When it comes to graduate sales onboarding training, you’re likely to find that this is a greatly different process to onboarding an experienced salesperson. Typically speaking, a sales graduate won’t yet have experienced the working world, so you want to ensure that you provide them with a nurturing atmosphere.
Graduate sales jobs are hard to come by, placing graduates in a catch-22 of needing experience for a job but needing a job to gain that experience. At BMS Performance, graduate sales roles and sales graduate schemes are something we encourage all businesses to consider. This way, the sales sector can expand and introduce plenty more candidates into the industry.
So, what should you be including in your sales onboarding checklist for graduates?
Give Them a Warm Welcome
As with any sales new hire onboarding, you should provide sales graduates with a warm welcome. However, you might take it that one step further with sales graduates as they may not know what to expect of a professional environment. Everyone remembers the first day of their first “proper” job, so be sure to make this a positive memory for your sales graduate. When you look back on your own first day, you probably remember feeling nervous and intimidated; make sure you show some empathy and do what you can to prevent your new hire from feeling this way.
Assign Them a Mentor
Entering any new profession can feel overwhelming and confusing; you can help alleviate this confusion by providing your new hire with a mentor. This is particularly important when it comes to graduates as it’s highly unlikely that they’ve ever worked in a remotely similar role, whereas experienced salespeople are likely to have another role to go off. Assigning your new hire with a specific mentor will relieve a lot of confusion as it’ll be clear who they need to turn to when they have questions. Additionally, this will aid them in their journey of making friends, which is one of the most daunting aspects of starting a new job.
Clue Them Up on the Business
As previously mentioned, it’s unlikely that a graduate will have worked within a professional sales environment before, whilst an experienced salesperson will have first-hand knowledge of the industry. A fresh graduate will come in with enthusiasm, so take advantage of this positive attitude by teaching them all you can about your business and sales as a whole. Furthermore, graduates are fresh out of a learning environment, meaning that their capacity for learning is optimal. When given the means to do so, they will very quickly learn the processes of your business and complete them to your company standard.
Allow Them to Learn
If you hired a highly experienced salesperson and they made a huge mistake, you’d be forgiven for feeling slightly frustrated. However, you need to give sales graduates greater allowances as this is all new to them. Whether it’s the working environment or the various sales processes, these are all new concepts to a fresh graduate. As a result, you shouldn’t condemn them for their mistakes but rather point them out and allow them to learn from such. In fact, mistakes can often be the best learning curves as your new hire will be conscious of not doing the same thing in the future.
Be Transparent
When onboarding sales teams, clarity is always key. You should make it abundantly clear what your new recruit is to expect from this role, from the salary to the potential to progress. Current graduates will typically be Generation Z: a generation that is built from constant communication. Play into this by ensuring that you’re making everything as transparent as possible.
Onboard your next sales graduate today
We always encourage businesses to hire fresh graduates. Contact us to learn more about the process.