#274 What Most Sales Engineer Leaders Agree as Best Onboarding Practices

Notes:

If you’ve been an avid listener of this podcast, you know that I have some very strong opinions about onboarding. I just think most companies don’t do it right, and it’s in their best interest to invest in their onboarding.

Enter Brian Geery, a previous guest in this podcast who appeared several times. Recently, he posted on LinkedIn about a project he is working on: A list of 100+ best practices in onboarding. Brian compiled this enormous list of best practices for onboarding Sales Engineers by interviewing sales leaders of all sorts, people who have built successful teams.

What are the main areas we need to be working on in onboarding? What are the key best practices in doing this thing right? We answer this and more in this episode.

Key Takeaways:

Why mentorship is exciting for a new hire
Why mentorship is also good for the mentor
The “dark side” of mentorship
The importance of writing a position description for mentors
Why a mentor and a mentee should also have a written agreement setting their expectations of each other
Ramzi’s bad experiences as a mentor
How to gamify the onboarding process and why
How to make meetings more fun
Why a sales enablement team should have a copywriter
Why hiring teams should define ideal candidate qualifications
How hiring teams could identify the criteria they set for applicants
Ramzi’s contribution to Brian’s growing list of best practices in onboarding
Why it’s important for SEs to understand the benefits of the technology they sell
What we can learn from the movie Inception when doing a demo
The relevance of proof of concept in the SE onboarding process
Key performance indicators to track during the onboarding process
The importance of tweaking your KPIs once in a while
When should companies outsource
The usefulness of peer-to-peer learning
What weekly knowledge checkpoints are, and why are they critical
Making tough choices when there’s no match during the onboarding process

Quotes:

You can go to your mentor and ask questions that you may not want to ask your Sales Manager because you feel like you should already know the answer. — Brian Geery

Some people want to become leaders, not for the right reasons. — Ramzi Marjaba

If the leader of the sales engineering team is onboarding new Sales Engineers and they think that this idea of a mentor is good, the key thing is to write a position description. — Brian Geery

Think of ways to make it fun and interesting. And to me, that is friendly competition. Ideally, when you’re onboarding people, it’s multiple at a time. I think it’s hard to gamify if you’re just onboarding a couple of people. But if you have, let’s say, four or more, then you can create this friendly competition. And there are so many ways to do that. — Brian Geery

Enablement is the continuation of onboarding. — Ramzi Marjaba

If your new hires are sitting in a two-hour meeting, for example, that’s mostly PowerPoint. Why are you doing that? That’s mean. — Brian Geery

The manager needs to own new hire onboarding. And if new hires are going through boring sessions, day after day, that’s up to the manager to fix that. — Brian Geery

The best person to train an SE is another SE, someone who’s doing the job, someone who’s been doing the job. — Ramzi Marjaba

Be prepared to sell top candidates on why they should want to work at your company. Remember, the interview is a two-way street. And top candidates typically have options because every smart manager wants to hire the best. — Brian Geery

Top performers are never on the street for very long. And for some reason, it seems like in recent years, interview processes have been extended than shortened. — Brian Geery

Schedule all your interviews one shot before they even have the first interview, and then cancel if you don’t want to move forward. — Ramzi Marjaba

Most SEs don’t understand the business problem that their product solves. And most SEs are left to figure it out on their own. And what that means [is] if the SE is involved in a discovery call, for the first, two, three years, all they’re asking about is the technical aspects of a solution. — Ramzi Marjaba

There are people that shouldn’t graduate. And you know what, that’s okay. We do our best to hire the best. And we try, and we’re very good at it. But sometimes you mis-hire like it just happens. So let’s have the ability to fail people out of New Hire onboarding. — Brian Geery

The KPIs or whatever you’re going to reward the SEs on [are] very dependent on the behavior you’re trying to incentivize. — Ramzi Marjaba

The basic gist of the strategy session is double down on onboarding like it’s critical. Get it right. Make it unparalleled. Commit to a plan, invest the time, money, and resources. And you’ll get a return. Don’t and it will cost you. — Brian Geery

You have to make tough, tough choices. There will be times when you realize in the process of onboarding, that there’s not a match. You’re so much better off for both of you making the choice to separate after, you know, a month of new hire onboarding and letting them get out in the field than six months later, making the same decision. — Brian Geery