Program Rationale

Why create a New-Hire Field Sales Training Program?

Statistics have shown that the first 8 weeks a new employee spends with a company are most critical in determining their future success with the organization. Agentive can help you evaluate and modify your new-hire sales representative training program to insure that every new sales representative has an outstanding experience and gets up to speed as quickly as possible.

To determine if your organization can benefit from a new-hire field sales training program, consider the following questions:

• Are your regional managers responsible for designing field training for their new sales representatives?

  Although providing ongoing training and coaching is a key element of the sales manager's job, putting together an effective field experience requires a great deal of time as well as critical knowledge of the tenets of adult learning. This is usually done at the expense of other key management responsibilities. Agentive develops a comprehensive training plan that is easy for managers to implement and ensures your new sales representatives receive the very best orientation from day one.

• Is the new hire training experience consistent from region to region?

  While mentoring programs are an essential part of new hire training, they sometimes lack consistency. The experienced rep on the West coast may focus on different issues than the experienced rep on the East coast, leaving your new hires with holes in their basic training. Agentive identifies the "need-to-know" information for new hires at your company, and then develops a training continuum that ensures new hires are systematically exposed to that information.

• Does your organization hire sales representatives with different background profiles?

  It is challenging to provide effective classroom training for new hires that come from diverse backgrounds. The training you provide for a recruit coming right out of college will differ from that of a clinician who is entering sales, or an experienced sales rep who may come from a competitive organization. Agentive has found it is more effective to address these differences in experience by customizing the field-training program. For example, the sales representative with limited clinical knowledge might spend more time working with a clinician, whereas a sales representative who has a wealth of clinical experience might spend more time focused on territory business skills. By the time these new hires attend headquarters training they are all on a more level playing field.

• Do your sales representatives attend Headquarters training classes before they have spent any time in the field? Do they come to class "not knowing what they don't know?"

  New recruits who have been out in the field for at least 1-2 months come to headquarters training with many questions based on their experience to date, and thus retain a great deal more of the information that is provided. Agentive New Hire Field Sales Training Programs provide a continuum of training experiences that help representatives get on the job quickly and make the most of costly headquarters training time.

• Are you confident that your new sales representatives are as productive as they could be in their first 3 months on the job?

  If all new sales representatives joined the company at the same time, timing Headquarters training would be easy. Since they don't, your field-training program must take up the slack. Agentive's field training programs offer new sales representatives consistent, meaningful training that begins to prepare them to meet the challenges of field selling from their first day on the job.