Great post, Trish.  
 
When I joined HubSpot, I was handed a 5 page document. I opened it up and it said, "Qualification process goes here." That was in 2007.  
 
It took Mark Roberge (VP Sales, HubSpot) a few tries to find the right person. But, we hired an all start training executive about 2 years back now. He (and the sales management team) at HubSpot and more recently, a member of Andrew's team (who was previously a HubSpot customer consultant) has refined the process to the point, where it's very strong. We start with personas, product/methodology training, go through the steps in our sales process (research, connect, qualify/explore, diagnose/set goals, demo, close) with training decks, recordings, scripts and playbooks for each, as well as how to use salesforce.com/hubspot lead intelligence (and other tools) to be productive. We also get our new people on the phones pretty quickly, but with lots of coaching. We do group film reviews, 1:1 film reviews, 2 on 1s with 2 reps getting coached on similar material and "buddies" where we pair senior people with new people. We have this training and teams broken out by segment of our business now (direct, indirect) and personas (small business owners, in-house marketers).  
 
There's still more to do and it is a priority to continuously improve! But, it's awesome to work at a company that prioritizes this. As a sales director, this makes my life 10x easier and helps me get my new team members ramped faster and exceeding quota.

Hi Trish, 
About a year and a half ago I was brought in to help a company selling a SAAS help desk solution via inside sales. They had a solid lead gen engine, that produced sufficient numbers of inbound inquiries. 
To grow, the entrepreneur/founder/CEO had decided to double the size of the sales team, the thinking being more sales people would equal more sales. When he met with me he had become frustrated because he had doubled the size of the sales team and yet sales remained flat. There was little thought given to onboarding the new reps which consisted of doing a few demo's with a senior rep and learning the product.After a few weeks it was clear that this was in large part an "onboarding" issue.  
In effect, what the CEO had done was put a large number of new reps on the phones who were ill equipped to convert other than simple deals. It also reduced the number of leads that the established reps were getting, resulting in a "double - whammy" - new reps convert at a low rate and established reps get fewer at bats.

Pete C. thanks for the input on how your organization handles the route from hire to revenue. 
 
Pete P. you summed up the problem of why onboarding is broken perfectly! 
 
Thanks to you both for participating in the conversation.

You don't have to spend a ton of $ on on boarding, but you do need to think it through, teach the right subjects and make sure you are measuring the right stuff. If someone doesn't cut it in the first 30 days, you should be prepared to let them go. Daily interaction is critical to gauge success.

Great post. Love the idea of filming customers, something marketing could do at trade shows for very little money. Sales people crave that kind of information.

Trish, nearly 40% of inside sales teams are not in a central location. Video conferencing makes it easier to provide an effective onboarding process for new workers in a multi-location workforce. Once the initial orientation is complete, HR can use video conferencing tools to deliver information on benefits and training for topics of safety, and more. Such job skills training is not only more effective but more affordable because physical classrooms are no longer needed.

Thanks for the reminder Trish! We all need to update our processes because sales and marketing keeps on evolving on a fast pace. The short film is a good idea. Instead of just simply giving the prospect a thick list of all the clients served - which is considered plain and boring nowadays - - a two or three-minute short film would do the trick. Because it will definitely include the client's experiences, it gives short and accurate information that matters, what is really on their mind and how they were assisted to help them grow their business. And once a prospects sees the short film, he or she can easily get a bigger picture on how the company serves their clients. http://bit.ly/ayeen2