Episode Summary
Onboarding is the process of integrating new hires into the organization, and it helps them adjust to the social and performance aspects of their jobs so they can quickly become productive, contributing members of the organization.
But not all companies have onboarding programs that prepare a new hire for success. As a result, many new employees are not ready for work and do not do well.
In this episode of Taking the Lead, our host Christina Brady welcomes Carly Lehner, the senior director of RevOps & Enablement at Andela. The two get into the importance of the connection between sales enablement and RevOps and the importance of good onboarding programs. Carly and Christina also discuss RevOps, Andela, and Andela’s onboarding programs and the departments involved in them.
Guest Profile
- Name: Carly Lehner
- What she does: Carly is a senior director of RevOps and Enablement at Andela.
- Company: Andela
- Noteworthy: Carly provides sales organizations with meaningful development experiences without disrupting their primary goal of increasing revenue. Carly attended Oregon State University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Marketing. In 2014, she began a Master's Certificate Program in Human Resources at Cornell University and finished it in five months. Carly has been voted One to Watch 2022 Sales Enablement.
Key Insights
- RevOps is a part of every process that involves revenue or money. RevOps and Revenue Enablement are new fields in sales that have evolved from certain existing roles over the past few years. At Andela, Carly is in charge of these two areas and explains the shift from sales to revenue. "Money touches all parts of the business. When a customer pays you money, sales is not the only one involved. And so, I see Revenue Enablement and Operations being involved in every part of the process where revenue or money is flowing through the business. So that starts with trying to get money to come to the business and trying to get clients — and that's top of funnel, very traditional sales. But then there's account management, 'How do we keep that money in our business?' And then there's the process of, 'How do we bill clients? How do we receive money from them?' And our Revenue Operations team works closely with other teams, but Salesforce is the way we do all of that."
- You can learn a lot from the team you lead. Carly was initially head of Revenue at Andela and later became the head of RevOps & Enablement. Speaking about her new role, she points out that she has been trying to learn as much as possible about RevOps, which her team has greatly helped with. "What I've definitely been trying to do is go outside a bit and network with people in trying to understand what RevOps is all about. I'm also not afraid to be vulnerable with my team — the RevOps team that's in place, who are experts in RevOps — and be like, 'Help me learn the business. Help me learn what you guys think about.' Because I come more from a manager/leader perspective, and I know where the business is going; I can work with them to make sure that we can execute, but they can also teach me things."
- RevOps and Enablement should be aligned. Enablement and RevOps were separate departments at Andela and later merged into one entity. Carly points out that this "unification" was a great idea and that the joint work of these two departments brought a lot to the company. "We've actually aligned Enablement managers and RevOps managers. So I have someone who's in charge of top of the funnel for Enablement, and then we have someone who's top of the funnel for RevOps, and they partner on everything. […] If RevOps is gonna change something in a system, Enablement needs to know about it. If Enablement is sensing frustrations in the field, RevOps probably needs to know about it. So having these partnerships has made a world of difference."
Episode Highlights
The Job of Senior Director of RevOps & Enablement at Andela
“I absolutely love waking up and coming to work every day and helping someone who is based in Lagos, Nigeria, or in Brazil, or someone who’s based in Poland find a job with a big tech company — they wouldn’t have had access to it if it wasn’t for Andela. And so, to me, it’s just such a cool place to work because I really do think we’re doing good in the world, which is just like such a cool thing. […]
It’ll be a year in October since I started leading both RevOps and Enablement. I have an enablement background, so I’m super comfortable in that area. I started off in sales and immediately said to myself, ‘I just don’t think I wanna sell, but I love the arena of sales.’ So I still wanted to be involved somehow, and so Enablement turned out to be a really great spot for that. And now I’m learning RevOps.”
Gaps in Learning Sales
“A lot of times, companies will have these boot camps. And a lot of amazing companies have really successful boot camps. But the challenge that I see with a boot camp approach —, and I see this even with how we do onboarding — is you’re in a learning environment for two weeks; you learn a bunch of stuff, and then we ask you to go do it, and you don’t retain information that well. So even if you are super focused, taking really thorough notes, you are going to forget some of the information you learn in a boot camp. And so when it’s time to go sell, or it’s time to start your new opportunity in Salesforce, you are going to forget. And so, it’s almost like you’re learning in a vacuum, and we need to figure out a way to truly learn on the job. But that’s really hard to do; that’s really hard to replicate.”
Andela’s Onboarding Programs
“We have to recognize that people learn in different ways. There are different learning styles. Some people like to read things. Some people like to listen to things. Some people like to talk it out. And so, we’re trying to bring a blend of all of those things to our onboarding programs. Our programs are two weeks long, but they’re hybrid. So that we’ll have live sessions with a facilitator — and that allows people to ask questions and that sort of thing — but we also pair that with self-guided learning. So, we use Showpad as our enablement platform.
I like to use the flipped classroom model from Salman Khan. He started Khan Academy, which is the coolest thing ever. The idea is that you learn something first, and then you go to the classroom to discuss and do your homework in class, with the guidance of a teacher. And so, that’s the approach we’ve taken.”
Who Works With Enablement on Onboarding?
“The two that come to mind are the People or the HR team and your IT team. Because we obviously have to know that a new hire is starting, so there’s the whole notification process — usually, it’s from the People team, but from recruiting, ‘Hey, this offer is going out. Here’s when they’re starting, here’s their manager, what team they’re on, and where they are located physically.’ Just getting that whole notification process figured out took a lot of work because Enablement has to know if someone’s starting. We have to start planning, and we have so many tools that we use that we need to start assigning their licenses so that when they come to onboarding, we don’t have access issues. We don’t spend the first 15 minutes of a 30-minute meeting on how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for them to be like, ‘Oh, I don’t have access to this.’ ‘Let me get you access.’ So you have to work with IT to be like, ‘Hey, can you set up their Andela email address a week before they start?'”