Grow Revenue Faster with Messaging Chapter 6 Alignment, Playbooks, and Onboarding Step 4: Role-Play and Practice The way to make this stick is to have every rep make a video of one objection and one trap or practice in a team meeting, in round-robin fashion. The power of practicing objections and traps is great and the benefits of peer-to-peer reviews and feedback are tremendous. Onboarding Getting sales teams performing better and faster is the way to quickly grow a business. It’s how we did it at Salesforce and it’s one of the most important initiatives for young startups, too. The first step to creating a scalable, revenue-generating onboarding program is to align on metrics. We all want to front-end the process with metrics that help sales to focus on the right behaviors and actions. For example, we want to measure pipeline generated, time to first deal, and time to quota attainment. When Dave Rudnitsky, former sales leader from Salesforce, joined Jim Steele at InsideSales.com, one of his first initiatives was to build an onboarding program to ramp up his new team fast. He went from 0–20 sales execs in a very short period of time. The program he created resulted in tens of millions of dollars in self-sourced pipeline and every seller closing a deal in their first 30 days. Dave created a program that blended self-paced work with certifications and with team-based exercises and role-plays. He focused all activity around messaging competence, self-sourcing pipeline, and closing a deal in the first 30 days. Here’s what the learning path of his program looks like: Week 1: Culture, Stories, and Vision The first week includes content and welcome videos from all the executives, including the CEO, CRO, and CMO, sharing their vision and goals. The week is filled with customer stories and testimonials along with top performers recording their deal wins to capture how they won the deals and to share their story in a more engaging way. By the end of week one, which is all done pre-boot camp, sellers have gone through over 12 hours of rich content and have practiced their pitch and white-boarded the value proposition. The first week is all about getting up to speed on the culture and stories.