The onboarding of new hires and their retention has a direct impact on a company’s economic performance, according to a study by the Boston Consulting Group. Their research concluded that firms with structured onboarding procedures enjoyed 2.5 times more revenue growth and 1.9 times the profit margin than those without.
Efficiently direct the onboarding of personnel
With potential financial benefits like those on offer, it would be foolhardy not to investigate how to improve your onboarding by implementing a technological solution. While a sales enablement platform may not appear to be the right HR tool, you will be surprised to learn that its content aggregation and analytics are just two features that can bring structure to onboarding.
Hiring an employee is a time-consuming process. In fact, it’s often underestimated just how much time is required. “Digital tools mean that the new hire doesn’t have to go around the office or go online to find the right colleague to answer their questions because the knowledge is in one place,” says Mikko Hyppölä, Director of Customer Success at Showell.
“With a sales enablement platform, the beauty is that all of your training content is in one place. If you provide goods or services that have a lot of supporting content and specialist knowledge, a sales enablement tool will allow a new sales rep, for example, to access everything. They can start learning right away and this will accelerate their time to being a productive member of the team.”
Using a digital tool as an onboarding system will help to avoid the stress of manually finding and providing all the relevant information separately, as well as ensuring that it is the up-to-date version. However, technology is only a tool and should not replace the in-person onboarding process that ought to be overseen by team leaders, emphasizes Hyppölä.
“Through the use of targeted notifications on the Showell platform, HR and team leaders can efficiently direct the onboarding of personnel, as well as track their progress and establish any necessary goals.”
Feedback encourages and guides new hires in the right direction
He adds that a good example of a successful onboarding process involves a team leader actively taking the new hire onboard and tracking how they are performing. “By giving them feedback, encouraging them and guiding them in the right direction, it has a very high correlation to how they will perform over the first three to six months.”
One of the biggest mistakes made during onboarding is forgetting to set up the goals and what should be achieved, believes Hyppölä. “From the very beginning, you should be discussing individual and joint goals for both the employee and company, as well as how to perform in the future. It provides the new hire with a better scope than just surviving from the morning to the afternoon.”
From the beginning, you should discuss individual and joint goals
However, he reminds that they must be guided to find the relevant content, given monthly goals and shown how to follow the company strategy. “Once you efficiently deal with that, you increase the amount of information being consumed. It’s not only about having the platform in place, but it’s also crucial to understand human behaviour, which can be forgotten sometimes.”
Sales enablement tools are not just file-sharing platforms, like SharePoint or Google Drive. Vendors, such as Showell, include comprehensive analytics that can track users and how they are using the content.
Positively encourage the consumption of sales content
While this may have an intrusive Big Brother vibe, Hyppölä says reassuringly that it’s more of a big brother in the coaching and support sense. “With a platform like Showell, you can check what material new employees are reading during their first weeks. If you see that there is important neglected information, you can positively encourage them to consume that content.”
Poor onboarding has been proven to result in high employee turnover and reduce employee productivity, writes BambooHR, a human resources SaaS tech firm. They add that a third of new hires look for a new job within their first six months and almost a quarter before their first anniversary—among Millennials, those percentages are even higher.
Using a sales enablement tool is a great way to ensure that your new hires, especially your sales reps, become valued members of your team for years to come. It is a sales tools that ensures they have the right information and the right skills to sell in the field, and it does it quickly and efficiently.
Incidentally, Showell has been shown to make onboarding new reps six times faster and is one of the few sales enablement vendors that offers a free trial via its freemium product, an option not offered by many of its competitors.
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