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Reps need time to develop and build their skills, practice their pitch, and build relationships. How much time is enough? We took a data-driven approach to find out.
The first few months on a new job are probably the hardest for every sales rep. You don’t know the company, your colleagues, or your boss. You have to get training on the product that you need to sell and start developing new relationships with prospects. But for how long is a new sales rep actually new? We took a data-driven approach to find out.
For this analysis, we looked at anonymous data on over 100k opportunities from over 500 companies that use Implisit’s Sales Intelligence platform. For every rep, we looked at the emails he or she was sending out from the first month onwards after his or her CRM account was created. Here are the results:
First, we looked at the share of emails to new prospects, as compared to emails to existing business trying to cross-sell and upsell. This is the classic “hunter vs. farmer” sales rep, where reps choose whether to hunt for more business or farm their existing business and opportunities.
For the first six months, new reps spend significantly more time reaching out to new customers. This rate declines from 50% of emails in the first month to around 20% after six months and stays at the same level. This indicates that reps start out by trying to build pipeline or help on existing opportunities, but once they build a robust pipeline, they focus on cultivating the opportunities that they have.
After 9 months, reps reach a steady state where they send around 17% of emails to new business and the rest of the 83% emails go to existing opportunities or business.
Next, we looked at the volume of emails that sales reps send to prospects and clients. Our analysis shows that reps start slow, with only around 26 emails per month. As they become more familiar with the company and the product, there is a rapid increase in emails in the second month and a solid increase every month until they reach 9 months on the job.
After 9 months, we see that reps keep sending emails to clients at a steady pace of around 140 emails per month. When it comes to volume of emails, 9 months is about the time when new reps reach a steady state.
It takes sales reps quite a while to get comfy in their chairs. Our data-driven analysis shows that the average length of time before reps reach their peak performance is around 9 months, both for building pipeline and the volume of emails. Therefore, it takes nearly a year to evaluate the performance of a new sales rep.
Understanding the sales onboarding process and email effectiveness using a dashboard for tracking on-going success is crucial for every sales organization. By tracking sales performance over the first couple of months, you can figure out whether a new rep is on the path to success early on. This will allow you to develop specific coaching and training or make tough decisions without waiting nearly a year to evaluate.
We would like to open this discussion to you. Please let us know in the comments what your experience has been.
Gilad Raichshtain is the founder & CEO of Implisit. Intel recruited Gilad who, at 16 was their youngest engineer at the time. Concurrently, Gilad completed his computer engineering studies at Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology. After 6 years at Intel, Gilad joined the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and founded several startups. Gilad received his MBA from the Wharton School of Business, where he also managed Wharton Ventures. Additionally, as Genacast Ventures’ investment team member, a Comcast partnership, Gilad supported several portfolio companies, three of which were later acquired — two by Google and one by Adobe.
Get a closer look at these sales trends now in the 2015 State of Sales report.
