Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 163: How to onboard new sellers yourself

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163: How to onboard new sellers yourself · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Blue Board podcast, which exists because at startups it's hard to get consistent traction and scale the sales team.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Sales Blue Board gives you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or 10 about selling and building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monhan, and today we are talking about onboarding of new sales hires.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the reality is the big companies in the space have literally armies of people, small armies of people whose job it is to look at the incoming salespeople into the company and build programs that help them get up and running as fast as possible.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: I know some of the bigger names out there will have in double digits number of people that their sole job is to do onboarding, new hire, sales training, things like that.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Startups don't have this luxury, as we know, right?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: We just don't have the headcount, we don't have the resources to go and do that.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And what results is that too often a incoming salesperson, a startup has a pretty lame experience.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's haphazard, it's focused on the wrong things.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of it is up to them to just go figure out, which is not a bad thing in general.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: But when it happens like this, what you often find is you lose control about a whole bunch of things and what they're taking on board, what they're learning, what they're remembering.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And uh in a startup world, you know, you can't afford that.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much writing on uh getting new salespeople up and running, right?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: They're it's a big number of a small number, as it were, right?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you're onboarding three to five people of a team of 10, you're almost doubling the size of the team.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So these guys have a big impact on the success of the company, never mind the sales team over the coming months.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of writing on their success, how fast you can get them up and running, and how successful they are when they're there.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: So over the years, I've actually built a number of sales new hard programs at uh medium and size companies and also at startups.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if I was a sales leader right now and I didn't have access to people, this is how I would do it, right?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is how I would approach it if I were you.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of similarities in this list that I do anyway with my clients when I uh help them build programs.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So let me go through a list of things here.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's just uh six things to call out, but hopefully I'll give you a framework that you could work off and see how you could improve the onboarding that you're doing right now.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: The first one seems a little bit obvious, but you know, remarkably it's often missed, which is give an incoming salesperson very clear objectives week by week, month by month, about what's expected of them in terms of their growth inside the company, and then build the program to help them meet those.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: This does seem obvious, but it is missed, right?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think sometimes what people do is they get they get too wrapped around wrapped up around the wrong things as well.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: What I encourage my clients to do is to think about the first two metrics are how soon can you have this person prospecting?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: They're coming in as an AE and they've got some experience and maybe a network.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: How soon can they start booking meetings with their network, with their friendlies?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one metric, right?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: The second metric is how soon are they ready to run a first meeting on their own?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: So imagine that they did book a meeting with a friendly, and for whatever reason, you know, the other people at the company weren't able to show up.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Could this person handle themselves, do all the things that usually happen in a first meeting and be successful?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there's two things to think about in terms of harder metrics.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, first uh new business pipeline generated is uh is another one.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can think about qualified pipeline, things like that, right?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I would think about leading indicators right at the start.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And two leading indicators are are they prospecting?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Can they do that?
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And secondly, do they have the wherewithal to run a first meeting with all the imaginations that go on first meetings at your company?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And once you've got some clarity around that, you can set quite aggressive goals about when they should be able to do that.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when I work with my clients, I have very aggressive goals.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: I say at the end of the first week of the company, they should be able to pick up the phone or send an email to people they know and say, hey, I just joined this company.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really excited about what we're doing.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Let me give you a value prop, value prop, value prop.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get together, right?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: They should be able to do that, right?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't take much to do that.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and maybe they can answer the odd question, right, through the phone, you know, simple questions that will come back.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I say at the end of the second week, they should be able to run that first meeting.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a real pressure point, right?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's things that they feel like they should have to know to be able to run that first meeting, like a whole bunch of background information.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: In reality, it's not that complicated, right?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you put people under pressure if you say at the end of the second week, we're gonna have a role play, and at the end of that role play, you either pass or you fail.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, failing doesn't mean you get fired or anything like that.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: It just means we need to go again.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's more learning to be done, right?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's how I think about it, right?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we're really starting at the beginning, be very clear, those leading indicators, what they should be.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing that uh I would do if I were you is I would help them get very deep about prospects and the personas that you're targeting and the problems these personas have.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the aha, and this is where a lot of people, I don't think, get this right.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you fill people's brains with something in the first week or two, this is what they will focus on, this is what they'll remember, this is what will occupy most of their mindset and uh what they think about when they're thinking about selling your product.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: So if you fill that brain full of information about your ideal customer, the prospects, the people themselves, the job titles, the personas, their fears and frustrations, how they're measured, uh, what problems they have in this space, what gets them fired, what gets them promoted, what else is round about this problem, uh, what's ancillary to this, what they might be doing already, why that might not be working for them.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Basically everything about their lives, fill their brains with that first before you even get as far as thinking about, you know, we're gonna talk about how amazing we are as a company and our amazing products and all this sort of stuff.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And and that's the aha.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And too many people do it the wrong way around, I think.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: What they do is they start with, well, we had this amazing founder, and he had this great vision, and uh, here was a vision that they had, and it's just amazing.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And here was a product, and you know, it's amazing, and it does all these amazing things, and you know, it's so much better than the competition and all this sort of stuff.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: We filled their brains with all this stuff about us, and to me, that is wrong, right?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: We need to fill their brains and get them really, really deeply knowledgeable and involved with thinking about prospects, about customers, the people themselves, and what they care about.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you go about doing that?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Three ways to do it uh that uh come to mind immediately.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: One is existing customers, right?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: You may want to go and interview and have on video a two or three customers be interviewed.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And you're not trying to, you know, get them to say how awesome you are.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: What you're really trying to do is interview them about their lives, their jobs, you know, how they think about things, what they were doing before, your product, the challenges they were facing, all the dynamics going on, all that.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you could go interview them.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: You could bring a customer on the phone or on a video link.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you've got a class, a new hard class, just say, hey, we need an R, you know, we've got some bunch of questions about your job, video that and then record it, right?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: But go to existing customers first, right?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're often, if your customers are early stage, they're motivated and they want to see you succeed.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: The second one is it's remarkable how many uh videos there are on YouTube that cover this sort of area.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: I did some work recently and um I was working with a cloud security company, and there's a whole bunch of videos about cloud security engineers, how to be one, day in the life of, things like that, right?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Cloud security engineers, architects, there obviously CISOs.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's so many CISOs talking about all sorts of things, right?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: So YouTube videos are your friend.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can go out there, you can find them, catalog them, and have them watch them.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third thing I would do, hopefully you have a conversation intelligence tool like Gong or Chorus or the many, many other good ones that are out there.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Get them to listen just to the discovery portion of a bunch of calls that have been recorded.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Don't tell them, hey, go listen to a bunch of calls, right?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because they're gonna get distracted and pulled all sorts of different directions.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Ideally, what you should be able to do is create a playlist inside the tool that has just the snippets of the discovery portion and have them go down and listen to those calls.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: So there's three ways just in getting to understand the prospects and their problems to get some understanding for the sellers about the people they're gonna be talking to.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: The third thing to do is up level it a little bit and think about the industry and the market.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this really depends on the type of sellers you're bringing in.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: If your profile is longtime cybersecurity salespeople, you don't need to go so deep on this.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly on the industry side.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, maybe your submarket, maybe they need to know more about your submarket.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: But again, this should not be a company-tinged view about this submarket, right?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: YouTube is your friend again.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole bunch of videos about a whole bunch of things.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you're in uh submarket X, go search for videos on submarket X.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: They might not be the perfect videos about describing the real need for your exact solution.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Really, what you're trying to do is give people a flavor for the dynamics of the market, what's going on, the big players, the small players, how it's changing, uh, how this market even came to, this submarket even came to exist.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: When did it come to exist?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: What was the drivers behind it?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Things like that, right?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: So again, YouTube is your friend for that.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: The fourth thing is then once you've got that base in terms of the persona and then the market, is talk to them and train them on the business value in your offering.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Again, don't go into training them on the product yet.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Train them on the business value in the offering.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And now, this may be something, likely to be something that you have to do internally, right?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: But you really want them to understand the outcomes that you deliver for customers, the problems that they have, the value propositions that they're attached to those.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And what to do when you're doing this, a quick trick is to set the new hires up with questions to answer, right?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So these aren't multiple choice questions, right?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: They should be able to listen to something and then be able to say, you know, why would X persona, why would our ID persona love this bit about what we do, this value prop, this big outcome, right?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Why might they be threatened?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Why might, for example, I don't know, the engineering, security engineering team love this, but why might the operations team not love it?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Ask them questions like that that are designed to get them thinking in the right way, rather than just saying, did they pass the test?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Did they answer the right questions and choose the right option, the multi-choice, right?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So what you could do to expand on that is give them daily research projects, right?
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you got uh, and this applies also to maybe the industry market knowledge and also the persona uh things we talked about is every day they should be submitting videos to you saying, you know, the topic today was some market that we're in, and the question was, you know, which of the ideal personas might love this bit of what we do?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Here's my five-minute video response on that.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, by doing a video response, you're putting the onus on them to go do the work, synthesize what they've learned, and then be able to articulate it back to you in a video without you having to spend a whole bunch of time to go through the process with them, right?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Ideally, you should be just looking at some videos every morning of what was submitted the night before and then be able to write back to them and say, love it, or you missed the point, or you know, let's chat, right?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's a good way to put the work on them so that uh you're not inundated.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like you have not enough work to do, right?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a good way to put the work on them to take charge of their learning like that.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then after all that, and only then should you tinge taint their learning by talking about the company and the product, getting into very light demos.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, going back to the aha, as I said, this is where people right now often start.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's tell them what we do, let's show them the product, let's tell them how awesome we think this bit of a product is.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let me give them a demo.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go waist deep into the demo.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: And basically what we're doing is filling their brains with the product and all about us.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: When as we know that's important, but nowhere near as important as filling their brains with the prospects, the problems that they have, the value props that we have, the things that we solve, the examples, all these things, right?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: So this should come later on, not in the first few days.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Some people are gonna hate this.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'll guarantee it, right?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have people internally who think this is stupid.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, maybe the, you know, your leadership, the founders are gonna say, hold on, you need to know about the product at the start.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all these things that we need to tell them and all the rest of it.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: So they may hate it.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, some sellers are not gonna like it, right?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: They'll be saying, Well, what about the product?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: I need to see the product.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: What I'll tell you is that uh I built and ran a new hire onboarding program for a well-known company now in cybersecurity.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: At the time they were probably just beyond early stage at about four or five hundred people in the company.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: We doubled the number of salespeople in one year.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: So we were we were ramping up new hire classes basically every um six weeks to two months.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: And in that week-long program, uh, they never once saw a demo.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I got some pushback about that, right?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: I certainly did, but when people understood what I was doing, they liked it.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how we ran the program.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: We talked a lot about prospects, we talked about use cases, we talked about where the product would help.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: We just didn't have product training.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: No one stood up and said, let me tell you about the product.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: No one stood up and said, I'm gonna give you a demo, right?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, this needs to be pushed back a little bit.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: I tell you, it's it's really interesting when you see people respond to this.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Some will hate it, some will like it, and some will just understand that you know what they're trying to do is deliver business value and the product's important, but they should be filling their brains with that to start.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: So even when you're doing this though, when you're doing the product training, let's call it, um, again, challenge them to think why the personas would love this bit about the product.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: What you don't want to do is to say, well, you know, why don't we give the new hires the one-hour demo, right?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: What we should be doing is saying, well, let's show them how this works, but do it in the context of what they've learned about the problems so far.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: So they should be able to say, I know that our ideal persona has problems A, B, and C.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And now, uh, because of the intentional way it was designed, I can see how our product helps with A, B, and C, right?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you're connecting the dots that way at the end.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then the sixth thing I would say at this point is there's gonna be some judo things that uh need to be done.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: These are the day-to-day blocking and tackling when you're out there.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Again, going back to my comment about first meetings, right?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: There's gonna be some things, right?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: So discovery questions, there's gonna be objections or questions coming from the prospect that you need to handle.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: They need to be able to get stories, right?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Customer stories.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: So these are things, just the tactical things they need to have.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so you know, intersperse in the first few weeks is different elements of this, right?
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: So help, you know, maybe what you say to them is you're gonna learn a new customer story every couple of days or one a week for the first three weeks, whatever it might be, and make sure they learn it.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then you know, they need to come up with their own discovery questions based on the structures you want to use, the qualifications that you want them to get into and deals, things like that.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then with the objections and common questions, you know, you can crowdsource this internally, right?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: I bet you if you have the team that's there right now and you for half an hour or an hour, you can probably come up with the top 10 questions you get and then have good answers for those, right?
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: So crowdsource that and then adapt from there.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: So what's interesting is if you uh listen to what I'm saying, there's some things I haven't talked about, right?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: No need, you know, for Salesforce training, no need for all the tools training, things like that.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in reality, you can drop them in.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: They're just not priorities, right?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I hear about is, you know, we need to train them on pricing.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the reality is that they're probably not going to use pricing for a month or two, maybe.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, depending on your deal velocity and how you get into it.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: They might not need pricing training.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you train them on pricing in the first week they're there, the first two weeks they're there, and they don't actually do a quote for a month, they've completely forgotten what you've told them anyway, right?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you just have to think about what's the right time to bring some of these things in and be true to your leading indicators that you're asking them to shoot for and make sure that whatever training you're doing is right for that.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: What's true is that it's easy to come up with a list of things to possibly train them on, right?
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: The team, you know, I bet you you could sit down and say, well, here's all the things they should know, and the list is gonna be very long.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: The real art and the trick to this is to narrow it down to what they actually need to know right now or need to do right now.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I started off by saying, let's get clear on the objectives.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you're trying to get them to prospect early, you're trying to get them to do first meetings, things like that.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Focus everything.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's the filter.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Of all the things that we think they should be trained on, what is aligned to them being to do prospecting and do first meetings and then figure out how you deprioritize your things?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now you might get to them eventually, but it might not be in the first one, two, three weeks of their time in the company.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: So these six points above will help you get focus and deliver a pretty damn good program for a new hire if you put it together with thought and with the right intentions.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: So good luck with that.
• 18:35
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• 18:40
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• 18:46
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• 18:53
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