Recruitment HQ
Are your veteran sales reps knocking out your new hires?
Finding quality sales representatives takes a lot of work and patience. Advertising, screening, interviewing, and training takes up valuable time, energy, and money. What happens when your new hires are introduced to the general population?
For many organizations new sales reps are left to fend for themselves. After a very short introduction period, usually just a few days, new hires are expected to compete for clients with existing sales staff. They are at a severe disadvantage.
Here are a few best practices to help your new reps weather their onboarding to your sales department:
- Assign new sales reps a manager mentor. Charge this person with building tasks for the day, keeping testy veteran sales reps at arms length, and guiding the new salesperson towards potential clients. Do not hand this task off to one of your experienced sales reps!
- Give real leads to new salespeople with supervision. Many times new salespeople are given old leads, or cold calls. They are started out with potential clients with the least likelihood of sale, while experienced reps are given the best traffic. Trust your management supervision and give new hires an equal opportunity to work with high quality leads, such as recent web leads or orphaned lease renewals.
- Put team bonuses in place to motivate the veteran staff to want the new reps to succeed. The existing staff is going to view new reps as taking a piece of the potential client pie. Combat this instinct with a monetary reward that includes having the new staffers sell.
- Incorporate training pay into your compensation plan. While your new staff is learning, and gaining the confidence to compete for traffic with your veteran staff, give a training salary. It can take 60 to 90 days for a new employee to complete basic training requirements, and feel like they are on equal footing with the rest of the staff. Help them financially get to this point.
Hiring new help is expensive, and time consuming. Make the most of your investment.
Greg Gershman- Managing Partner - Recruitment HQ
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9 Comments
Dennis Wisco
Wisco Agency
Providing mentors is a helpful tip, and one that does not often happen. I recall taking a few new hires under my wing, and I enjoyed it. But there are definitely certain veteran sales professionals who should not take on mentees. They probably wouldn't have their feelings hurt either if they weren't chosen. I interact with dealership personnel on a regular basis, and I'll be your boots on the ground @greggershman to inform you if such a practice begins to get implemented as a result of this post...
Big Tom LaPointe
Preston Automotive Group MD/DE
Great piece
H Gregory Gershman
Recruitment HQ
Thanks Dennis and Tom for the comments. @Dennis what do you do?
Greg Wells
AllCall Multi-Channel BDC
I know of a dealership that pays veteran salespeople a 10% over ride on commissions earned by an understaudy. Works great.
Jonathan Dawson
Founder - Sellchology Sales Training
Great article as always... I do find most dealerships do not have an adequate on-boarding process to ensure their investment and to give the new person the highest chances of success!
David Ruggles
Auto Industry
YES, this is a GREAT piece. Veteran Sales people RARELY go out of their way to help a new hire and will often try to maim their attitude. This is just another reason a rotation system is the best way to manage floor traffic.
Dennis Wisco
Wisco Agency
@hgregory i run my own automotive concierge/broker service. i work directly with sales pros, give them qualified leads, instruct them on how to work w my clients to provide what i believe to be a higher level in-store experience. i'm based in orange county, ca. where are you located?
(btw, does tagging someone on here lead to a notification? hope so...)
H Gregory Gershman
Recruitment HQ
@Dennis I am based in Albany, NY. Putting the @ sign doesn't seem to create a notification. Might be some synergy in what we do if you would like to talk some time.
@Dealer Guy, thanks for the input. I have over 20 years experience on floor selling, a sales rep, F&I, closer, and GM. I agree that every person that wants to sell has to be willing to ask for a sale, as well as be assertive and ambitious.
The issue I see is that new sales reps are not given any access to people to sell. The system is designed to funnel the best prospects to favored reps, and encourages veteran team members to crowd out new hires.
If the Automotive Industry wants to hire new blood that are not already car salesman, which it desperately needs, then it needs a solid process to onboard them. This has nothing to do with negotiating vs one-price and everything to do with excluding new hires from any access to the ability to earn a living.