Sales Enablement Soirée: Accelerate Sales Onboarding with Actionable Insights, Fall 2020 

Cassandra Tenorio: Welcome to our panel on Accelerating Sales Onboarding with Actionable Insights. I’m very excited to be joined by our panelists today to have a discussion on the insights that they’re gleaning to really understand their sales onboarding process and decrease rep ramp time. So if I could just get each of you to go around, introduce yourself and say a little bit about yourself. Mike, let’s start with you. 

Michael Aloe: Great. Hi, I’m Michael Aloe, vice president of sales here at Ascent Cloud, where we provide sales enablement and performance management solutions to the greater Salesforce community. So thanks for having us here today, Cassandra. 

Adelle Bonavire: Hi, I’m Adelle Bonavire. I am a director over at PTC. My background is primarily sales and then moved into operations and enablement. So I’m excited to be here today and answer questions and hear more about what Michael and Aaron are doing. 

Aaron Evans: Hello. My name is Aaron Evans. I work at an organization called GlobalData. We are the fastest growing business intelligence company on the London stock exchange. My background is 13 years in sales and eight months working across the globe for multiple organizations from small startups, working for these huge multinational corporations. 

Cassandra Tenorio: Awesome. Well, I’m really excited about the discussion that we’re going to have today. And I really wanted to start by really level setting on what successful onboarding looks like at your organization. So what does that look like? How are you implementing that at your company? Mike, let’s start with you.

Michael Aloe: Sure. Well, great question. Let me start with saying, I think we all know this. Right recruiting, the right talent is challenging and expensive, right? And it’s sometimes, you know, recruits new hires fall into our lap that are our shining stars, but finding and selecting the right candidate for your open headcount can take a lot of time and effort, right? This adds to the importance of employee retention, which I’m a big believer of. So if you find the right new hires and resources for your organization to fill that open headcount and you onboard them properly, that retention rate can increase. And that can add so much value to the business.

But, retention rates, especially in tech sales, are low and low retention rates result in more expensive recruiting efforts and lower productivity and start the cycle all over again. But this leads us to the importance of really the basis of the question and that’s successful onboarding program and the stronger that onboarding resulting in greater levels of employee satisfaction and retention, you know, a successful onboarding program has a positive effect on the satisfaction, the level of engagement, and the performance of the employee. And often engagement and productivity of the new hires utilized as the measuring stick for onboarding success while we believe in those metrics and measurements for the new hire. It’s not the only metrics. And while they’re key metrics and for categories, I should say it’s also important to measure the employee satisfaction. Really big here with AscentCloud and ensuring customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. We believe they go hand in hand, but it starts with the onboarding process. 

And when it comes to employee satisfaction, here at AscentCloud, and many companies across the globe, we use a performance management solution from level 11 and for multiple purposes, including the implementation and measuring of our new hires and within the level 11 solution. We manage and measure our 30, 60, 90 day program, which that term is fairly standard when it comes to onboarding and business. But, the program consists of three key phases. Those phases are really the define and or the learning phase, the building phase, and then the doing phase, if you will. So when we define early on in the 30, 60, 90 onboarding what we’re really doing is making sure that that new hire has a clear understanding of the importance of their role, their responsibilities, and the importance of their role within the organization.

Then a lot of the integration and introductions and integration with the extended team members is key within that phase as well. And then the building phase is where we’re really starting to build the skill sets that they will take out into the field, whether it’s with new prospects, sales, pitches, presentations, meeting that prospects and customers at trade shows so on and so forth. And during that phase, it’s key we leverage what’s common is the buddy system for shadow and we call it our copilot system. We leverage other members within the organization with similar or same roles as the new hire, that have a level of experience that can help provide that shadowing experience for the new hire, right?

And this includes mock or even sometimes lower risk live production activities. Whether, it’s a sales pitch and a presentation during that phase and then the doing phase is really that the co-pilot switch seats right now, the new hires flying the plane, if you will. And the experienced team member is kind of guiding and coaching along the lines of when those things and those activities are being executed by the new hire. Again, having that copilot there to help take over or pick up in guide the new hire for areas where improvements are needed during or after the activity is taken place. You may have heard the same. And I’m a believer in this, I was told this years ago and early on in my career, hurry up and fail. And I scratched my head. I’m like, that sounds so negative. Right? Why am I hurrying to fail? But, you know, as I got to realize, it sounds like a negative plan in business. 

It’s definitely negative if you’re flying a plane. But, it typically tells the new hire to be productive and learn from mistakes and evolve your pitch, evolve your approach into your new role and your responsibilities, and find what fits, find your own approach you may have shadowed one or several team members with several similar roles in that co-pilot program, but you’re going to find your own way and take the best of breed and develop your own approach. But hurrying up and failing is really telling the new hires to learn quickly. Self study is as great as possible and jump in and be as productive as you can sooner in the process. and that’s going to lead to greater levels of success through the onboarding process. So, there’s a lot of detail behind the approach and the different phases and whatnot, but, I hope this gives the audience at least a generalized framework for successful onboarding tips as we use here at Ascent Cloud. 

Cassandra Tenorio: I love that. Another big topic that I think that gets talked about a lot when it comes to sales onboarding is really tailoring onboarding to different roles and experience levels. And so I’d love to hear about how you’re doing that. Aaron, let’s start with you. 

Aaron Evans: Yeah. So, I mean, I think obviously the thing to bear in mind here is the size of the organization and the amount of recruitment that you’re actually doing. I mean, if you’re doing cohort recruitment of 30, 40 roles, it becomes a lot easier to do that, but just to touch on some points that were spoken about before, and I think something that’s overlooked, is there’s a pre-boarding stage as well. I think people overlook that if you’ve got a learning management system or if you’ve got a whole load of collateral, you can actually start onboarding people before they even start in the role. There’s usually a one month notice period. They’re working at their organization. You can use that time as a way of giving them access to their LMS and start doing some of the training or some of the modules that you’ve got on there. 

On top of that, I think we need to remember what the point of onboarding is, right? You’re trying to successfully transition someone into the business to set them up to succeed. That’s fundamentally what onboarding is, but it’s also a really nice sort of what I call it, the honeymoon period of dating, where you can work out if you make the right choice, whether the employee has made the right choice in whether the candidates made the right choice as well. And to do that effectively, you’ve got to test people in that period. You’ve got to stretch them. I gotta take them out of their comfort zone. You’ve got to undo bad habits, but I’m doing it by the learnings that they’ve had in the past and in a whole new knowledge base for them. So that’s one thing I’d add on that point.

And in terms of doing it for different roles, I think this is about the robustness of the onboarding program that you have to be conscious of the fact of in a sales organization there might be ten, even 15, 20 different roles that you have, and to be able to modularize those in programmatic way of approaching onboarding, it’s going to help in the way that you do that. So let’s talk about some ways you can do it again. It’s about slicing and dicing your LMS and the data that you’ve got in there or some of the onboarding challenges or tasks that you’re sending people to do, making it around the roles itself. The central thread that can help you do that is a competency framework. If you’ve got a really beat up competency framework where you’ve broken down the competencies for each role, it’s just a case of matching the right courses in your curriculum or the right content in your LMS to those roles. Now, this is where a lot of people don’t know the difference of roles in organizations like can someone in your organization very clearly articulate the difference between an SDR and an AE?

What are the competencies that an SDR needs to do? What are the competencies that an agent needs to do? And then when you go through that or onboarding program, you should be matching the onboarding with the competencies that you require. There’s a couple of key foundational competencies that every single person entering fitness will make, which is knowledge of the market, knowledge of the competitors, knowledge of the products, and knowledge of your organization. We should all fit in into your onboarding, but when you start getting into those little nuances and idiosyncrasies within the role, that’s when your onboarding programs needs to start matching the competency against the training and the job role itself. And that we’re not wasting time on onboarding when you’re teaching someone the new role, you’re matching it against the competency that you’ve recruited for in the first place and that you’re sharpening in the onboarding, and then you challenge and test all the way. We’re really critical to test candidates. Well, really important to test people during that onboarding stage to make sure that you’ve made the right one. 

Cassandra Tenorio: Absolutely. I love that. How has onboarding in the virtual environment really changed the way that you execute onboarding at your organization? And has there been any change in the insights that you look at? Adelle, did you have any thoughts on this one?

Adelle Bonavire: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it goes back to what Aaron was saying too, about your LMS, the platform that you’re using. I think for us, it was using a platform that allows us to be interactive and engage with our new hires, especially being in this virtual world. So what we’ve done is we’ve built our onboarding plan to incorporate along with our LMS system. A lot of them recorded themselves from starting out with recorded video. Tell us a little bit about you where you are from? What are your hobbies? We can then share that with the rest of the sales board. So it makes them immediately feel like they’re part of the team, we’ve got a face, we can put the face to the name.

So that was really important. And then as they’re going through their onboarding programs, they’re very role specific, but along the way asking them to participate, like maybe it’s practice your elevator pitch. Like here we are, we’re teaching you what it looks like here. Now take two minutes, record it, share it with us being the onboarding team so that we can then ensure that one they’re doing it correctly. We can give positive feedback. So I really think for the virtual part, it really comes down to what tools you’re using. So, just send somebody a link to a bunch of PowerPoints and say, “Okay, good luck. We’ll check in in a week.” That’s to get them engaged. It’s not going to get them excited about the role. So I think it’s important that you look at what you have in your tech stack and you utilize as best you can ways to pull them into the fold. We were also doing a lot of weekly teams. So, on a Friday we would do a Friday just like we are now, whether it’s Zoom or whatever your platform is, let’s all get together. Let’s talk about what we want this week. What are the questions? Let’s have a conversation. 

So, I just think it’s really important that we use the technology we have. Yes, you have to be on camera, but we want to see your face. We want to know that you’re engaged, that you’re not multitasking. And I think that way, we can almost take advantage of the situation that we’re in this virtual world that we’re dealing with at the moment. So that would be my strong recommendation to look hard at your tech stack. If you don’t have a tool that can do it, now’s the time to go. You’re saving money on probably in-person flying people, doing onboarding new hire orientation. So if you have budgets to go purchase a tool that can really help, highly recommended. 

Cassandra Tenorio: Absolutely. Aaron, did you have any thoughts on this one? 

Aaron Evans: I think that Adelle made a fantastic point. And if anything, just to be brutally honest, onboarding during COVID-19 has been nothing short, but it’s, it’s horrible, right? I mean, imagine the poor people starting the job, you’ve not met anyone in your team. You’ve not had any face time with your manager. You’re basically being satellite managed during this time. It’s absolutely horrible. And if COVID has done anything, it shined a light on how important your enablement tech stack really is. Right? Like when you look at conversational tools like Gong or whatever, or you look at the LMS that you’re using, or you’re looking at the content management system you’re using. 

This is basically an eagerness to do some really intricate onboarding during this time through technology. The only good news about it is that everyone’s in the same position, I think, globally, from like four different geographies at the moment. And I can just look at everyone’s face and feel the unbelievable pain that we’ve all gone through for onboarding through COVID. But what’s been quite interesting about it, familiar, is that it’s become easier for people to reach out to other people as well. Like I think when you’re doing onboarding someone’s first time in a job, often they feel a bit uncomfortable about going sitting on someone’s desk or approaching them. Whereas now we use it as okay, just call this person, just Zoom this person, just speak to them because we’re all in the same boat. I think it’s made it a lot easier. But yeah, I mean, I’m just echoing Adelle’s point that technology is what’s going to win this. And if you haven’t invested in your enablement tech stack, go and do it now because I don’t think that’s going to change for a long, long time.

Cassandra Tenorio: Absolutely. 100% agree. Shifting gears a little bit. It kind of goes hand in hand. How do you really drive onboarding success with actionable insights? I think that technology is something that can definitely aid in gleaning those insights, but what are those key metrics and insights that you look at to really gauge sales onboarding success? Mike, I’d love to hear from you on this one. 

Michael Aloe: Yeah. You know, before I jump into that, I’m going to touch on the last point. So, I think, in the introductions or prior to the introductions, I was talking about how we had our first social distance gathering. It was more of a tailgate gathering with our team down here in downtown Detroit last night. And it was amazing to realize the number of people that we’ve onboarded since the pandemic remotely, and this way. They’ve been onboarded and even productive here for months, and this was the first time that any of them really had a chance to meet anybody in person other than through the technology that we’ve been leveraging.

And, it was a bit of an interesting, and even a wake up call about how far we’ve come to really adapt, you know, like everybody has across the globe. So the pandemic and leveraging technology to do certain things like onboarding where we’ve typically done, you know, a combination of in-person obviously and technology, but, it was interesting to hear their experiences, you know, the individuals, as Aaron put it, you know, imagine being the new hire and having to go through this and only meeting your new team members remotely. It was interesting to hear the experiences and how nervous they were to show up yesterday to this social distance event that we had that followed all the protocols. It was great. It was a great event and we have great feedback about the overall onboarding experience that they had. I think like everybody they’re ready to get back and be with their team in person when necessary, but back to your question, Cassandra. 

So gauging onboarding success and several categories for us. And again, I talked about employee satisfaction and productivity, and the importance of onboarding to drive improved retention rates and in tech sales, the turnover is quite high. You know, much of this turnover is common within the first three to six months, which typically means that the new hire is disenchanted early and with early experiences, and they’re in their new role, and they start to look for greener pastures early on, right. Three to six months time frame. Not that onboarding was the result of that, but onboarding, that’s a key metric that drives us to look and review onboarding amongst other things, but definitely the onboarding and evolve where necessary. But, retention in that first three to six, or the first six months is certainly very important.

One of the key metrics that we look at from an onboarding, engaging for our overall process. Another key metric is really time to productivity. How long does it take for the new hire to begin providing value to the organization. And Aaron said it earlier, too, right? So, you know, the onboarding starts before they actually arrive or show up on their first day working virtually or in person, if you will. Even the recruiting process itself is onboarding these recruits before they are even offered or accept a role. But the time to productivity is always going to be a key measurement, especially on the sales side. Whether it’s daily activity and it’s not so much the results. It’s especially early on, it’s how quickly are we getting them involved in the daily activity?

Again, whether it is from a sales side, whether it’s an SDR or even account executive, number of engagements and calls and demonstrations or live connections if you will. Are we making it earlier on and are we meeting minimal criteria early on in certain timeframes that are required to make sure that we’ve got the success of our onboarding program? We measure these levels of new hires, leveraging the technology and scorecards within level 11, in that our pacing, we have the ability to have metric pacing. Again, to Adelle’s point, making sure we have something in our tech stack to not only define and identify the metrics, but also, on a continuous basis to identify the pacing towards the metric.

And are we meeting those levels or not? And then, another one that’s a little bit more difficult to measure, but I’ve always got especially now that I’ve got a number of years experience in management onboarding sales staff. I call it the ambassadorship program, right? How a successful onboarding program will lead to greater levels of employee satisfaction. I’ve said that several times now, but are these new hires willing to recruit? You know, their friends and former colleagues. And, basically say that I’ve landed in a great spot with this new company and you should take a look, because I think you could be a great fit here or even open up their book of contacts from their network from previous customers that say I’ve got another solution that I could provide you. 

Are they believers in the company that they just joined early on? It’s a metric that’s difficult to manage or measure if you will. But it comes out in a number of employees at certain levels that you hire new hires, you know, based on their satisfaction level. And it’s pretty intriguing when you see new hires excited about bringing others and recruiting others to the business, whether that’s a customer or a former colleague. Then lastly, are they showing early signs of corporate citizenship? Do they take on added responsibility? Do they seek out added responsibility above and beyond their current roles that they’re in providing that extra effort in their new roles? Again, I think it was said earlier about the number of different responsibilities that every individual has, especially on the sales side. Are we willing to think about the company first and go above and beyond. So you know where they’re at? I’m sure there are other metrics for measuring onboarding success. These are a few things that are near and dear to my heart, that we keep very visible within our scorecarding programs.

Cassandra Tenorio: Oh, Aaron, did you have anything to add?

Aaron Evans: It does add something to that, right. And I think first of all, I love that ambassadorship thing. I think that’s really cool. If you can measure how many referrals you get from people. I think that’s really, really cool. And, and often a great sign that you’re doing a good onboarding job. The thing that I’d say is I’d force leadership to look at successful onboarding in a different way. Like I’ve worked at organizations where first deals are critical, and I just think it creates a boom and bust culture where getting your first deal becomes the be all end all. One thing I’ve always encouraged organizations and managements to do is actually like really healthy pipeline building in those first three to six months, then you’re creating a culture of them actually being successful and sustainably successful for the next six, nine, 12 months.

Whereas what you see when often reps do it to themselves, they put so much pressure on that first deal that they end up burning at a later point. Like living hand to mouth for the next six months. It’s like not a good indicator to look for one thing I’m always forcing management to do is look at the quality of the pipeline that they’re building the hygiene of the pipeline as well, to make sure that they’re progressing pipeline and it’s moving for a good pace with the right, you know, tasks associated with the pipeline. And then customer outcomes as well, but it might be the right customer outcomes, and say, “Look, this is great. We love it. We accept the proposal. It’s just not ready. We can’t buy it now, but we realize that we can buy it in three months time,” but that could comfortably be a deal. And it’s a customer outcome where they’re saying we want to buy it, but just not now. 

So yeah. I’d say don’t look at revenue as the number one thing for successful onboarding. I think there’s far more interesting and ultimately more sustainable metrics that will show you’ve done a better job. And, in my opinion, sales is all about pipeline. If you’ve got good quality pipeline hygiene, you’ll be good at your job for the rest of your life. If it’s just about getting the deal in then yeah, that’s not that short term, is it? And that never works. 

Michael Aloe: Yeah, no, I would agree with you and go back to my earlier point where I said you don’t want to measure results in the onboarding and that the early stages of the new hires, tenure within your organization, but you want it, you do at certain points. Why don’t you measure levels of activity to your point, again, their level of calls and live connections and building new opportunities in that pipeline and then pacing those metrics as well. The results will come if the onboarding is successful and the employee is engaged. So great. 

Aaron Evans: I think one thing that onboarding can do is really crisply articulate expectations. I think that’s one thing that the onboarding has to be responsible for. Sometimes people leave an onboarding program and they’re not quite sure of what the expectation is with KPIs, what the expectation is with output or proposal center and I think onboarding should make that really, really clear of what the expectation is.

Adelle Bonavire: Yeah, it’s funny. Aaron, I was going to say that to you from when I think about ways we’ve done onboarding programs in the past, there’s always been some point of certification, right? And it’s not a task. It’s not a POS fail. You get fired if you fail. But it is a point where, okay, you’ve been an onboarding program for 30 days now. Let’s drive towards a certification where you’re very clear from the beginning these are the key things we want to make sure you can do after 30 days, if you can’t do them, then let’s go back and revisit. Where is it that you’re still stuck, where is it that you’re still having challenges? So I think it’s really important to set the expectation with the new hire that you are going through onboarding with an end in sight of we are going to do some form of certification at the end.

I think that can be driven either as a 30, 60, 90, or the whole 30, 60, 90, and then you go through it or in our case, sometimes it was going through onboarding that led to a bootcamp. And the bootcamp was a six week program. At the end of the bootcamp, you’d go through certification. We want to make sure these sellers, these BDRs, whatever the role is, are able to do the things that we’ve been trying to teach them through this process. So I think it’s really important to set up that expectation and have something to measure against. And you can see right when you put up a new onboarding program in place, then you’ve got new highs going through it and suddenly they’re all passing their certifications. Whereas the people before didn’t right there, you can see, this has been a very positive impact on the business.I think that’s really important as well.

Aaron Evans:  You can kill bad hires as well. Right. And that’s what you just said. They’re either gonna make it, or you’re not out in the first 30 days when they’re never going to be successful. Let’s kill them, set them free in the first six, three months. Sorry. Cause it’s not gonna work.

Adelle Bonavire: I totally agree. 

Michael Aloe: Yep.

Cassandra Tenorio: Keeping along with this theme of insights and gleaning insights. What are some of the key metrics that you bring to your leadership teams? And how do you really present that data? Adelle, did you have any thoughts on this one?

Adelle Bonavire: Yeah. So, what I try to do with my leadership teams is have an expectation upfront here are the key metrics that we want to achieve through going through onboarding. And a lot of it comes back to, like I said, the tech stack that we have the technology that we’re using to be able to do that. And when I look at the number of new hires that have come in, how many of them got the certification and passed it. We also do a rubric so that we’re able to see what is the average score for each piece of the rubric. And so again, we can show improvement. We have an expectation of where we think people are going to fall.

So we definitely want to bring that to the executives and let them see that what we’re doing is working. And then on the flip side, also getting feedback from the managers of the new hires. And I think that’s really important to make sure that they’re buying into what it is that we’re trying to get their new hires to accomplish and achieve, and then finding out how are they doing? How are they doing in their one-on-ones? How are they doing in the team? And bringing again to Aaron, to your point, are they starting to build pipeline? Are they starting to get on calls? Are they starting to be able to do that by themselves? All of that data? We bring that up to the executive level and that is what they want to see. They don’t necessarily want to know day-by-day when I’m asking them to do, but in acting to see that, yes, this is working, that they are hitting the milestones that we expect them to be, their managers are giving positive feedback. So I think that those are really important things for the executive team to have visibility into.

Cassandra Tenorio: I love that. And really understanding what are the other things that I really wanted to talk about is the impact of accelerated onboarding on the organization. So, what has that impact of efficient sales onboarding been on your organization? Mike, I’d love to hear from you on this one.

Michael Aloe: Sure. Yeah. Well, with that, you know, an optimized sales onboarding program, like most companies we’ve recognized increase in sales readiness, reduce ramp time, you know, which translates into what we’ve been discussing. Greater levels of activity that leads to production and building new pipelines and down the road, right. Maybe not during the 30, 60, 90 day program, but not the key focus during the onboarding program, but increased customer win rates and higher quota achievement down the road. You know, the onboarding we’ll set the groundwork for that. 

We’ve also discussed the levels of satisfaction, right? The employee satisfaction and what that really means for the levels of productivity in the future success of that new hire down the road. The other side of it too is, we talked about how quickly do we identify this as the right candidate for the RA role and continue to advance this candidate or how quickly do we prune? Because we realized that they’re really not the right fit. Maybe we did not re recruit the right individual, which again, can provide us some significant insights. But during that time too, sometimes we find that while this individual is not only the right fit here, but is even the right fit for another level or another role or another position that might be available. So again, if you’ve got a successful onboarding or an optimized onboarding program, there’s a number of things that this can lead to. Again, not just productivity in the current role, but future roles and other components of the business that can be important. 

And lastly, you know, I’ll mention too that, the new hire with an onboarding process, if that new hire is fully integrated in the team and the onboarding process drives the integration of the new hire into the team and improves the company culture or continuity and carries forward that continuity and they’re gelling well with the team and carrying the corporate corporate flag. Again, going back to the ambassadorship program or metric that we were talking about earlier can be key with positive onboarding processes, new hires, you know, they can and will improve the culture and the team continuity. At the same time, the opposite can happen. And a bad onboarding or a less efficient onboarding program can be pretty toxic for the organization and at certain levels too, because it leads to less productivity and less employee satisfaction. 

Cassandra Tenorio: Aaron, did you have anything to add on this one?

Aaron Evans: Yeah, I think one thing that’s massively overlooked in an onboarding program is how it is very quickly and efficiently. It brings together all of the key constituents of an organization. So when you’re going through onboarding, you should have a little tasting menu of every single department in the organization, domain experts coming in and coming out to talk about their area of the business. And I think that it’s a really good litmus test for the communication of a business. If people aren’t turning up to the onboarding in your business. If you’re not getting the domain experts standing up for me, that’s a massive red flag, but you think about it, even for sales enablement, working really is placed. You have HR working really, really closely with products, working really closely with marketing. All of these components need to come together to do a very successful onboarding. And I think that that in itself is really powerful for an organization to really test the matter of the communication within the business, but more importantly, create cross-functional collaboration.

I think that’s really powerful. Remember, like someone’s onboarding it’s a little taster of the culture. If you can get the right people in the business, basically presenting the right information. Then you can really, really fast track that candidate to being really good at their job. But also to the point before, is that straight away you’re as an organization is that you’ve got potential leaders. Perhaps you’ve got people who are gonna come out and they come after their gates quickly and start ramping and hitting their targets. And all of this is because of the simple fact that you’ve brought these components together and execute over 30, 60 to 90 day period.

There’s so many benefits of having an onboarding program. And in many ways, I think where organizations go wrong is they try and rush it. Like don’t be afraid to slow it down, commit over 30 days, do over a bit longer. If it means you’re going to get what you need, which is setting the candidate up to be successful in the role. A bit of a moderate answer. But hopefully that answers the question for you. 

Adelle Bonavire: Yeah. And Aaron, I think to piggyback on that too, a lot of the sellers are going to have to interact with other areas of the business, whether it’s pre-sales, post-sales, their BDR, the technical people. So I think again, to your point, if you’re running an onboarding program, which we always do, right, you want to bring in those people because I want the seller to understand, at what point should I engage with pre-sales and who are those pre-sales people. When do I engage with my implementation team and who are those people? And when do I then have to worry about post-sales and customers and who are those people? 

And again, to the, I’m a station where we’re all remote and we’re all virtual, it’s even more important through the onboarding program. Your hires need to be able to put a face and name and a title. When I get to this part of the sales cycle, I need to go find that team and I need to reach out to them and then not get to feel awkward or shy because you’ve already met them. You’ve already had a conversation. 

Cassandra Tenorio: I think that’s a really good point, Aaron. It is so important to engage all areas of the business in it. Well, thank you so much for this discussion today. We do look to end all of our panels, and I know there’s a couple of you that know this, but with one quick takeaway for our audience. So if you have one takeaway that you want to leave everyone with today, what would that be? And so Adelle, why don’t you kick us off?

Adelle Bonavire: I think my big takeaway right now is to really focus on the environment that we’re in. Aaron said it earlier. I don’t think it’s changing any time soon. I think this is our new world for right now. And to really take advantage of making our onboarding programs even more empowering with the world that we’re in and just using the technology that we have to keep people really bonded. I think that’s just going to be critical going forward.

Aaron Evans: Well, my answer is really simple. Everyone has had a share of onboarding experience as all of us have. So if you’re thinking about the worst onboarding experience you’ve ever had in a job that should make you think about how your onboarding should be, just imagine when you were sitting there for two hours in reception and no one came down to collect you, or you didn’t go to lunch with anyone in your first week or no one showed you where the toilets were.

Simple, things like that. Just think about your worst onboarding experience and just think I never want one of our potential where what about all candidates that go through that? And I think that’s a really good barometer when you’re looking at it. Just think it’s really simple things, set people up for success, test them along the way, make sure that you’re bringing the right people into the business. And if you’re not, just kill it really quickly. 

Michael Aloe: Yeah. Well said I would add to all of that with be proactive with your new hires. Start your plan early. And it was said earlier, don’t wait until the new hire is on board before you start their onboarding program. It absolutely starts during the recruiting process and prior to their start date, and really engaging, make sure that they’re engaged with the team, and remain engaged in this environment. It’s more difficult, but there’s certainly technology and ways for us to make sure that our new hires are engaged with the extended team members and that’s going to lead to great levels of satisfaction, higher levels of productivity. 

Cassandra Tenorio: Thank you all so much for sharing your insights today. We’ll now open it up to Q and A with our audience. So if you have any questions, you can feel free to type those into the questions section and we’re going to get a couple of those answered for you today.

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