Onboarding Independent Sales Teams: 3 Keys To Setting Your Teams Up For Success
Posted by naxumadmin / December 20, 2022
When running a referral marketing, direct sales, or affiliate marketing company the onboarding process the sales team consumes will set the pace for the companies growth.
Your independent sales teams are a volunteer army. They are choosing to promote you as an independent contractor and are not your employee.
So how do you create a dynamic culture that attracts A-Players and invites every new candidate to achieve their full potential?
1) Defining WHY They Chose To Be A Promoter
Simon Sinek’s viral Ted Talk, Start with why — how great leaders inspire action has over eight million views for truth found inside the concepts he shares.
When onboarding new independent sales people, inviting them to define ‘why’ they chose to promote your products and services is the best place to start.
A career in sales will not be without challenges. Having a reason to be successful bigger than the challenges the team members face will be required for them to maximize their success.
2) Gathering A Commitment To Daily Habits
Success in sales is not a one-time event. Long-term success comes from taking the daily actions required, that compound over time, to create continual and predictable sales. At NaXum, we see clients prompting their members to commit to 4 simple questions during the onboarding process:
1: How many new people a day will you start a conversation with?
2: How many people a day will you follow up with that you’ve already engaged?
3: How many minutes a day will you spend watching training and growing your mind?
4: How many pieces of social media content will you share each day?
By inviting your sales teams upfront in your onboarding tools to commit to daily actions, your process will reinforce the importance of the daily work required for success in sales.
Once your sales teams have set goals, do the work of putting together content and systems that model the appropriate way to reach out to prospective customers.
For many of your sales teams, choosing to be an independent sales consultant with your business may be the first time they’ve ever started a side-gig outside of their regular job before. Don’t expect them to be incredible salespeople or talented copywriters.
Instead, focus on the gifts your promoters do have. They have personal connections who trust them. Your platforms and onboarding process can give them the words to say, text, and share to engage their trusted contacts with your story.
At NaXum, we love assisting our clients with custom predictive tools that ‘feel like’ a top leader sitting next to the newest person on the team suggesting what to do next. Because these tools model the appropriate way to start conversations, follow up, and handle objections, your sales teams have a clear path to run on to win.
3) Continual Learning & Accountability
With your sales team knowing their ‘why’ and committed to daily actions, the next step is to create a culture of continual learning and kaizen.
By providing a learning area for your members to daily grow their minds, you can deliver an experience where your sales teams have a clear path to a constant expansion of their skills, knowledge, and beliefs in what’s possible.
When designing your learning platform remember the principles of the Success Triangle.
The three corners of the Success Triangle are:
Technical Knowledge: Skills to do a role
External Communication: The person’s beliefs about others
Internal Communication: The person’s beliefs about themselves.
The hypothesis of the success triangle is that when we’re tempted to fill our learning libraries with hours of content on the technical knowledge required to win, we miss out on the ratio of information required to create true behavior change.
To create success in your independent teams, we’ve found the hypothesis to be true that 5% of success is from technical knowledge, 25% external communication, and 70% from your team’s internal communication.
Wrap your learning platforms with systems for transparent accountability for best results.
As an example, we’ve seen clients display leader boards both in your web and app tools to the sales teams bringing public accountability sharing ‘who’ is taking action on their daily goals.
The healthy competition and real-time feedback have created a fun culture that motivates others to win their daily goals.
About Ben:
Ben Dixon loves referral marketing. His family found direct sales back in 2006 and had success using technology to create home-based businesses. Since 2010, Ben has focused on serving referral marketing, party plan, mlm, and direct sales companies across the globe with the technology they require to empower their passionate fans to virally grow their businesses.
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