How to Train a New Salesperson to Succeed Before the Burn Season
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How to Train a New Salesperson to Succeed Before the Burn Season
Tim Reed
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How long does it take to train a new salesperson to be successful in our industry? This is a question I hear all the time at trade shows and conventions—and the answers often range from one to three years. The defense given is that our industry is complicated, our products are technical, and there’s a high degree of both difficulty and danger in what we sell.
This common belief discourages most retailers from seeking out new salespeople and leads them instead to opt for candidates with the unicorn-like combination of industry experience, sales acumen, and a good work ethic—without personal baggage or bad habits.
But what if you could train a new salesperson to succeed quickly—say, in two months? Imagine if you could hire someone today and have that person selling nearly as much as your top performers in just 60 days. As outlandish as that seems, I know it’s possible because I’ve seen it happen.
As I write this in early July, you can have a new salesperson onboarded and trained before the burn season—if you act soon.
Here’s how you do it.
Part 1: Map Out the First 30 Days
The initial days after a new salesperson is hired are your honeymoon period. This is the time that you have the best chance of molding new hires into the image of your company, and it’s a time that should never be wasted.
To take advantage of this, create a binder with their first 30 days in your business mapped out so they know exactly what they’ll be doing on each day. For people new to your company, this gives them tremendous clarity and the direction they’re looking for. When people are new, they’re nervous about making a mistake, and they fear the unknown. This 30-day binder shows them there’s a cohesive path they can follow to get where they need to go—and that your company is the guide to help them each step of the way.
Now, mapping this out for the first time is difficult, but once you’ve done it, you never have to re-invent that wheel again. So think about all of the things you want a salesperson to know and understand in the first 30 days with your company and write them down.
This list will vary for each company, but here’s an idea of what some of these items on your list could look like:
- Meet all of the people in the company.
- Understand our phone system.
- Learn the company sales process.
- Master the difference between a stove, an insert, and a zero-clearance fireplace.
- Learn the open process and close process for the showroom each day.
- Spend three days in the field with the installation team.
- Complete all of our manufacturers’ online training modules.
After that, organize them around common themes and break them up across those first 30 days until you have an idea of what objectives you’d like to cover on each day. From there, break each day down by the hour and map out what needs to be done. As an example, this is what Day 1 could look like:
- 9:00–9:15am: Welcome and Paperwork
- 9:30–10:00am: Company Tour and Introductions
- 10:00–10:30am: Company Story and Organization Chart Explanation
- 10:30–10:45am: Break
- 10:45–11:15am: “Where Do You Want to Go?” Exercise
- 11:15–11:45am: Job Expectations
- 11:45–12:45pm: Lunch
- 12:45–1:15pm: Sales Philosophy
- 1:15–1:45pm: Phone System and Email Signature
- 1:45–2:30pm: Open and Close Processes for the Showroom
- 2:30–2:45pm: Online Training Platform Introduction
- 2:45–3:00pm: Break
- 3:00–4:30pm: Online Training Classes
- 4:30–5:00pm: Test #1: Open and Close Processes for the Showroom
You’ll notice how quickly the day starts to fill out when you start putting it down on paper—and the beauty is that building it out this way forces you to be realistic about how long things actually take to get done. What’s more, once you have the first 30 days locked and loaded, you can assign different tasks within the training to different people in your company so you don’t have to carry the entire load yourself.
Time and time again, I’ve seen new salespeople amazed at the clarity this binder provides. In one case, a gentleman in his late 50s said, “In all my years working, I’ve never had a company care about me enough to put together a resource like this.”
Simply put, mapping out the first 30 days will do wonders for new salespeople, and it’s the first step to setting them up for success.
A sales process is like a map— without it, you’re lost.
Part 2: Teach the Sales Process
What is it that salespeople need to do in order to be successful? They need to sell. Period. If they aren’t doing that, they aren’t going to make it long in your company. In light of this, it’s critical that they know how to do it. And this means that we need to teach them our sales process.
A sales process is like a map—without it, you’re lost.
Unfortunately, most companies in our industry don’t have a documented sales process and, as such, aren’t able to teach it. So instead of providing new salespeople with a map and a set of tools to succeed, they lead them into the woods at night and leave them for dead. That doesn’t sound like training; it sounds like a kidnapping.
In order to teach the sales process, I like to create a formal document that outlines each step in the process and provides resources and tools to help a new salesperson learn it inside and out. At the beginning of this document, I’d recommend that you list your company’s core values and add a sentence or two about your heart behind sales, followed by the steps of your sales process. Here’s an example of what this could look like using some of the core values at my company, WhyFire, and the 7 Steps of The Fire Time Sales Process.
Our Core Values:
- Default to generosity.
- Stay in touch with our partners’ experiences.
- Seek innovation wherever you can find it.
- Confront the brutal facts about our company.
- Be honest with our partners—especially when it’s difficult.
- Trust each other to make the call.
- View limitations as opportunities.
- Don’t take ourselves too seriously.
What Is Sales? Sales is communicating wisdom to lead someone to the point of a decision.
Our Sales Process:
- Step 1: Greet the customer.
- Step 2: Understand their problem.
- Step 3: Advise a solution.
- Step 4: Explain the process.
- Step 5: Call them to action.
- Step 6: Pursue the opportunity.
- Step 7: Show gratitude.
After this, you can break down each step in the process over two to three pages explaining how that step in the process works and why it matters. In addition, you can list out some bullet points of what you expect to happen every time a customer reaches that step in the process and provide a link to digital resources (podcasts, videos, articles, etc.) that help teach that step. To cap it all off, create a worksheet with questions and practice scenarios for new salespeople to complete and turn in so you can review their progress and understanding of each step.
Here’s an example of what this worksheet can look like for Step 1 of the sales process: Greet the customer.
Questions:
- Imagine feeling nervous as you walk into a new environment and you see someone walking over to greet you. What could that person do in that greeting to make you feel comfortable and included?
- Why is it so important to make customers feel welcomed when they come into our showroom?
- What are the intangibles you want to make sure you include in every greeting you give a customer?
- How will you greet a new customer in the showroom if you’re already working with someone else—and you’re the only salesperson on the floor?
Practice:
- Grab a team member and practice this step together. Have your teammate walk into the store like a customer while you come over and give the greeting. Make sure to include the intangibles you listed above. After this, debrief on how it felt and switch roles. Repeat this three times.
Once you’ve done this for the first step, you can follow the same framework for each one that follows until you’re finished.
Teaching the sales process takes time, but providing these resources is what will set a new salesperson up for success rather than failure.
That doesn’t sound like training; it sounds like a kidnapping.
This article is brought to you by Pacific Energy.
Part 3: Master the Customer Understanding Form
Along with the 30-day binder and the company sales process documentation comes what may be the most important part of setting up a new salesperson for success: the Customer Understanding Form.
This is an intake form that should be used by every salesperson with every customer who comes into the showroom looking to start a fireplace project. It should walk through a customer’s situation to help a salesperson understand the problem the customer is experiencing. By the time salespeople complete this form with a customer, they should know if the customer needs an insert, a stove, a gas log set, or a zero-clearance fireplace.
Teaching new salespeople to master the Customer Understanding Form is paramount. Over their first two months, they should be going through this form relentlessly—with team members and customers—so they feel confident that they have the tools to understand the problem of anyone coming into the showroom looking for a fireplace.
Now, I never said that, in these first two months, new salespeople need to be confident in advising every type of solution your company offers. Rather, they only need to be confident in diagnosing the scenario of the customer’s home and understanding the problem the customer is encountering. These are two completely different things.
Spend these first two months explaining how to understand a customer’s home: Take them out to look at new jobs, give them time in the field with installers, have them ride along on service calls. All of this, combined with the Customer Understanding Form, will give them what they need to understand the customer’s problem and determine what type of fireplace that customer needs categorically.
Every Customer Understanding Form will look different, but here’s an example of some of the questions that you can use for yours.
- Can you tell me a little bit about the project?
- What part of town is your home in?
- How long have you been in the market for a fireplace?
- Have you seen anything that you’ve liked so far as you’ve been looking around?
- What kind of problems have you experienced that have led you to look at a new fireplace?
- How did you hear about our company?
- What kind of fuel were you hoping to use for your fireplace?
- Which room(s) of the home is this going to be in?
- How do you use that space currently?
- What do you want this fireplace to do for you when it’s all said and done?
- Do you have a picture of your space—or any inspiration photos?
- Can you tell me about what you have in that space right now?
- Is the fireplace going to be on an inside wall or outside wall of the home?
- What style is this project?
- Can you tell me about what’s above that room and what’s below it?
- What is underneath the first floor of your house?
- What’s around your fireplace right now?
- When were you hoping to have this project completed?
- Is there anything else important about your home that we should know?
Again, these are just examples. But if new salespeople can walk a customer through questions like this, they’ll understand the problems the customer is encountering and know if the customer needs an insert, a stove, a gas log set, or a zero-clearance fireplace.
If you make this part of your training process, you’ll find that new salespeople can master this form within their first two months on the job. And, once they have that, you’re only one step away from seeing them start to succeed on the sales floor.
Part 4: Sell the Basics and Pass Off the Rest
One of the mistakes that most companies make in our industry is they think that they need to train new salespeople to sell everything before they can be trusted alone on the sales floor—and that couldn’t be further from the truth. If that’s the standard you have for a new salesperson, then I would concur it’s probably going to be a two-year process. But thankfully for us, it doesn’t have to be that way.
For most companies in our industry, inserts make up a huge percentage of their overall sales—and that’s where I would start. Inserts are the easiest product to sell because they’re encased inside of an existing wood fireplace, so there aren’t all of the technicalities of framing clearances like stoves and zero-clearance units, and the venting situation is simple (often a one-, two-, or three-story flex kit).
One of the most amazing things about inserts is that they solve a very tangible problem: Anyone looking at one has a hole in the house, and the insert plugs it. The insert also creates a comfort zone within the home that will transform the entire living space.
In addition, inserts have a huge amount of forgiveness with them. If you mismeasure, most brands have a smaller or larger option that will work for only a few hundred dollars’ difference. The same is true for venting: While it may be hard for a new salesperson to map out the dozens of parts required for a freestanding stove’s vent kit, an insert is much simpler. When you couple this with the fact that these products are low risk, low time, and high profitability, it makes all the sense in the world that this is where you start.
In my market, gas inserts make up the lion’s share of insert sales, so after two months of training, we would unleash new salespeople to sell, by themselves, to any customer on the showroom floor—as long as the customer was looking for a gas insert and had an existing masonry fireplace with a gas line already in place.
Now, you might say that scope is way too narrow—and if it is, just expand it to what’s right in your area. But especially in the burn season, I’ve found that new salespeople trained to sell only gas inserts in these specific situations can do three-quarters of the sales of your most experienced salespeople on the floor. Why? Because they’re laser-focused on the best opportunities—and they pass everything else off.
Here’s an easy way to do this: After filling out the Customer Understanding Form, if the customer’s situation requires anything except the specific insert parameters you’ve set up, the new salesperson simply grabs you (or someone else on the team) to take over, then observes the entire interaction from start to finish. Over time, you’ll find that this rhythm—in combination with specific product and installation training—sets them up to sell everything on your showroom floor.
By focusing your new salespeople on the products that are a combination of the easiest and highest impact, you can set them up for success right away—and build on that success with more complex products as time goes on.
Creating the Flywheel of Sales Success
Every company in our industry wants to have successful salespeople, but most owners and managers aren’t willing to create the environment that results in that success. As a result, their new salespeople quit before they gain traction, or they get stuck in a two- to three-year purgatory that reinforces their reliance on the business owner to make every decision for them. Either way, it’s not the result that anybody wants.
But by using the four steps we’ve just lined out, you can set new salespeople up for success quickly and build momentum over time for them to be a cornerstone in your business for years to come.
None of these steps are easy, but committing to this process builds a training pipeline that optimizes itself each time you run it. With each new salesperson, you’ll learn things and make micro-adjustments that make the entire system better—creating a flywheel that spins faster and faster with each passing turn.
Yes, training new salespeople is hard. Yes, not all of them will last. Even so, you’ll see disproportionate results from someone who follows this process compared to someone dropped off in the woods to figure it out alone.
How long does it take to train a new salesperson to be successful in our industry?
For anyone without a training plan, it will probably be years—if ever.
But you can have a new salesperson trained up and ready before the burn season if you get started right now.
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Tim Reed
Tim Reed is the president of WhyFire, where he helps business leaders in the hearth industry take control of their companies by providing them with sales tools to save time and make money. He's also the host of The Fire Time Podcast, which is actively helping thousands of people grow themselves—and their companies.
