The onboarding process for new salespeople is a crucial part of ensuring their success and your success as a sales leader. You review roles and responsibilities, teach product and sales knowledge and discuss team goals. But are you paying attention to embedding your company values and teaching emotional intelligence skills when onboarding your new hire?
Add these two areas to your onboarding program to set your new hire up for personal and professional success.
#1. Make your company values tangible. Are your company values just words hanging on your walls but never hitting the halls? It’s not enough to vet potential candidates for alignment with company values. As a leader, it’s important that you make your values tangible, which requires communicating clear behaviors associated with each one. This helps your new team member truly understand your organizations “non-negotiables” and how to “walk the talk” when interacting with peers, prospects and clients.
For example, respect for others is one of the core values at your company. When bringing on new hires, hold a discussion around the observable behaviors associated with this value.
- You show up on time to meetings because you RESPECT and value your team member’s time.
- You don’t send DISRESPECTFUL, snarky chats to other team members during video conference calls. If you have something to say, share it with the entire group.
- You do what you say you’re going to do. Don’t make empty promises that impact another person’s ability to do their job. RESPECT other people's deadlines.
#2. Emotional intelligence training. Embedding EQ skills into your sales culture creates a whole new level of success. “People problems” often stem from underdeveloped emotional intelligence skills. My suggestion is to start by teaching your new hires emotion management, self-awareness and empathy skills.
Education on these emotional intelligence skills helps your sales team:
- Pause before speaking or reacting. Imagine creating a sales team that thoughtfully chooses responses with prospects, customers and peers instead of succumbing to a knee-jerk, thoughtless or stupid response. (Yes, I said stupid.)
- Remain calm and collected under pressure. By building emotional intelligence skills, your sales team can access the smart part of their brain, even in high stress selling situations.
- Develop real world empathy. When salespeople stop getting emotionally triggered, it allows them to become curious about another person’s perspective. It helps salespeople become other focused, rather than self-focused which creates more productive conversations and better relationships.
Onboard new salespeople and provide training around company values and emotional intelligence skills.
Strong company cultures are rooted in deeply held core values and creates a tightknit culture characterized by respect, inclusion, collaboration and integrity.
Emotional intelligence skills help each person on your team bring their “best self” to work, which in turn, make work a pleasure.
I look forward to hearing your success stories.
