How Wonderway helped Forto to slash SDRs onboarding from 12 to 4 weeks

One-size-fits-all, live trainings with no easy way to assess knowledge retention. Ramp-up time: 12 weeks.

When Dario Schierloh, now Head of International Sales Development at Forto, joined the company as an SDR, onboarding was set up as a spreadsheet with links to available content, and a list of live trainings new reps needed to attend.

Since Forto was scaling fast and new reps joined the sales team every week or every other week, this approach was creating multiple challenges:
- no way to adapt the training to the new hires’ industry and sales knowledge
- very time-consuming, for the reps and for the trainers
- no way to assess reps’ knowledge retention

Structured onboarding program, built-in assessments

To streamline onboarding, the first step for the Forto sales enablement team was to map out the necessary knowledge, skills, and tools that new reps really needed to be successful in their job. 
‍
The next step was organizing this content and determining the order in which information needed to be delivered during onboarding. Using the Wonderway platform for onboarding meant that the rep could simply log in to see their onboarding plan: sessions, content, assignments, and time to completion. Instead of working through the onboarding list on their own and having to rely on more experienced team members to help them learn the ropes, now reps’ onboarding journey was self-driven and tied to the assessments.

Having built-in assessments was just as useful for understanding the real skill level of all SDRs. The Forto sales enablement team was able to uncover missing content they needed to improve reps’ skillsets.

Having all content in one place also helped decrease ramp-up time, not just because of the content changes and single-platform delivery, but also by making the reps excited about the training and motivated to complete it. 

Ramp-up content is also used by SDRs after completing their onboarding: as a team leader, Dario expects his reps to own their professional development.

Now when the reps feel that they’re missing relevant information, they can always go back to the training and the scripts. At the same time, Dario can check what each SDR is working on and how they’re performing, without having to micromanage.

3x faster onboarding with custom learning tracks

The biggest success of implementing Wonderway training was decreasing ramp time from 12 weeks to 4. Now everyone knows when new reps will be ready to take on their responsibilities and drive new expansion efforts.

The sales enablement team has different types of content available for different skillsets and can scale the program without adding live trainings or other time-consuming activities to their workload.

Having a self-driven onboarding program also means that team members and team leads no longer need to focus on teaching the material live. Now they spend a fraction of the time on assignment reviews.

At the same time, new reps can see that the cohorts before them ramp up quickly and come to full speed after onboarding, and are excited to join the program. 

Create different trainings for different segments of customers, industries, or regions. Invest your time in developing learning content for different skill and knowledge levels to keep all sales reps engaged. 

2. Make training engaging with gamification

Built-in gamification makes learning materials feel less dry. Gamifying onboarding also means that there’s a competition going on, and that really engages teams.

3. Hand over the topics and content development to team leads

Enable team leads to build their own content to help their teams succeed. They are on the battlefield and more aware of market changes than employees in leadership positions.