Why Change Selling Blog

Onboarding and Ramping New Hires  

Executives responsible for hiring and ramping new marketing and sales hires have a whole host of challenges in finding and hiring good candidates and in getting them productive. For new marketers it's usually a brief, sink or swim induction that starts with a content immersion and then the writing begins. 

Onboarding new sales hires is a longer process, commencing with indoctrination in the product; demo, presentation, pricing, followed by CRM and sales process training.

After meetings with the sales manager to discuss territory and key accounts, the sales rep is off-and-running.
 
Unfortunately for sales reps in many companies, from this point on, they are on their own. They have to source their own leads, figure out how their customers buy their product and through trial and error, how to sell the product.  

Sound familiar? 

It should, this is pretty standard stuff in mainstream technology companies.  

For a straightforward product with a 1-month sales cycle time, it might take 3-4 months for a rep to become fully productive. For a complex enterprise solution with a 6-month sales cycle, it will likely take a year or more.  

Dave Kurlan’s formula for Ramp up time = the length of your sales cycle + the length of your learning curve + 30 days. Dave adds a couple of months to ramp time for either lack of industry knowledge or lack of sales experience.  

The only variable in Dave’s formula is the length of your learning curve.
 
CSO Insights suggests that the factors causing long ramp-times are:

With so much at stake in every prospect encounter, why would I promote the idea of leaving the laptop, PowerPoint presentation and LCD behind?

I've been working with sales and marketing teams for the past 8 years as a consultant to help align sales and marketing messages and create clarity around value creation. With one or two exceptions from the hundreds of presentations I've seen, they all follow the same format.

It's all about me, my big office, my stuff, my awards, my customers (slide 4), my partners, my products, my compelling features and my unforgettable and highly differentiated benefits. 

It's like there was a gold standard master PowerPoint presentation written 20 years ago and every presentation since has inherited the format....only the buildings and the names change.
If you want a good laugh and some introspection take a look at the Chicken, Chicken, Chicken video below (Thanks to Neil Warren for making me aware of this).

According to a CSO Insights survey on "Optimizing Sales Performance with Consistent Message Management", companies that are world-class at integrating sales and marketing messaging around the customer;

1. Best Book: Seth Godin's Linchpin really addresses a bunch of personal issues that prevent people from getting the important stuff done.
2. Obama's healthcare reforms: mean affordable healthcare coverage for me and my family and the employees of our business...and millions of other small business owners and employees in the US.
3. Moving back to the USA...it was a good time to go to the UK in 2003 and it feels like a good time to be back in the US - an added bonus, we missed the coldest, snowiest winter in Scotland for 60 years.
4. Becoming an affiliate of WhiteboardSelling provides a logical output of our Messaging Architecture process and translates it into something the sales team will actually want to use and enables me to implement a lot of the Salescraft technique I have developed as well.
5. Our Toyota Prius has to be the smartest car I've ever owned and we are averaging 50+ MPG. A real surprise inside, with more leg and headroom than our old Volvo Waggon and a terrific load deck that will carry most stuff we need to haul.
6. Moving in to our Pebble Beach home in just 10 weeks from purchase with a complete renovation has to be some sort of record...thanks to my wife, Robin.
7. My new Kevin Burns Putter...this is the first putter I have ever owned that is scientifically fitted exactly for my physiology and putting stroke. It is also the finest quality milled putter available and the custom-fitting-machining process that Kevin Burns invented and his practical stroke improvement tips mean that KBGolf putters are the only truly custom golf clubs that actually improve your game.
8. Best Work Engagement: Working on implementing Inbound Marketing at hot Cloud Storage spin-out Scality in Paris.
9. Best Wine of the year: 1976 Penfolds Grange Hermitage - a majesterial wine, still improving, incredible colour, nose and massive sweet and intense chocolatey red and black fruit flavors that linger for minutes, this wine still has 20 years in it.
10. Best Pub: The Central Bar, St Andrews and ask for a pint of my favorite real ale "Bitter and Twisted" from Harviestoun Brewery.
11. Best New Golf Course I played: Loch Lomond, Scotland thanks to my host Rick Gardner and the best parkland layout I've ever played - shot a 79 gross.

The following is a true story. A few names have been changed to protect the identity of some of the people involved. 

In the first instalment of this story, Scorched Earth, I described the situation leading to my being hired at MicroStrategy into an OEM sales role and the problems in overcoming relationships that my predecessor had soured. This episode is about the events leading up to my being given 30-day's notice of termination and reflects on the changing role of salespeople in B2B selling. 

For B2B marketers, quality trumps quantity in lead generation priority and according to a recent Marketing Sherpa poll, generating quality leads is the greatest challenge marketers face.

"We have just spent $25,000 on an SEO project and we don't have the budget right now!"
I have heard this sales objection a couple of times in the past year
from prospects in discussion around providing inbound marketing strategy and services (we are a certified HubSpot partner) and I was going to write a post and share some lessons learned.

In preparing to research this article I ran a number of searches and Google'd up the phrase "SEO is not a one off event" as it perfectly encapsulates the sentiment of the article I was planning to write.  A couple of clicks later I came across an excellent article on SEOMoz from 16 year old Fryed7 entitled "The definitive guide to awesome Web content".

This is a long, but excellent article and well worth the 5 minutes or so it will take to read, more if you follow all the links....and maybe you will want to watch the 17 minute Seth Godin video on TED on building Tribes.

I love Ed Fry's jet engine metaphor (an original thought) and although Ed calls it Tribal SEO, in the HubSpot community, creating "manifesto" content is one of corner-stones of Inbound Marketing strategy. Bob Apollo's brilliantly titled blog yesterday social media without thought-leadership is like broadcasting into space echo's this idea.
Take-Aways

The marketing messaging used in Websites and Blogs to drive Inbound Marketing leads, must be used to drive sales conversations with the gamut of prospects and customers, without salespeople having to translate it or figure it out themselves.

Rules for Inbound Marketing Messaging:

For a B2B Internet Site to be effective, there is more work required than simply selecting and optimizing keywords. Effective Website messaging and blogposts have the following characteristics