The Rep's Journey

What's up everyone? This is episode 7 of The 
Reps Journey and in this episode I'm gonna  

do something a little different. I'm gonna go 
solo. I'm gonna really quickly go through and  

show you something that we've been doing with our 
customers initially, when they initially joined  

with ConveYour that has been hugely valuable 
for them. That's why I want to share it. We call  

it The Rep Journey Audit. I know I talk about 
the rep's journey a lot. It's the name of our  

podcast but I think this is super super valuable 
so I just want to share with you how it works.

This is The Reps Journey 
podcast with Stephen Rhyne.  

TRJ exists to help you recruit, 
train, and retain your reps.

This is going to be a 
[notion.so](http://notion.so/)  

template that you can use in your own company 
if you want. We're going to try to set it up  

as a template so that you can grab the link 
and create this for yourself. The first thing  

that we do with our customers is to try to set 
some baselines. What kind of stats do they have  

right now with their rep funnel and what are they 
shooting for? What are their goals? Surprisingly,  

a lot of times these numbers are arbitrary. 
They're not tracked but we want to just start,  

you should start thinking about these numbers 
even if you're working with smaller numbers.  

Even if you're working less than 100 reps or you 
really have no idea how many actual candidates you  

had because all of your managers have their 
own little lists on their phones of who the  

candidates are and you only get an email saying 
on board this rep, okay? Don't worry about it.  

Just try to ballpark and get in your current 
numbers and ballpark your percentages even  

if they're guts around your conversions between 
recruit to onboarded, onboard to fully trained,  

and then fully trained to actually going out and 
doing the job. Maybe, you also have one that is  

around three months later, around six months 
later, like your retention numbers. Just get them  

in. I think that no stats or having some stats 
whether arbitrary or not is better than no stats  

at all because at least you're starting to move 
towards tracking this. So we do that first. We can  

set some expectations and figure out what the 
customer wants. The next thing we do is log all  

of the systems and tools that a company uses. What 
is their canvassing tool? What is their proposal  

tool? What's the HR tool? Is a rep using this 
or not? Does a rep interact with it? The reason  

why I want to know if the rep interacts with it 
is because that is part of the rep experience  

and how you onboard them into that remote product 
and when they receive an email **matters**. Is it  

going to be super obtuse that they got onboarded 
in this thing before they got training on it?  

Maybe. We try to get all those out on the table 
and then we also go through and look at the rep  

systems. We bring them down from the systems and 
we go which of these tools are a must-have for the  

rep and by when. Where is it going to fall into 
the rep journey? How are they getting into it?  

Is it manual? Who does it? Why are they doing it? 
How does that person, Jane, for example, know when  

to add this person? Is that clear? Is that defined 
and can we automate it? Could we get it where the  

rep is only added to your proposal tool the minute 
after they finish their training on the proposal  

tool? Why do they need it beforehand? So, that's 
an example where we want to know about all those  

individual tools that you have. Now, we're at 
the rep journey audit section. Most of the people  

that come to us start with training. That's the 
first thing that they want to focus on which is  

kind of in the middle of the stack. We do like 
to start really comprehensively and start with  

recruiting. Here are some of the questions that 
we ask. This is all going to be in the template.  

How do people initially hear about the company? 
How does a manager intro the opportunity?  

How does the manager save recruit information? Is 
a manager storing that in their own phone? Do they  

use their own little recruiting system or is there 
a centralized location where anybody that's heard  

about the opportunity, that you provide, is 
getting added to a system so you can nurture  

those people? Does that exist? If there's quasi, 
document it. Document all of the things that  

managers are doing to get this done. How does the 
manager share rep info with the company to start  

onboarding? Is that an email to some mystical 
person that does all the manual onboarding  

or is that some documented process where managers 
hand off to that person? I'm gonna guess there  

are a lot of manual processes. There an email 
goes out, ‘this person wants to get onboarded’  

then the person's plugging all that stuff into a 
form. Do you have job boards or different systems?  

Document the places where you're collecting new 
potential recruits and figure out where what  

those systems are. Make sure everybody is aware 
of those systems and how you could potentially  

integrate with them. Communications, how does a 
candidate receive a message? Is it sent directly  

from the applicant tracking system? Is it sent 
from a system you send? Is it the manager? Again,  

just write it down. So, this is a good little 
outline for you. Let's go to onboarding. How is a  

decision to hire made? Who makes that decision? Is 
there a system, a quality check system, that the  

manager should go through? Is there an opportunity 
for you to provide tools to the manager,  

to share with the potential recruit, and 
help the potential recruit understand  

the expectations you have before the manager 
tries to recruit them? Does that make sense?  

There's a checklist for those things as well. 
Here's an example of a very specific question.  

Does a rep need to meet with someone to complete 
onboarding before moving to training? If so, why?  

Sometimes that’s, ‘Of course, they can move on 
to training’ and other times, ‘No, we need to do  

this, this, and this other thing before we can 
actually turn on training for this rep.’ Again,  

document. I know I'm just kind of beating a dead 
horse here, with regards to the documentation, but  

it is so valuable. Later on, what you're going 
to do with this outline, you're going to take  

it and you're going to put it into your rep 
journey model. You're going to use something  

like whimsical and you're going to lay this out in 
a map. You have all of your answers here, through  

the outline. Then you can take those answers and 
start laying out what is truth, visually. You can  

see the places that are inefficient, where you can 
say ‘Wait a minute. We don't have to immediately,  

manually, add somebody to spotio or solo, as soon 
as we get a signed contract. We could add them,  

maybe, automatically right after they finish 
their initial training!’ Less stuff coming at  

the rep. The rep can focus on only the thing that 
matters which is getting ready to sell then they  

get access to the tools. Again, that might not 
work for your business but the point is to get  

it documented so that you can start laying it out 
as lego bricks. This is the lego brick purchasing.  

If you've ever built legos, you go to the lego 
bin first. You don't start immediately building.  

You start looking for the black piece that you 
need. You look for that really cool piece of glass  

that will be the front of your spaceship. You 
get all those pieces on the table then you start  

building the lego set. So, what this journey, 
this audit, here is laying out what is truth  

and what should be truth. Then, you take those and 
you lay them out in a more dynamic way. Training,  

what's initial training? What training do 
they absolutely need right away to even be  

part of your sales force? Why do they need 
this right now? Is there stuff you can defer?  

If you defer it would be more valuable? When must 
have been completed? How are you going to convey  

completeness and are there trainings that are 
required to be done before they show up, say, for  

a boot camp in two weeks? How long do you have to 
train that person? Would there be times when you  

only have two days to train one rep and two weeks 
to train another? Have you thought that through?  

There are just a couple of bullet points for the 
second training level, and third training level.  

Just laying out what you envision those trainings 
to be. Whether that be advanced training to move  

from in solar, you might be a setter and you want 
to move people to become a closer, an advisor.  

Maybe the third training level is training 
someone on how to build their own team or  

start their own location, or more ‘working on 
themselves’ type of training than just working on  

understanding the business. Then, you have your 
on-demand training. What training is not ‘you  

need this right now’ and prescribing it to the 
rep and is more product resources pdfs, videos,  

cool interviews with other sales reps that you 
want to put in your on-demand training. Next up  

is retention. I think two things about retention. 
If reps don't feel like they're being supported  

and they don't get help, they will quit. They 
don't feel like they have the necessary tools.  

So, how does a rep know where to go to get help? 
Is that something that is is driven by just  

culture? “Hey, can you help me tell me who I 
should email or text to get an answer about this?”  

or are you proactively giving them, pointing their 
face, pointing their head, towards the place that  

they need go to get support? One thing I always 
do, initially, when we sign up a new customer,  

is I point out how they get support inside the 
product and explain to them that they're gonna  

get better support there than reaching out to me 
directly because I might be on doing one of these  

things right now. Sounds obvious but it's not 
done all the time. How does a rep know where to go  

and where do reps go to get help? Do you have a 
list of frequently asked questions that you could  

document? Actually, a lot of questions come up 
once you start really mapping out your journey.  

You start to realize all the different 
places where reps might have questions  

that you can address into a frequently 
asked questions list and use that in your  

messaging platform as saved snippets or saved 
replies. This is something ConveYour does well.  

Next is promotion, belief building, 
motivation building. I'm a huge believer that  

most of the time, when you're onboarding 
reps, there's training involved but you're  

also belief building. You're keeping them 
warm until they're actually doing the job.  

So, here, it's figuring out where you drop your 
messages, where you you share your promotions,  

in context to where they are in their journey. 
Sometimes things might be sound a little tone-deaf  

if you send them too early or too late in their 
journey. How are you how are you thinking about  

what's going to drop based off of them? All that 
really matters is, really, them, in their world.  

Everybody's a little selfish and it just matters 
what they receive. They don't care that when you  

send it, it's better for the team to send it at 
this time. They care about them. No offense. Also,  

I like to say is somebody, a rep, is walking 
along a hiking path and they might go around  

the wrong path. How can you cut them off on the 
path and take them the right direction based on  

red flags you see in their performance or 
whatever? Could you set up automations to address  

issues that you see happening whether that be 
slow to finish training, not coming to meetings,  

things like that? Usually, most people just say 
“Well, they're not gonna cut it”. But, I believe  

sometimes it's just a matter of a disconnect 
between what they believe is a great opportunity  

and then they see another opportunity 
over there that they might want to go to.  

Again, write down all of your promotion, belief 
building, motivation building exercises that you  

already have. Write down and document when you 
are sending them. Is this just a mass message  

that you send and a brand new rep gets it right 
away, and a veteran rep gets it or a rep that's  

been around for three weeks gets it at three 
weeks? Anyway, point of this document. Then  

once you have all of that in place, what I 
start to do here is, before I draw any lines, I  

start to put my lego pieces out here on the board. 
What I'll do is I'll give you an example like  

one here. Manager sends email to onboard so I'll 
just write that. “Manager sends email to onboard”  

onto my board, my whimsical board here. Let's 
say I didn't have any of this already built and  

I was just trying to lay it out. So, the next 
thing I want to do is say what happens next.  

“Jane sends contract”. I'm 
just putting them out here.

Next thing, I want to make sure 
the rep signs the contract.  

I'm just putting all of my milestones, my 
events out here. I know I need to get them to  

do pre-boot camp training. I want to do the 
welcome course. I'm literally just putting  

out bricks, lego bricks, out here and then I'm 
arranging them in the order in which they are  

occurring in the real world. Once I have 
all those in place, I highly recommend you  

have almost two versions. Start with a version of 
your journey that is the current journey and then  

make a copy. Start messing with what you want 
your journey to be. I think that's best. Do not  

just have a journey that is the ideal journey. I 
think it's best to have one that is the current  

state of things and this is what we're moving 
towards. It's going to help your engineering  

and your development team, every team, to see 
what's truth and where you want to go. So, there  

you go guys. This is how we do the rep journey 
audit and then how we help lay out a canvas for  

our customers to use as a backstop, something 
to look back at, an artifact, to use to move  

forward and build out this in ConveYour and the 
other systems that they use. Thanks for watching!