive learning experiences will help you keep learners engaged and enhance overall completion of your onboarding programs.
Track What Works – and What Doesn’t
Measuring the outcomes associated with your onboarding enables you to identify opportunities to improve them. More than half (55%) of organizations don’t measure onboarding effectiveness — leaving impact and ROI in the dark. With Scorecards, you can track onboarding performance and connect it to real sales behaviors like content usage, course completion, Digital Room creation, and meeting execution. This makes it easier to identify what’s working and where to optimize.
You want to understand if onboarding helped to equip sellers with the foundational skills to sell effectively. You also need to know if it primed sellers to review the right content, share the right assets, and say the right things. To understand if your learning program resulted in behavior change or exposed skill gaps in need of remedying, leverage analytics to help you evaluate impact.
TIP: Use the Rep Scorecard post-onboarding to assess how your onboarding programs prepared new sellers for their roles. Highspot customers who use the Rep Scorecard to evaluate seller behavior and coach to performance gaps experience 20% higher buyer engagement.
Turn Onboarding Into a Strategic Advantage
Whether you’re building from scratch or optimizing a mature program, the goal of onboarding is the same: ramp sellers effectively so they can start performing faster. With a unified enablement platform to execute your learning programs, you can more easily keep content relevant, personalized, and concise – and understand its impact to achieve desired outcomes.
Customers who train their reps with Highspot report a 24% increase in average rep quota attainment. Designing effective onboarding is key to building a team of sellers who are ready to perform and drive lasting business results.
To learn how to use Highspot to deliver high-impact onboarding, download our E-book.
This blog post is part of Highspot’s research-backed blog series, Highspot Insights. With the help of our research teams, we provide data-driven best practices for sales enablement. If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
