New Salesperson Onboarding Checklist for Startups

Since the average cost of recruiting, hiring, and training an employee is typically 200% of an employee’s annual salary, you want to make sure they actually stick around.

According to HubSpot, in an Allied Workforce Mobility Survey it was revealed that only 66% of companies train their new employees.

On average, the cost of onboarding a new hire is just $67. Compare this to the cost of recruiting, hiring and training a sales employee (over $100,000), and you’ve got a clear, logical reason to use a proper salesperson onboarding process.

Let’s jump into this salesperson onboarding checklist to help ensure your new hire successfully integrates into your company with ease. 

These tasks should be completed before the new hire’s first day. 

Before the onboarding process can begin, you’re required to prepare any necessary paperwork and information before your new hire’s first day. You can start preparing this paperwork by recording the following information in the form field below:

When hiring a new employee you need to remember the basics – all forms must be intact and passed on to the HR department. Save copies of these vital forms using the form fields below:

If you require some examples of the necessary forms, see below.

1. Intellectual property and assignment agreement (Customizable example)
2. Non-Disclosure agreement (Customizable example)

You can also edit what paperwork you want to upload during this onboarding process by adding the workflow to your library and clicking ‘Edit.’ 

Great! Now that you’ve completed the employee paperwork, you can go ahead and create a company email for your new hire. 

Once you’ve provided the new hire with their company email, you can send a welcome mail to this address. This can also be an opportunity to remind them of their start date and keep them interested in this new position. 

An employee handbook is an excellent way to help your new hire understand your company culture and the relevant information for their role.

If you have a handbook, you can include it into Pages and provide the link in this workflow to help provide the new employee with easy access.

These tasks should be completed by the new hire’s first day of employment. 

Five9 recommends you to follow this process for an introductory session that will make new hires feel at home:

The goal of the introduction session is to introduce everyone and create an awesome environment.

When assigning a mentor, be clear about their roles. Identify the criteria and expectations to ensure the mentor is fully aware of their duties. Record the assigned mentor with the form field below.

Don’t follow the job title hierarchy or pick a person with a higher job title or a person that has been in the company the longest. Instead, it’s best to find a person who knows the most about the tasks regardless of their job title. Tasks for mentors might include:   

A full tour lets new employees feel comfortable in the area while giving them a chance to meet their co-workers. During the tour (perhaps using your phone) tick off the below sub-checklist items to make sure you don’t miss anything.

(Source: welcome.mit.edu)

To get a better idea of the company you’re working for, you can read through the employee handbook. Here are the sections you should be paying attention to. You can tick each one off once you’ve finished reading through the relevant section. 

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This is the perfect opportunity to check in with your new hire and see how their first day went. During this meeting, you can let them know about what they can expect within the following weeks, the projects they have coming up, and their roles and responsibilities at this point. 

These tasks should be completed within the new hire’s first week of employment. 

Your new hires should be familiar with any required tools you might be using before they start to work independently. Organize a training session to test your employees on these tools and provide the necessary training. 

Once the salesperson is familiar with your product through testing, you should introduce them to your customer base by getting them to read (or even interact with) your support conversations.

This is a fantastic way to show both the breadth of questions and objections they will later be faced with, but also give them a sense of the background and desires of your customers first hand.

If you’re planning to have your new hires react to support conversations, you should properly brief these employees through a meeting. 

Having daily check-ins with your new hire can be incredibly beneficial to ensure they are integrating well into the company. You won’t need to do this for the entire onboarding process, but doing so during the first week will help provide the new hire with some direction and support. 

As time goes on, you won’t need to check up on how your new employee is doing so regularly. Limiting correspondence to weekly meetings means that the most important issues of the week can be ironed out on the spot.

It’s best not to schedule a meeting like this on Friday, so action can be taken straight afterwards. Also, ensure that you do not overload them with feedback – focus on a few key areas of improvement at a time, as this will not only make it clear what they have to focus on before the next meeting, but they also avoid walking away with their confidence in tatters.

(Source: inc.com)

Each onboarding process should come with a project, as this helps managers and mentors assess the new hire’s progress during the initial onboarding. When looking at a salesperson onboarding checklist, assigning a live calls project offers great benefits. 

This project can involve the employee cold calling various potential customers. During this project, they can apply everything that they have learned so far in the onboarding process. From here, the calls can be recorded, process tracked, and number of sales they accumulated. 

Have a meeting with your new hire to discuss this project and lay out everything that needs to be done. The end of the project could be after reaching a certain number of hours’ worth of cold calling. 

Now that your new hire has reached the targeted number of cold calling hours, it’s time to review how they did.

On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the best): 

After you’ve assessed their performance, you can go ahead and schedule a meeting to provide feedback. This is also a great opportunity to discuss future plans and goals with the new hire. 

Decide whether the employee needs more orientation or is good to go by looking at the following aspects and comparing them to your expectations:

Bring in their assigned buddy for the assessment to help you clear up anything you’re not sure about.

• Victoria Young – Proven Strategies for Reducing Sales Rep Turnover
• Patrick Hull – Answer 4 Questions to Get a Great Mission Statement
• David Skok – Sales and Employee Onboarding Best Practices
• Kauffman Foundation – ‘I Have No Idea What Your Company Does!’ Five Steps To Clearly Explain Your Startup Idea
• Howard Stevenson – The 4 Elements That Make Great Company Culture
• Amazing Workplace – Building And Managing Remote Teams
• The Whole Brain Group – Five Simple Steps to Creating an Ideal Customer Profile
• Didi Zheleva – How to Find Prospects for your Business
• Zach Bulygo – The SaaS Owners Guide to Churn
• Jason Lemkin – Expired: Your SaaS Company Doesn’t Need Sales Reps Focused on Renewals
• ITWorld – Quickly Share Google Calendar Events by Adding the Person’s Email Address
• MIT – Onboarding Buddy Suggestions and Tips
• Veer Gidwaney – How to Hold a Weekly Team Meeting Without Wasting People’s Time
• Steli Efti – How To Onboard New Sales Hires

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