The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

This post was originally published on SalesHacker.com.

The weekly sales meeting — you know the one. The whole crew gets together for what amounts to an hour-long discussion around menial housekeeping items or which sales rep got a little closer to nailing a sale.

Certainly it’s important information in its own right. But, it’s not worthy of eating up an hour that could be better used securing leads. The substance of the old-school sales meeting, in essence, belongs in a weekly email.

Last year, Harvard Business Review estimated the turnover in salespeople to be around 27%. In an industry that’s seeing almost double the turnover rate than the overall labor force, it’s essential for managers and leaders to not only know how to recruit great talent that’s an excellent fit for your team, but also how to retain sales talent and improve their performance over the years. 

You have hired your next great seller. You have a strong on-boarding plan, a great training schedule, and amazing people in place to help with training. They are prepared to hit the street, right?

If you want elite sales performance from your new hire, have an elite onboarding process. 

You breathed that sigh of relief after you received a signature from a new hire. Satisfying, right? Now, you must put as much effort into their onboarding as you did into the interview process because hiring elite performers is only part of the overall equation. You expect elite performance from them, but it is not guaranteed.

The Tour of Duty Framework

There are so many young people out there with innate talent and tremendous potential… but zero sales experience. 

I wonder if we could all treat people better if we replaced human resources with a department focused on human flourishing (HF). People are certainly more human than they are resources, but I wonder if there is a better way to think of them than merely resources. One of the dictionary definitions of flourish is "to thrive or grow luxuriantly." Pretty cool way to think of your people.

I think we’d all agree that long-term relationships are gold in the business arena, and long-term relationships begin with the very first interaction that delights a customer and are fed by every other interaction subsequently. 

You made the perfect hire, one who is talented and eager to learn. He or she had a great first day. Now what? How do you turn that potential talent into a real-life superstar?

Just like the first day, your new hire’s first 90 days need to be planned out. Before the employee starts, you need to have a set plan of how to acclimate the new hire to your company, your team, and your style. In other words, onboarding. The most successful companies have a general onboarding path to follow that includes not just filling out paperwork and getting the grand tour, but a roadmap for training, available mentors, and lots of hands-on advice from managers. Statistics tell us that organizations with a standardized onboarding process have 54% greater new hire productivity and 50% greater new hire retention. Managers' job satisfaction increases 20% when their employees have formal onboarding training.

Not a bad return on investment for thinking ahead. So, how can set your onboarding apart?

One, one thousand.

Two, one thousand.

Three, one thousand.

Where are you going with this?  

Four, one thousand.

Five, one thousand.

Ahem, I have more important things to do. 

Six, one thousand.

Seven, one thousand.

Get to the point!!! 

Eight, one thousand. Done!

The point is to illustrate—in words only—the interval of eight seconds.

Why? Because eight seconds is the average attention span of a North American, revealed last year in a study by Microsoft Corp.