For many sales organizations, onboarding presents a specific challenge: how to deliver training on demand, tailored to the specific role and region, and to a small audience (often of just one) that may be remotely located across the country or around the world.

The time required to onboard effectively is is substantial as well. Sales & Marketing Management notes the average organization spends 73 days training entry-level sales reps. And even experienced sales professionals still require an average of nearly a week’s time to get up to speed.

A video platform can help with this, giving you a powerful tool you can use to quickly create a new hire training video library with how-tos and best practices for every sales role and position.

A video platform makes recordings viewable, searchable, and shareable on-demand, so that new sales hires have everything they need from day one. These videos are ideal for onboarding, as they can be viewed as many times as necessary and from any location, helping new team members get up to speed even when onboarding remotely from home or in the field.

Here are a few of the types of videos our customers recommend to expand your sales training resources and help new sales team members ramp up quickly and completely.

5 Ways To Use Video For Sales Onboarding

1. Show new hires your culture. What your company does, how you do it, and most importantly, why you do it, is essential information for anyone coming into your organization. Yet in almost every organization’s onboarding process, these guiding-principle statements are simply printed out and slipped into the “welcome aboard” folder — a box checked.

Video helps bring these strategic statements alive. Ask executives across your organization to share their take on the why that drives your company, and help viewers actually see the passion and enthusiasm built up in these ideals to help them better join in with your organization’s culture.

2. Give virtual company tours. Sometimes the greatest challenge in being new is just learning where to go. And yet, especially for large organizations, an in-person tour of the corporate headquarters or field offices, including safety-related walkthroughs, isn’t practical. Video tours of the workplace help employees settle in more quickly.

Invite your front-line managers to record their own office introductions, highlighting places important to their teams. This doesn’t have to be a burden — they can simply record the tour they give the next time a new person starts. Having the recording available in the future will help new reps — as well as your existing remote employees when they visit the home office.

3. Explain the roles of different departments. The sales team onboarding processes shouldn’t be focused solely on sales. Cross-departmental training is key to a sales team’s success because it helps salespeople understand the bigger picture.

Ask your colleagues in other departments to record a brief introduction to their work, as well as any pointers they’d want to make sure members of the sales team know. You might find these sessions generate a few best practices that are valuable to share even with tenured members of your team.

4. Give product demonstrations. There’s no better way to help someone understand your business, products, and processes than with a full demonstration. But onboarding demos can be a big challenge.

First, they require your managers or specialists to find time to walk through every detail and every feature — no small challenge, especially for growing organizations. Worse still, no matter how perfect your onboarding demo, if it’s delivered live, your new hire only gets one chance to see and remember every last important fact and facet presented. For most people that’s a big request, especially when they’re already facing down a dozen other new hire tasks.

Teaching new hires the basics of your product offerings with high-quality, replayable, searchable video demonstrations is an investment that is repaid over and over again.

Training professionals recommend companies share videos like these for new employees not just at the start of the employment, but over time. Incremental and repeated training sessions have been shown to improve knowledge retention rates significantly.

5. Coach new hires on sales strategy discussions. Some of your new hires won’t just be new to the company—they’ll be new to sales, too. And even for veteran salespeople, your approach to working with leads, prospects, and customers may be different from how they’re used to doing things.

Selling skills videos are an important part of every employee’s onboarding experience. Ask your sales managers to provide an overview of your strategy, including what types of customers your organization targets, and whether you prefer to take a relationship-builder, a challenger, a problem-solver, or other approach.

Forward-looking sales organizations are already making video a part of almost every aspect of sales training and communications for their reps.

Learn More Ways To Train Your Sales Team With Video

Think your sales team is actually using all those brochures, handbooks, and FAQs your organization is writing for them? Think again.

A massive portion of most companies’ sales enablement tools and strategies are going unused.

Find out how video can help better inform your sales team and support more efficient knowledge sharing in your organization in our latest white paper: 18 Ways To Improve Sales Training With Video.

Get your copy today!