One of our clients right now has a new sales rep who is about 60 days into her job, has a proven track record, and will most certainly get up to speed in this new position. However, this is an industry change for her and her domain knowledge is lacking with respect to this particular product that the company is offering. This requires a little bit of extra patience from the client to allow for this person to come up to speed on the learning curve.
It’s important for us to remember that just because a person has great skills doesn’t mean that they’re going to immediately going to be able to apply them to a new circumstance, new product, or a new market/industry. Sometimes, we tend to get anxious about how fast we can get through the learning curve and up that learning curve to results with new hires. We need to apply some level of patience and persistence when working with the new hire to make sure that we’re bringing him or her up to speed in an orderly fashion and allowing for that person to assimilate the information that they need in order to be successful at their job. It’s very easy to be sixty or ninety days into a new hire and feel like you’re not getting to the results that you’re looking for. Allowing that anxiety to creep into your thoughts, actions, and discussions with that individual.
Yet, new sales hires want to be supported in their job and want to know that they have management’s confidence so it’s very important as a sales manager to maintain an even keeled approach to scrutinizing and verifying their activities and their progress while at the same time being supportive and instilling confidence in the new sales hire as they work towards getting ramped up. There is a lot of finesse involved in managing the relationship with a new sales hire. It’s not easy work but when done right, you’ll have the shortest possible cycle to get the person ramped up and you’ll get the best possible results.
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