Taking Your Sales Onboarding Program from Strategy to Reality 

Feb 12, 2025 | Articles, Sales Training

Key takeaways:

  • Conduct a needs analysis and involve the sales team in developing relevant and effective onboarding programs.
  • Secure leadership buy-in by presenting data, leveraging social proof, and running pilot programs.
  • Utilize multimedia learning and ensure content accessibility for both in-office and remote sales hires.
  • Optimize and personalize sales training to address specific needs and challenges of new employees.

Executing onboarding is often a bigger challenge than building it. After all, what use is a comprehensive sales onboarding strategy without the support and follow-through?

In this article, I’ll share nine ways that you can push your sales onboarding program past the planning stage and begin executing. These tips will help get you closer to hitting that “launch” button, while also ensuring higher adoption rates, leadership buy-in, and better time-to-value for new sales hires.

How to successfully launch your sales onboarding program

Before you build…

The first steps to a successful sales onboarding program aren’t building the courses and sending them off to your sales team. Acquiring learner data must be your top priority before you start creating training for your onboarding program.

Consider taking the following steps to ensure that new hires enthusiastically adopt the sales training you create:

1. Conduct a needs analysis
By identifying the pain points of new sales hires and the skills your business needs, you can create a more targeted and effective onboarding program.

A needs analysis can provide a clear understanding of the specific requirements and investments needed for your sales onboarding program. To conduct a needs analysis, you can start by identifying the skills gaps within your sales teams, as well as the requirements of the roles you’re hiring for. Knowing what skills new hires will need, and what skills your sales team is currently lacking can help you build a more targeted sales onboarding program that resonates with new hires. And by tailoring your program to meet skills gaps and organizational goals, you’ll also be laying out a more compelling case for executive buy-in.

2. Involve your sales team in the development process
Not sure how to onboard new sales hires effectively? Talking to your current sales team about their past onboarding experiences and gathering feedback about their learning and development needs can have a profound impact on your program.

Incorporating real insights from salespeople on the ground will make your onboarding materials more relevant and realistic for new hires. And when learning resonates, it’s more likely to stick and keep learners engaged. Conducting surveys or focus groups can be an effective way to gather feedback and ideas from your sales team before you finalize and execute your onboarding program. This not only makes the training more relevant but also fosters a sense of ownership and commitment amongst your team.

After you build sales onboarding courses…

Once you’ve created sales onboarding modules that resonate with your team and meet their learning needs, follow these crucial steps to gain buy-in from your organization’s leadership team:

3. Show don’t tell
Leaders who actively support and champion your sales onboarding program can significantly influence its effectiveness. To secure leadership buy-in, present a compelling case that addresses key pain points, such as high turnover rates and low employee satisfaction. Use dramatic data to illustrate the impact of good sales onboarding. Here’s one for you: did you know that companies with a structured onboarding process improve new-hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%?

4. Leverage social proof
As a sales professional, you’ve likely heard of the psychological theory of “social proof,” which suggests that people usually make buying decisions based on the actions and opinions of others. How can you use social proof to persuade your company’s leaders to endorse your onboarding program? Make them feel a little bit of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) by showing them case studies and reports from peers in your industry who have seen tangible sales onboarding ROI. Seeing competitors succeed at onboarding could be what convinces your leaders to embrace your plan, rather than risk being left behind.

5. Run a Pilot Program
Before rolling out an onboarding program to your entire sales organization, consider running a pilot program that targets a small cohort of sales hires. This allows you to test the training in a controlled environment, gather feedback, and make refinements. A successful pilot can also generate positive buzz and build momentum for the full rollout. For example, a pilot program might show a significant improvement in time-to-value for a small cohort of new sales hires. If you can show that your pilot onboarding program reduced ramp up for a number of new hires, that can be a powerful selling point for broader adoption.

6. Gather continuous feedback
Transparency and open communication are vital throughout the onboarding process. Keeping multiple lines of communication open can help you and your leadership team identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments.

Work with leadership across your sales organization to determine which communications channels work best for gathering continuous feedback on your program. Make sure your company’s leadership team vocally supports your new onboarding program. Encourage salespeople to share their thoughts and suggestions, too, and remind them of which channels are open for communicating that feedback.

You can automate learner reminders in your LMS to solicit post-training evaluations. Doing so on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, could help you gauge whether the skill learned in training have stuck over time. Getting feedback on the way content is received is important, too. Consider sending an anonymous survey to gather qualitative learner feedback. Managers should also be scheduling regular check-ins with their direct reports to get informal feedback on the sales onboarding process.

7. Reinforce multimedia learning
It’s essential to reinforce learning through various delivery methods, such as microlearning, videos, job aids, podcasts, webinars, instructor-led training sessions, and different forms of assessment. Making learning readily accessible and engaging is key for making onboarding stick. This means having easily searchable course libraries, conversational AI tools for quick learning summaries and course discovery, and follow-up resources like quick refresher courses and quizzes. Switching how and when you deliver learning, and empowering new hires to take charge of their training, can help them not only retain information, but apply it more effectively. For instance, being able to easily search an LMS for courses on sales techniques could help a new rep quickly find the information they need to get up to speed and start selling!

8. Make remote-friendly sales training
With the increasing prevalence of remote work, it’s crucial to design onboarding programs for remote sellers. These programs should provide the necessary support and resources to help remote reps feel connected and supported. For example, virtual mentoring sessions, online collaboration tools, and regular check-ins can ensure that remote sellers are not left behind. Offering onboarding courses that can be viewed online or offline and making learning accessible on any device will remove onboarding barriers for remote sales hires. Make sure that managers are celebrating the learning accomplishments of these remote sales reps throughout the onboarding process, to incentivize participation and make them feel like a vital part of the team.

9. Optimize and personalize sales training
One of the most effective ways to drive adoption for sales onboarding is to tailor a program to the specific needs and challenges of your new hires. Customization is that extra step that ensures your training is relevant and practical. For example, if your new sales rep has less experience in software sales, you may need to add a microlearning course about Saas sales best practices to the onboarding mix. Tools like Litmos AI Playlist can help scale this kind of personalization by turning your prompt into a customized learning path that you can automatically assign to new hires.

Building a better sales onboarding program is a multifaceted process that requires careful planning, customization, and strong support from both participants and leadership. By integrating the strategies above, you will be able to more easily gain buy-in from sales training participants and secure executive support, so that you can take your onboarding program from a great idea, to an exciting reality!

Get more tips and insights for building an effective sales onboarding program with The Ultimate Toolkit for Continuous Onboarding – an expert-curated collection of customizable onboarding resources that you can use to streamline and scale your sales onboarding program. Download your free copy today!