By 2020, roughly 50% of the American workforce will be Millennials and that number will jump considerably to 75% by 2025. Companies are evolving away from traditional 9-to-5, corporate ladder, workplace structures and focusing on important things like culture, flexible work hours, coaching and mentorship. Organizations need to be innovative in the way they attract and retain sales talent, as reps are quick to job hop if they are unfulfilled or unable to hit quotas.
The quickest way to crush your reps excitement for a new role? Death by powerpoint, or forcing them to watch monotone video recordings of a person droning on and on about workplace processes. The craving for instant gratification and feedback makes millennials quick to adapt, change and learn faster and smarter. Through technology and online resources, they learned to become self-sufficient, creating a workforce and think-team of innovators. Younger sales reps are looking to move at a quicker pace and want to see results, and success, faster.
After all, the goal is to continuously close deals faster and shorten the sales cycle, therefore an organization must offer sales tools that align with this sense of immediacy. It’s valuable to create an onboarding experience that aligns with millennial values so they can become productive members of your workforces more quickly.
Here are some surefire ways to modernize your onboarding process and keep new millennial sales reps ramped-up, engaged and ready to start selling faster and more effectively:
Start Communicating Early
While there are various elements that go into sales enablement, onboard training is a big part of driving salespeople toward success. Often, new hires will partake in job prep before starting a new role, such as industry research, reviewing the company website or looking into new colleagues and culture via LinkedIn. Creating a public social group on networks such as LinkedIn is a great way to connect your new sales rep to the rest of the team.
Many companies are now using HR chatbots to collect employee data and provide new hires with a general set of guidelines through the entire procedure of hiring. Having AI technology handle pre-boarding administrative tasks will free up time for both the HR team and the employee can focus on quality learning right out of the gate.
Use The Latest On-boarding Technology
Millennial sales reps are typically tech-savvy and quick to embrace cutting-edge sales tools that are accessible from a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. Millennials are accustomed to having information at their fingertips. With social media channels and chat applications like Kik, What’s App and Facebook Messenger, it’s no wonder social selling has become the new norm for younger reps.
Workplace chat applications such as Slack, who recently surpassed 6 million users, are becoming commonplace to interact with coworkers. There is no longer a need to be constantly plugged in, as mobile applications allow reps to take key information and resources with them on the go. Technology can simplify the onboarding process and shorten the sales rep overall time-to-productivity while being cost-effective in the long term.
Spend More Time on Quality Learning
One thing that will help your new sales professionals advance faster? Focus on quality learning. Connect them with your top performers, peer mentors and allow job shadowing to get new hires ramped-up, inspired and motivated to reach goals. Automating learning through mobile chat technology such as Kiite will allow the sales rep to access reading materials, research, sales decks and any company information when they need to, anytime, anywhere.
Socializing through learn-as-you-go or experiential learning opportunities will give millennials that instant gratification and make the process more engaging and meaningful. Finally, developing human-to-human relationships with colleagues whom they can ask questions and use as examples to model their own behaviour, will allow new hires to adapt to the cultural norms of the organization.
The need for training on your organization’s basics, like policies, technologies, products, services, and other important organizational knowledge is never going to change, but the way you make that information accessible can. Onboarding is the first introduction to the company your millennial sales rep will experience, therefore it is vital to ensure quality learning and engagement that will propel them towards success and not the exit sign.
Let’s Connect
If your company is doing something unique to engage and onboard millennial sales talent, we would love to hear from you and share your story! Send us a quick note at info@kiite.ai or comment below.
