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Likely, your sales department is falling short in at least one of two sales rep onboarding areas: either uptake or ongoing education.  Perhaps it takes new reps months of ramp-up to sell accurately. That’s bad onboarding. Or, perhaps you invest heavily on rep education on the front end, then stop. That resulting lazy rep mentality also points to an onboarding problem. 

The five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower aptly noted that, “Morale is the single greatest factor in successful wars.” The same goes for the battlefield of selling. Much like a general leading troops to victory, high-performance sales managers earn the willing and earnest cooperation of the sales reps beneath them.

Sales managers often perform as drill sergeants who deliver impassioned speeches to ignite their troops of salespeople. The sales manager position implies duties of coaching, training, implementing and other one-way forms of communication.

Most of us have fallen into the habit of labeling content like blog posts, infographics, whitepapers and presentations as “marketing content,” imagining that content serves as an advertising tool that drops potential customers at the salesperson’s doorstep, who takes it from there. In reality, content can guide customers, and salespeople, through every step of the sales pipeline. Oftentimes, what we label as “marketing content” can also be used as “sales content.” The content you use now for advertising may serve a larger purpose if it is effectively used throughout the entire purchasing process. Here are the beginner’s commandments for kick starting a sales content strategy:

The onboarding of salespeople has proved to be an elusive sport. Sales training best practices are always under construction. Ask a VP of Sales if he or she is totally confident with their company’s sales training process. Chances are, they’re looking for the next best thing to solve that sticky situation.  

It was not so long ago that the best tactic for onboarding was totally tactless. It was a “throw everything; see what sticks” sort of thing. A barrage of outdated loose-leaf papers, unreadable handwritten notes, insufferable 100-page PowerPoints, and other unworthy pursuits characterized onboarding. More often than not, none of that stuck. Salespeople compensated by making up their own rules. They came up with their own sales playbooks.  

We don’t wait for a momentous life experience to share a story with 1,000 of our closest friends. We’ll shout from the Internet’s rooftops about almost anything. When we hire a photographer and receive the photo proofs, we thank them publicly on Facebook and share every last one of the copies on Flickr. We post on Yelp to complain about poor car rental service and we mention the name of the representative involved in the mix-up. We Instragram a nice lunch at a new restaurant and link it to the restaurant’s page. We Tweet 140-character complaints at airlines when our plane is taxied for too long on the runway.

Flurries of sales studies quantify a shift in the role of the salesperson of today. Data shows a steady decrease in the amount of time that on-the-clock salespeople spend actively selling. Now, representatives spend the majority of their workday concerned with other tasks, like planning sales calls and researching their prospects. Most studies suggest that less than 50% of salespeople’s time is spent delivering traditional sales presentations.

The pipeline is a widely accepted metaphor for the sales process, as it conjures a simple visualization of a salesperson’s work. Pipelines transport goods from one location to another through underground pipe infrastructures. Similarly, effective salespeople transport prospects from the position of “potential customer” to the position of “paying customer” by leading them through a carefully constructed sales process.

One of the most important aspects of a sales representative’s job is lead qualification, and the primary way this is done is by asking questions. However, while a simple question might give you a lot of information, is it giving you the right information?

The average sales cycle is 22% longer than it was five years ago,¹ which is not good news for sales professionals. In a world with more options and less patience, it’s important that sales organizations are providing potential customers with everything they need at each step of the buying phase and in a timely manner. But this is much easier said than done.