Your Framework for SaaS Sales New Hire Training is Not Working

You’re a Sales Manager. You have a new Enterprise Account Executive starting next week. You feel good about his/her territory. You feel good about his/her account install base. You DON’T feel good about what they’ll actually do their first few weeks.

Maybe you’ll have them shadow some calls. Maybe you’ll have them talk to a few cross-functional stakeholders internally. You’ll have an SE go over some product knowledge. You’ll have marketing share the value props, and you’ll finish with their comp plan and territory.

They should be good, right? They’ll pick it all up by month 7. You’d be wrong.

You would be surprised at how many times I’ve heard (non-sales) people say, “You know, I’d love to go through your onboarding if I could. I’ve been here a year and I still don’t feel like I have a good grasp about our [insert pricing, persona, product set]”. That’s because few companies do a good job of prioritizing the foundational need-to-know aspects of a go-to-market position.

I’ll provide you with a very simple, repeatable framework to use at any SaaS company.

The 4 Elements to Master

There are four (actually 6, but the 4 are bookended with some pre-requisite and supplementary) core tenets that every new GTM team member (SDR/BDR/AE/CSM/SE) should master before they are deemed “ready” for the field. The framework is simple — all you need to do is build out the curriculum (either self serve or live) around these four using existing knowledge or content.

• Know the Industry
• Know the Personas
• Know the Product
• Know the Sales Process

Unpacking the Elements

Industry

This module will be centered around everything you know about the industry. What does the market look like? What verticals/horizontals do you serve? What did the market look like before your company came swooping in to solve the world’s biggest problems? Who are the competitors in the field and what are your differentiators?

Personas

This one is critical and extremely foundational to a company being able to inform their directional guidance in market. Who do you sell to? Who are your buyers and what do they care about? Are they business buyers or technical buyers? What are their KPIs?

The easiest way to begin this exercise from scratch is to use traditional SaaS sales buyer personas (I’ll cover this in a future post).

Product

You never want to dump a truckload of product knowledge on a new hire — odds are they will retain about 8% of what you give them. But they do need to know how to talk about the product/service. The easiest way to do this is by giving them bite-sized one liner questions and answer reference sheets as a primer. Example below:

What does ABC Company do?

• Product Answer: It’s an open source database company that helps developers……..
• Sales Answer: We help companies save time and gain visibility by…..

You’ll also want to provide a simple table of the product offering explaining each and what/who they’re a fit for.

Of course you’ll need information on pricing, and additional details. The point is, it should be enough for them to go home and understand what the product is and how it’s priced. Pricing is another animal that we’ll cover in another post.

Sales Process

The final element wraps it all up by laying out what the sales process is and how it should be followed. This will likely be the most detailed module. What are the stages within the company’s sales process? What does discovery look like? What kinds of questions should be asked in the sales process? What is the methodology used that is mapped to the sales process? What are the internal resources used at each stage, and the activities that should be followed?

It always helps to tie it together with an example deal end-to-end.

In Summary

All you need is to build out a curriculum that details these four elements and have your new hires walk through it within their first few weeks. It can be self serve, in class/virtual/LMS, etc but it will be enough for your new hires to have a holistic view of the critical components to feel armed to sell. Everything else will be mastered “on the job” (ie deeper product knowledge details, sample customers, legal agreement topics, using internal tools, etc)

Appendix

I mentioned that there are actually 6 elements, but the 4 are the core pieces. The other 2 bookend the 4 and are:

• General Concepts
• Tools and Advanced

General concepts are usually just to set the stage for the other modules. If the product is an API, it’ll be information around what an API is. It’ll be terminology, both industry terminology, as well as internal company terminology.

Tools and Advanced are more specific to the company, how it operates, as well as the operational tools to help get the job done. It might cover internal approval processes, or it might cover advanced topics like data security.