Learner engagement is a key driver of sales enablement and can impact all of the important variables, including retention, ramp time, and productivity.

In fact, companies with engaged employees achieve twice the annual net income of those without engaged employees ^[1]. And engaging sales employees to stay longer and perform better is a big reason why.

Unfortunately, many businesses aren’t succeeding. In 2021, the average tenure of a sales development rep was 1.8 years ^[6], down from 2.5 years in 2010. And when you consider a ramp-up time between three to 12 months ^[6],[8], this reduction is a worrying trend. The less time a sales employee stays with the organization, the greater the proportion of time spent onboarding and ramping instead of selling.

There are two strategies for mitigating this problem: Ramp sales employees faster or get them to stay longer. Of course, to really have an impact, you can do both. This will improve the percentage of time sellers spend generating revenue.

We know that engaged employees have a significantly longer tenure and are more loyal. But get this: After completing the typical onboarding process, only 29% of employees feel prepared to excel in their role ^[8]. Yikes.

By delivering exceptional learning, you can reduce ramp time and improve your sales team’s confidence.

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Start immediately.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and if a new hire has a poor first day or first week, that can cascade to an overall negative impression that’s hard to correct later. Make sure new hires have check-ins with their manager early and often, and ensure you have the right content to set them up for success.

Make learning social and tie it to your brand. There’s a reason tools like Gong are so effective for sales training: They let new sellers listen to real calls and interactions, helping them build skills and understanding in a safe way. To take it a step further, invest in social learning, which teaches new skills, builds social connection, and empowers your SMEs and best performers to share their expertise.

Management matters!
70% of the variance in team engagement is attributable to a team’s manager[8]. Exceptional managers elevate learning beyond a checklist—they reinforce the culture and values, connect new employees to team members, and help identify the best ways for the organization to harness each person’s unique skill set.

Following these best practices will help you build a sales team that stays longer and gets more done. And of course, Docebo comes equipped with all of the functionality you need to engage a sales team, including always-on social learning tools and AI-powered adaptive learning.

Improving engagement comes down to several best practices:

Don’t ignore ‘reboarding,’ which is the onboarding an existing employee requires when changing teams or roles. Skipping this can be disastrous: Not only do you lose their above-average productivity, you risk churning one of your most valuable people. 

Tailor learning to a sales audience.
Sales teams are on calls intermittently throughout the day. They probably don’t have hours of uninterrupted time to complete lengthy courses. For sales audiences, focus on shorter modules of microlearning content, embrace learning in the flow of work, and evaluate learning success by looking at performance. After all, scoring well on a post-training test isn’t the measure of a skilled seller—selling more is. Look for accurate ways of measure learning success. Think things like quota attainment (of course), and performance in activities like objection-handling, mock calls, product knowledge tests, etc.

Want to grow sales? Engage and enable your sellers

Higher engagement equals more sales