Sales Enablement PRO Awards 2021: Driving Successful Onboarding, Training & Coaching at DailyPay

Congratulations to Sales Enablement PRO Award winner Amanda Romeo from DailyPay. Learn more about the Onboarding award winning initiative below.

What was the challenge you were facing?

Amanda Romeo: My name is Amanda Romeo. I am the manager of revenue training at DailyPay. DailyPay is the recognized gold standard in the on-demand pay index. And my roles and responsibilities cover all of the revenue training initiatives from onboarding to ongoing training, as well as cross functional initiatives for new hire onboarding and leadership training. I love talking about the evolution of the onboarding program at DailyPay. DailyPay has been invested in its people since the very beginning. The first iteration of sales onboarding at DailyPay was actually a binder that the head of enablement now, my boss, Michelle Bonavitacola, put together for our first sales rep and it’s really evolved since then. That was about three or so years ago now. And has really evolved with the company and the growth of the sales team.

When I got to DailyPay about a year ago, there was a lot of really amazing content put together. And it was just about taking the content and putting a learning spin on it and making sure that there was activities and role plays and making the content digestible for all of our new hires to make sure that they knew everything they needed to know in the end-to-end process so that they could be productive within their jobs. It’s about downloading all of the content that was existing. We had a really quick turnaround between my start date and the first launch. It was about a 30-day turnaround time that we built this 90 day onboarding program. So I just downloaded all of the content, worked really closely with my direct manager on the enablement team, as well as sales leadership, and our executive team to really do a deep analysis of what was necessary for our salespeople to understand so that they could go to market with a strong and compelling message.

What was the process of developing this initiative?

AR: From there, defining the processes, mapping out and storyboarding what the learning journey would look like for our new hires, and then launching it and thankfully, we got some in-person instructor-led training time prior to the pandemic when we all had to go virtual. So a little bit of a silver lining there. I still am, but I was very lucky at the time that I had an amazing management team and an amazing leadership team in my corner, supporting this program, and its rollout. Which is for anyone that’s built an onboarding program without the supportive leadership, it can be really difficult to get buy-in. So having the sales management team, executive leaders, both in sales and the company as a whole supporting this program really helped with the rollout and the adoption of the materials. And then of course, my amazing participants of that first pass, they were very engaged and willing to learn. So they made it really easy to execute on the content. Thankfully, we did get some time in person, like I had mentioned and obviously opening up the feedback loop, letting them know that, “Hey, this is the first pass at this. So let us know what you liked and what you didn’t like.”

How was the rollout and adoption of the new initiative?

AR: Having those check-ins with that group on a weekly basis after we had kind of left that first bootcamp style portion to say, “Hey, what happened on the phones this week that maybe wasn’t covered in training and then going back and iterating on the process.” So when we first rolled out this program back in March of 2020, It looked like a 90-day onboarding program with an accompanied onboarding plan. We had front-loaded what was the need to know is to get people productive quickly. So within the first couple of weeks, we had more of that bootcamp style and then the remaining time we spent more of that in-time learning so that first certification looked like a discovery certification to get them in the lead queue, get them on the phones with prospects.

What are some of the business results and impact as a result of your efforts?

AR: We actually saw a 12% increase in discovery conversion rate. Furthermore, focusing on time learning piece and on rep productivity, we were able to decrease the time to first sale for new reps by 67% and 21% for that second sale. So we were able to see a much higher velocity in a rep ramp time based on the learning path that we had laid out for them. Last year and even still today, it’s a constant state of change. We’re always looking at how we can do things more effectively and sometimes we go out and seek change. Sometimes the change is decided for us. So we have to pivot either way. The program has evolved immensely in the last year and in fact, in the last month or so we have completely reiterated on the sales program as well as added in specific learning paths for SDRs. Modified the AA program, added in a program for our CSM team and we’ll be adding in more paths. So while we intended, the initial request was to make an e-onboarding program.

We really expanded our scope across the entire revenue team to cover all of the roles. So with that comes a challenge of scalability, right? How do we get the biggest bang for our buck? What is the information that everyone needs to know regardless of their role versus what is just that end-to-end process for them? So, as we look at iterations of this, it’s more on demand learning, more video, we’re implementing an LMS. We did all of that the past year without any sort of learning management system. So I’m really excited to implement an LMS and create more opportunities for on-demand learning with the reps. They are very receptive to on-demand learning and being able to say, “ I’m going into a call with this person or up against this competitor,” or whatever it may be. Let me click in and watch a three to five minute video and brush up my skills going into that call. So we’ve seen a lot of success with that. And that’s the plan to iterate on for the remaining 2021.

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