Many salespeople find participating in the training for a new sales representative to be a rewarding and interesting experience. Some discover they have a real talent for training and pursue it as a career. Others find it improves their own skills.

Unlike being in charge of a website, this is a natural extension of selling and can be integrated with their regular job responsibilities. This additional duty, however, may distract the salesperson from meeting their primary goal: selling. Let's look at some issues you might want to consider before proceeding.

Understand Why

Before you delegate any training responsibilities, ask the salesperson about their reasons for volunteering. Are they getting bored with sales? Do they see themselves in a training position in the next few years? Are they interested in management? Do they see this as a path to greater responsibility of some kind? Get an idea of what they are thinking so that you can be in sync with them on their motivations and goals. As you wrap up the discussion, be clear that if they do take on training responsibilities, the new sales representatives still work for you and not for them.

Start Small

The training of a new salesperson involves exposure to many different departments (product development, customer service, finance, etc.) and should be a company-wide effort. The time the new salesperson spends with each department enables them to fully understand your business as well as establish internal relationships that will help them do their job. Consider asking your tenured salesperson to coordinate the schedule for the new hire - arranging visits with different departments and sessions with your other salespeople. Their ability to handle this activity can be the basis for whether you decide to let them take on additional training tasks.

Get Feedback

Most employees have an opinion about a company's new hire orientation or lack thereof. Have the tenured salesperson speak with the current sales staff and members of other departments and assess the existing training program for new salespeople. Typically, a lot of innovative ideas are generated from these meetings. Ask the tenured salesperson to write a brief report with their findings and recommendations.

Set Guidelines

If both of the above activities (and any others that you assign) go well, you may be inclined to give the salesperson additional training responsibilities. There are many ways to do this. Depending on the size of the sales organization, you could increase the salesperson's training and development responsibilities and decrease their revenue goals and/or territory size. But keep in mind that they would be selling less and training more, and that you would need to replace their production. You also might need to increase their base salary to replace some of their potential lost earnings.

Unless you are offering them a full time training position, the salesperson must understand that meeting their revenue goal is their top priority; they must give up any training responsibilities if they don't hit their sales goals.

Having a sales representative run new hire sales training can take a big item off of your to-do list, but plan it out rather than jumping right in. Salespeople can be effective trainers because they are "in the trenches" and can directly relate to the situations the new salesperson will experience. You must ensure, though, that they can handle the job without impacting their revenue production.