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Productivity Training
Sales Benchmark Index recommends enhancing standard product training with Productivity Training, an approach that encourages salespeople to learn the actual nuances of how to do their jobs. By teaching new representatives how to react in a variety of situations (what to do when faced with a problem, understanding who to call, what systems to access, which resources to leverage, and ultimately where to find the answers quickly), sales leadership can cut down on ramp-up time and be confident in the new players on the field.

The Winning Strategy:
The Point-Quota System
One method for ensuring this information is successfully adopted by a sales representative is the Point-Quota system. Every coach has a few tactics up his sleeve to coax the best performance from his players.

Point quotas reward sales representatives for certain combinations of sales activities by setting targets based on the accumulation of a certain number of points. For example, to encourage new sales hires to leverage the competitive intelligence group in marketing, executives might award five points for proposals that go out with detailed competitive comparisons. Sales managers might assign three points to each salesperson that uses the objection handling section of the best practices portal and two points for documenting the campaign in the company's account planning tool.

Point systems are useful when management wants to change the behavior of sales representatives who are new to the company. If an organization is in line with the above benchmarks, and it takes them six months for a new sales rep to be productive, repeating the current process adds to the problem. Altering the process and focusing on how a new hire can perform their work can produce improved results.

Look at the following example. Assume sales management wants to improve new hire productivity by asking them to focus on objection handling, competitive positioning, account planning, and historical customer buying trends. Furthermore, the executives decide to award one bonus point for any "sales" above quota. The chart below illustrates the respective performance of two sales reps.

In such a point system, Sales Rep #1 will be rewarded more than Sales Rep #2, even though Sales Rep #2 was 157.5% of quota, as opposed to the other rep's being only 119.5% performance. Sales Rep #1 earned his bonus by beating his quota with all of the techniques directly related to ramp time to full sales productivity.

Conclusion
Point-quota systems have the advantage of forcing the new sales reps to focus on the behaviors that management has determined will get them to productivity the most rapidly.  Don't risk wasting your time ramping up new players on your team. Adopt this best practice and watch your ramp time to full sales productivity shrink dramatically. Let the Point-Quota system be yours.

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