Benefits Of Using Video in Your Sales Rep Onboarding Process

For most businesses, the process of onboarding new hires is time consuming and expensive. One study found that it takes 7 months and almost $30,000 to recruit and onboard a new sales rep, as well an additional 5-11 months until reps are fully ramped up. Sounds like a ton of money and time, doesn’t it? Well, that’s because it is. And unfortunately, there’s really no avoiding this lengthy and costly process…

But it can be accelerated by choosing strategic and effective tactics and methods to educate new employees.

A common mistake many managers and leaders make is only providing “one-and-done” training for their new hires. They train, educate, and spend numerous hours covering everything they can during the initial stages of onboarding to prepare their new employees. Even with all of that time and effort, sometimes it just not enough...

That’s because one of the biggest problems with “one-and-done” training is that 87 percent of training content is forgotten within weeks.

Without ongoing learning and reinforcement new content is not retained.

Research indicates that without ongoing learning and reinforcement, 50 percent of learned content is not retained within five weeks. And within 90 days, that figure increases to 84 percent.

So while all of those resources you created for new reps may be awesome, they aren’t truly effective until they have been reinforced repeatedly.

Videos are a great addition to sales enablement solutions and provide an easy way for managers to reinforce learned content.

By leveraging the power of video, businesses can improve their onboarding process by:

Meeting the changing needs of distributed workforces

More and more businesses are turning to videos today, particularly when it comes to training. Video quality and accessibility has improved vastly over the past few decades. Using videos to reinforce learning and training allows your sales team to be brought up to speed quickly wherever they are. Bonus: every rep learns differently, so providing videos as a resource will cater to visual learners. Even a short, engaging intro using free video intros can set the tone and grab your audience’s attention from the start.

Helping sales team retain knowledge

As I’ve mentioned a few times, learning new information once is a good start, but you’re really only learning something when you begin to absorb and retain that knowledge. By incorporating videos throughout the onboarding process, you’ll be able to reinforce everything your reps have already learned. Even after they’ve learned and retained new knowledge, they can still rely on those videos to brush up on topics from time to time.

Boosting company and individual performance

The faster you onboard new reps, the faster you can start make money again. Reps pride themselves on closing deals, heck it’s their livelihood! But they have to be educated before any sales can happen. Videos decrease ramp up time and boost performance while increasing revenue for the company and the individual.

Increasing collaboration between sales and other teams

Video platforms make it extremely easy to collaborate quickly with other teams. For example, let’s say your marketing team makes changes to an outdated resource, or maybe they created a new overview video of your product or service. Videos will allow them to quickly send updates or new resources to your sales team via video and vice versa. Collaboration between teams is easy, reps will always stay aligned, and your message will stay consistent.

Ok, so I think you get it... We’re very fond of using video to speed up the onboarding process and reinforce learning at Guru. That being said, it’s equally important to remember the rest of your ongoing sales enablement needs that occur while sales reps work with prospects.

It’s sort of like juggling -- if all your tactics and solutions aren’t working consistently and systematically, your sales enablement solution will suffer as a whole and so will your bottom line.

Trying to identify the missing pieces in your sales enablement solution? Check out our Sales Enablement Guide or ask us a question on Twitter.