Foundational readiness is all about creating a ready-to-execute onboarding plan for every role in the sales team. The main goal of the foundational readiness is to accelerate new agents' time to full productivity and improve knowledge retention across every possible sales role in the sphere.

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How to implement it properly?

For many businesses, a common onboarding mistake is the "all-at-once onboarding" that typically takes the form of a four- to five-day boot camp. New people are flooded with the information about every single product, with product manager after product manager delivering their PowerPoint pitches. In this setting, reps just can't immediately become effective workers, and retention is often low.

A much more practical approach is implementing agile sales onboarding based on the basic principles like flexibility, responsiveness, collaboration, etc., defined in agile software development. With such an onboarding scheme, the emphasis is on developing specific skills mapped to discrete sales activities in which the salesperson must be proficient. 

For example, suppose reps need to conduct their first prospecting call within two-three weeks of joining the company. In that case, their onboarding plan should focus on developing phone communications, listening skills, and mastering the company elevator pitch. Once they've been certified, it's on to the following key activity they will need to perform across both the customer journey process and the list of products they need to sell.

In simple words, foundational readiness works, and it prepares the sales team to work with whatever comes their way. With this confidence boost, your sales team can close more and bigger deals.

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