Hit the Ground Running with Engaging Onboarding Activities

Now that you have a foundation in place, use Gong to build a portfolio of onboarding activities that are tailored to your unique market and sales cycle.

Use Call Libraries

Give new hires links to call library folders as part of their onboarding material. It lets new hires review calls quickly and efficiently instead of shadowing their peers’ customer calls. With access to a call library, they can review a curated list from initial contact to close. Let them run with it!

Analyze Calls as a Team

Have your new hires listen to a few calls together. It’s your chance to focus everyone on the same key indicators—ones that are important to your process—while also letting everyone shine with their own personal spin on what’s positive or negative about the call. Here’s how you might run that process:

• Pick a discovery call from your library and send the link to new hires along with a meeting invite. Ask them to write down what they notice about the call (the good, the bad, missed opportunities, etc.) and bring their notes to the meeting. Having them do this work in advance avoids groupthink.

•  At the meeting, talk about what everyone found interesting. Even better, have each rep play the call segment they thought was the most interesting and explain why.

• Ask what, why, and how questions to prompt discussion and encourage participants to think more deeply. Make sure your questions reflect your training goals. That means doing your homework and having answers ready for each question you ask that reflect what you want students to learn. For example, if you want to teach them about objection handling, choose your call carefully to reflect what can go wrong and be prepared to tell them how you want them to handle it instead.

•  Own awkward silences. If they happen (and they will), offer up one of your own experiences for discussion and invite participants to suggest how to handle the situation. You’re the model on this one; show them how to receive feedback well.

Go on a Discovery Scavenger Hunt

Deals are won or lost in discovery, but even experienced reps don’t always know the right questions to ask. Here's an exercise that will give your new hires a solid grounding in the art of asking great discovery questions:

• Create a folder in your call library for your team’s best discovery calls.

• Ask new hires to listen to them all, paying particular attention to the discovery questions that were asked and answered on the calls. 

• At a group meeting, ask the new hires to list the discovery questions and say why each one was important.  Talk them through as a group.

• Then organize the discovery questions into categories of your team’s choosing, such as surface-level pain, deep pain, business-level pain, throwaways, etc.

• Conclude by reviewing discovery questions that are particular to your organization’s use cases. Ask participants to connect those questions with your organization’s buyer personas.