B2B Onboarding Tips: Shorten the Hire-Line to Revenue

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Adding new talent to your sales team to accelerate growth may appear straight-forward.  However, many companies fall short in keeping talent and getting them to an acceptable level of productivity within a year.

For example, if you are part of a B2B organization with a long sales-cycle, it can take more than a year for a new hire to generate enough sales revenue to pay for themselves — even though the cost of a new hire effects your bottom line on day one.
 

To that end, hiring a bunch of salespeople at once can be a drag on profitability. Unless you can get new hires to generate revenue faster.

In a “buoyant” economy, even companies that aren’t planning to hire new sales talent still are hiring to address attrition and the deliberate churn of poor performers. Furthermore, consider the factors of recruiting effort and the lack of guarantees in B2B onboarding.  Hiring a salesperson is an expensive endeavor.

B2B Onboarding Tips: A third of new salespeople won’t succeed. 

The cost of a new hire flameout is much higher than their salary. When you factor in recruiting and training costs, travel & entertainment, management time, and lost revenue opportunity, profit on that hire in the first year is much less likely. For example, a rule of thumb is that it will cost you about 2x the fully loaded base salary.

If you are hiring a number of B2B salespeople that will make a difference in your revenue goals, it stands to reason that their costs will also make a real difference in your profits.

The Impact of Reducing Time to Revenue in B2B Sales Onboarding

For example, if your firm has a sales cycle of 9 months, reducing the time to revenue from nine to five months can reduce your net cost of a new hire to break-even in the first year — which means faster growth in the business.

B2B Onboarding Tips: How to Speed Up Revenue Generation

At heart, I’m a (simple) math geek that likes simple explanations.  Lets break down the variables:

To speed up revenue generation from B2B onboarding, you need to reduce the number of months spent:

• Learning — Develop an agile approach that adapts to new hire skill sets and that goes beyond knowledge transfer and product training
• Waiting — The faster you introduce new hires to customer situations, shadow learning and selling opportunities, the sooner their real learning begins;

You must also:
Increase the number of months they are selling — start them off with smaller, short sales cycle opportunities, or late-stage ones and give them intensive coaching and training.

Increasing efficiency of B2B Onboarding is a simple math problem:

Fewer months Learning & Waiting + More months Selling = Revenue Sooner

We aren’t suggesting that you lop-off items from your B2B onboarding plan to reduce onboarding time. Instead, we suggest that you re-orient how salesperson onboarding is spent. If your B2B onboarding plan hasn’t changed much in the past few years, it may be time for a fresh look toward shortening the line to revenue.

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