How To Quickly Integrate A New Salesperson Into Your IT Company, Part 1

By Dennis O’Connell, Business Development Manager, HTG Peer Groups

Read Part 2

I was asked by one of our peer group members to provide some advice as it related to the hiring and onboarding of a new salesperson. The potential hire did not have an IT industry background.  So my advice to him was twofold, focusing around how to get the non-IT person up to speed and how to quickly integrate the new hire into their company.

This article, the first in this two-part series, will focus on how to quickly and effectively get a non-IT person the industry knowledge necessary to sell successfully. This applies to any company that is hiring a salesperson with no experience selling in their particular vertical market, not just those within the IT industry.

In a previous job of mine with a large technology provider, I moved into a sales group tasked with calling on our Telco customers. During one of my first customer meetings, I was listening to the discussion and more than once the three-letter acronym of ATM came up. I was struggling to understand how automatic teller machines fit into the discussion. It just didn’t make sense.  After the meeting, I approached one of my team members only to find out they were talking about asynchronous transfer mode. I suddenly discovered that there was a whole new language I was going to have to learn.

This drives my first bit of advice: understand your new salesperson is learning a new language. Yes, a salesperson knows how to sell. Yes, the salesperson is likely good with people and can be successful. But it will require some work to learn industry jargon and to be conversant enough with IT-speak to be able to identify and opportunity and close a deal independently.

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