Interested in learning more about what it’s like to work with Durrie Sales?

Here’s a look into our six-step onboarding process for new Principals so you know what to expect when you join the Durrie Sales family; from your first conversation with our customer success team, to your ongoing partnership with Durrie moving forward.

Our onboarding process includes in-depth discovery about your company, your target markets, and your current and historical sales. This is to ensure a successful relationship and ultimately, the greatest positive impact on your growth and profitability.

The Durrie Sales Six-Step Onboarding Process:

  1. Set expectations
  2. Identify target customers
  3. Introduce Customer Success Reps
  4. Empower outside sales reps
  5. Conduct product education and training
  6. Review sales funnel and plan

Let’s examine these in more detail.

Step 1: Set Expectations

The first step in the Durrie onboarding process is to set clear expectations between both parties. Your Industrial Manufacturers’ Representative (IMR) may ask who your key contacts are and how they prefer to be contacted, which territory you want to focus on, what your sales targets and goals look like, if you have any stocking representatives, and where they may be located. This step in the process aims to discover the territory, sales goals, and workflow expectations for your company.

Step 2: Identify Target Customers

The next step is to identify your target customers. Questions you should be prepared to answer during this step include, “What they are looking for, where they are looking for it, and what are their top pain points? These target customers can be distributors or end-users and are usually defined by geographic territory.

You can also expect questions like, “Who are your current distributors and end-user customers?” “What are the end-user manufacturing sectors?” You may also be asked for recent year’s sales figures. The more detail you can provide, the better: The answers to these questions are integral for your IMR to understand the market your customer is selling in and how they can best market alongside the competition.

Step 3: Introduce Customer Success Reps

The third step in the onboarding process is to introduce Durrie’s Customer Success team. This stage is about introducing the team to your current contacts, conducting educational lunch & learns, and building relationships. We may ask about previous IMRs you’ve worked with and why they didn’t work out—giving Durrie an even deeper understanding of your expectations and how to best meet your needs.

Step 4: Empower Outside Sales Reps

After introductions, we will begin planning strategic sales initiatives and examining your competition to ensure a thorough understanding of the market. We’ll want to know who your current competition is, of course, but will be just as interested in your current accounts.

Important information to collect here includes which accounts have been the most successful, and which tactics have proved to enable that success, or hurt it. Other questions include which accounts should be approached tentatively, where you’ve lost significant business—and why.

The aim here is to gain full knowledge of your past and current business so that we can approach tactically and strategically to ensure the most success.

Step 5: Conduct Product Education & Training

The next step in the onboarding process is to dive deep into the product and train reps to get up to speed on your best sellers, their features and benefits to the end-user, how your products work with other products, and your buying structure.

Your rep will want to know:

  • Your top-five most successful buying programs and promotions with established customers locally, nationally, and globally.
  • Why your best sellers outperform the competition, what their competitive advantage is, and the most beneficial features to the buyer.
  • Where these products perform best.

The more in-depth knowledge your IMR has about your products, the better they will sell them. This portion of onboarding is vital in making sure your IMR not only understands your products’ value but can clearly and persuasively convey that value to customers.

Step 6: Review Sales Funnel & Plan

Lastly, your IMR will review your sales funnel, understand how your sales team has functioned in the past, and develop a plan for reviews of the sales pipeline moving forward.

This will include scheduling regular meetings between you and the IMR. We find that a cadence of every 4-6 weeks is optimal for engagement and an effective partnership. With your IMR, decide on the right schedule, who will join the meetings, and the structure of how they will be conducted. This should include a review the previous month’s sales reports to identify successes and areas of improvement, so you’ll need to make sure these reports are accessible to everyone who needs this information.

These meetings are the key touchpoints you’ll have with your IMR and will help set you up for a lasting, successful relationship.

A Proven Onboarding Process for Proven Results

During the whole onboarding process, our Customer Success team will be looking to get a grasp on your company’s needs, prior engagements with reps and your customers to ensure our reps can sell with integrity, authenticity, and in-depth product expertise.

Our team is here to serve you and your customers, from the first discovery call throughout the entire partnership. With your company’s revenue and profits top of mind, you can expect Durrie to always be a reliable, trusted advocate for your company and your success.

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