Training and onboarding are largely considered integral parts of a successful sales enablement program, but as sales enablement has evolved in recent years, there’s been a shift in the underlying mentality and processes behind that onboarding. Rather than onboarding, a one-time event in the beginning of a sales rep’s career, companies that have seen success with sales enablement have moved to “reboarding.” What exactly is this principle, though, and how can it ultimately save your company money?

Reboarding and Its Benefits to Your Bottom Line for Sales Enablement

What Is Reboarding?

Reboarding is the evolved form of onboarding. Onboarding traditionally happens one time when a sales rep or other employee becomes a member of the team. The idea behind onboarding is that it provides all the information and training necessary to acclimate that new employee into the company’s systems, culture, clients, products, and/or services.

What reboarding does is to take that spirit of learning and carry it through a sales rep’s entire career. It’s an ongoing, continuous process rather than a set, one-off session.

How Is Reboarding More Beneficial Than Onboarding?

Reboarding provides several concrete benefits over the more traditional onboarding model.

• Reps enjoy better retention of material.

When sales reps attend an onboarding session, it’s inevitable that the rep will not learn everything he or she needs to be successful in that position in that one session. Even if the information provided is thorough and comprehensive, people simply don’t retain all that information in one go.

Reboarding, or continuous onboarding, gives these reps the opportunity to learn various skills and information over time. If the training material is always available, reps get more chances to interact with that content and really learn and apply the information.

• Reps evolve with the trainings.

No company is continually static, and neither are sales reps. Throughout their careers, they are always learning and growing. If they are part of a company that embraces continuous training, those reps will always bring new perspectives and insights to these training sessions. This helps push reps to be their best, and it arms them with the tools to actually accomplish that.

• Trainings provide relevant, up-to-date content.

Many facets of sales enablement are relatively recent, and there are new schools of thought and ideas constantly surfacing. In an industry like sales, which is always in flux and always evolving, it makes sense that your training needs to be equally dynamic. A one-time training is only going to provide your reps with that small subset of informat Save & Exit ion. Instead, you should be constantly updating your sales training materials to reflect those new ideas, policies, and best practices. Reboarding keeps your reps up to date on both your company specifically and the larger world of selling as a whole, and it helps ensure your reps aren’t working off outdated, stale ideas.

• Integrating reboarding with technology promotes productivity.

Your goal with reboarding is to provide all this information—with as little intrusion and time requirements as possible. An easy way to make reboarding less intrusive, quicker, and more convenient is by integrating the training material into your existing sales enablement platform, CRM, or other software application. That way, no matter where your reps are in the world, they can receive this training, and it can be on their own schedules. This allows them to learn and then get back to the important business of selling.

• Evolve your reboarding program over time using analytics.

If you have a CRM or other software application, you have a wealth of analytical data at your disposal. Use that data to improve your sales team. Look at the numbers to determine what your sales team does well and what they might need more training on. (This can assessed for the whole team or for individual reps.) Perhaps your sales team is great at pushing prospects through the top of the funnel, but sales get stuck right before purchasing. You can use that information to customize your reboarding efforts and focus on what reps need to do to close deals. Reboarding gives you the time and space to see how these efforts work over time. By continuously providing training and tracking your results, you can see what training efforts are actually resonating and working.

• Give your sales reps a much-needed edge in the new sales environment.

Sales is harder than ever for reps. It’s an increasingly competitive landscape, and with the Internet, much of the buying power has shifted from the rep to the consumer. In this way, prospects often come to sales reps just as informed, if not more informed, than the reps themselves. Generally, consumers do their research—on your company and your competitors—before ever reaching out to any representative, so it’s vitally important that your reps are as knowledgeable as possible. They must provide prospects with genuine insights and helpful information in order to prove their value and secure the sale. Reboarding gives reps that competitive edge. It keeps them sharp, up to date, and at the top of their game.

Best Practices for Success with Reboarding

As with any facet of sales enablement, success does not come from a cookie-cutter formula. Every business is different, and what they need for sales success is also different. That being said, there are some techniques you can use to give yourself the best chance at success with a reboarding program.

First and foremost, include your reboarding material in your sales enablement platform or other application. Sales reps are always short on time, and task switching is a notorious productivity killer. Provide your reps with all the training material they need directly in one system that’s easy and quick to access. That way, in order to learn how to communicate with a particular persona or to determine a prospect’s common pain points, all your reps need to do is look within that platform. This content should be available for every persona at every stage in the sales cycle. That way, no matter who your rep is dealing with or how far he or she is in the buying decision, there will be helpful content to facilitate and progress that sales conversation.

Second, integrate video content into your training material. Video is faster, more convenient, and more engaging than text-based content, and, by virtue of being more interesting, it promotes better retention of the material. Supplement video content with supporting documents as necessary.

Third, make sure you have a team that’s always looking for and creating new content for your reboarding efforts. Say, for example, your company releases a new product. There should be accompanying content that trains your reps how to sell that product. That training could include product benefits, information about personas likely to buy the new product, common barriers or challenges preventing those personas from buying the new product, solutions to those common challenges and barriers, and so on.

How Can Reboarding Provide a Positive Return on Investment?

For companies loath to implement new sales enablement efforts, it’s critical to realize that reboarding can offer a company concrete dollars and cents. It does this in two important ways.

One, reboarding is an excellent way to make your sales enablement efforts more productive, and when you increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales reps, you start to see less prospects getting stuck in the sales cycle, more closed deals, and more revenue for your company.

Two, it’s very difficult to retain sales reps. Missed quotas can be discouraging, and rep turnover is very high in the one- to three-year window. However, if you can support your sales reps and provide them with what they need to be successful in their jobs, you can reduce that turnover rate. And with DePaul University’s study placing the cost of a sales rep replacement at upwards of $115,000, it certainly is in your company’s best financial interest to learn how to keep and maximize your existing reps.

For more information about reboarding specifically or how generally to make your sales team more effective, please feel free to reach out to a representative of Brand Fuzion today!