Social Selling Mastery

Chapter 19How Do We Mitigate Skill Gaps with Our New Hires?

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life after all is a chain.

—William James

I'd like you to imagine that you coach a sports team. You've been hired after the annual draft and need to start assembling your final roster during training camp. How do you think the most successful coaches would approach training camp?

1. Push only last year's roster to tackle new advanced plays.
2. Make sure that their newly drafted teammates can master the basic plays that the entire team has always executed.

I hope the answer seems obvious in sports. But why doesn't this seem obvious in a sales and marketing department? This is where you can help shape your annual sales kick-off (SKO) and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to incorporate skill-based training. It's been my observation that most SKOs and QBRs are far too product-training heavy. I'll meet streams of newly hired sales professionals at these events and pick their brains about their onboarding process. The process was a firehouse of information about how to sell the product. Unfortunately, these newly hired sales professionals are missing the basic blocking and tackling of your core team's sales methodology, let alone adding new skills such as social selling. This is how random acts of social can metastasize in your business. Before you know it, there is a huge discrepancy between how a 10-year veteran and your new sales professionals are selling. Compound this by ...