Onboarding Sales Teams with Sofiya Ulyak of Star

Sofiya Ulyak jumped onto Sales Operations Demystified to share her knowledge and experience in Sales Operations as well as providing insights into onboarding a sales team. Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.

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Key Takeaways

From sales-assistant to the director of commercial operations

Sofiya first joined Star as a sales assistant eight years ago and has moved through the ranks fo sales operations from manager to director and now to the director of commercial operations. She became passionate about the sales process right at the start of her career when she helped sales reps become more productive as a sales assistant.

The Three-step sales team onboarding flow

Star operates a three-step onboarding sales team process:

  1. Online onboarding through Showpad – Online training on the businesses mission, values, customer case studies and an overview of their sales process
  2. Onsite onboarding in Ukraine – During the first month, all new team members head to Ukraine for onsite training to build relationships with core team members
  3. Sales training – Each new recruit receives sales training on the value selling methodology explained below

What is in it for the sales team?

Many guests on the show highlight the importance of effective communication with sales reps. It is your responsibility as a sales operations resource to build impactful relationships with your reps. The strategy that we find most guests sharing is that you must communicate with your sales reps with their interest in mind… not yours.

Over time, if you communicate what they can get from adopting a new process, and then deliver on that promise… trust is built.

The value selling methodology

Star has adopted the value selling methodology. This essentially trains their reps to look for pains or problems that the prospect is experiencing and then match these to the features within their product. Only if there is a fit, should the sales rep proceed with the sale

This sales strategy serves well in the long term as it will build trust between the salesperson and the prospect over time regardless of whether a sale is made.

#1 metric: time to hit quota

Sofiya’s favorite sales metric is: the time is taken for a rep to hit 100% of quota. She enjoys this metric as not only does it inform you of how effective your onboarding is, but also informs you of how effective your hiring has been.

Biggest influences:

Sofiya’s biggest influences are her CEO at Star and also Hillary of Zoom who she met at an OpStars event in San Francisco:

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