Few internal processes are more important than new employee onboarding. This is true of every kind of new employee onboarding, but it’s perhaps especially true of sales onboarding, where a seamless and efficient onboarding experience translates into an immediate competitive advantage. The faster you get your account executives up to speed, after all, the faster they can start closing deals.
Of course, getting new AEs up to speed seamlessly and efficiently is harder than it sounds. For the AE being onboarded, the process requires synthesizing lots of different kinds of information spread out across many different systems. It also means completing lots of different steps involving many different apps, accounts, logins, and teams. (According to Sapling, the average new hire onboarding experience consists of at least 54 different activities.)
But sales onboarding might be even harder to manage for the people in charge of the process. The siloed nature of the apps and systems organizations use make tracking an employee’s progress across the onboarding journey difficult. (It’s not always possible, in most HR systems, to gain real insight into where in the onboarding journey a new hire is at any given time.) The bespoke priorities and preferences of the various teams with which new hires must interface to complete their onboarding, meanwhile—legal, finance, and HR all operate in a different way and with different process management tools than sales, for example—means that shepherding a new hire through the onboarding journey can often require lots of manual work.
In a breakout session at the annual OpsStars conference in San Francisco this fall, we spoke with a wide range of HR and RevOps professionals about how to go about sales onboarding better. To this end we got both tactical and technical. First, participants outlined—using sticky notes and poster paper—how they go about sales onboarding in their sales orgs today. For most, the process was almost totally manual and very difficult to track.
We helped them change that. Specifically, using Tonkean, we walked participants through how to turn their manual, difficult-to-track onboarding processes into a strategically optimized process wherein much of the manual work is automated and the task of tracking and orchestrating action items across systems and apps is entirely centralized. Then we detailed how they could do all this on their own (as in, without being dependent on IT) and without having to write any code.
Here’s what that looks like.
One thing that makes managing and executing not just the onboarding process but many different kinds of mission-critical processes within RevOps challenging is that the processes’ component parts are spread out across so many tools and systems.
With Tonkean, you can centralize and manage all these disparate parts in one portal view. For our purposes here, that’s the RevOps hub.
As you can see, this hub lends you a highly actionable portal view from which you can track all the different metrics associated with your various workflows and, beyond that, coordinate work and kickoff workflows across people and teams. One example of a workflow you can start is a new sales onboarding request.
So let’s say you go ahead and kickoff a new Sales Onboarding Request in the RevOps hub. You’ll be prompted to fill out a form.
Upon filling out the form, the process will be set in motion. First step: the hiring manager is automatically notified of the new request inside whatever app they like to use—in this case, Slack.
The notification will prompt the hiring manager to navigate to their fully centralized, highly actionable portal view, where they can track the new employee’s onboarding journey, kickoff associated automated workflows, and assign entirely new onboarding-related tasks as they see fit.
This is the hiring manager’s onboarding command center that they’ll utilize throughout the new hire’s onboarding journey. Tasks they’d normally need to manually complete—or manually pester the new hire to complete—across tools can now be completed or initiated in one easy-to-manage place. For example, here you can ensure the new hire is assigned an onboarding buddy.
This sort of centralized view is a gamechanger for anybody managing any kind of intensely cross-functional, cross-system process, such as sales onboarding.
One reason is it eliminates the need to go fishing system-to-system just to get an accurate view of the state of the process.
Whereas in typical tech environments, process managers would need to navigate to Salesforce, and then to Greenhouse, and then perhaps to Asana (and on and on) to get a complete view of what the new hire was doing and how far along in the onboarding process they were, Tonkean brings that all into this one view. Because Tonkean threads all your various systems together on the backend through APIs, it can automatically pull and surface up-to-date information about your new hire from across these auxiliary platforms, such as Greenhouse. It also displays information related to whatever accounts you’ve provisioned for them inside Salesforce.
Now let’s imagine it’s the new hire’s first day.
There will likely be a series of activities you’ve set up for the new hire to complete.
Tonkean will coordinate with the new hire to help them complete whatever activities you’ve scheduled for them inside Tonkean itself. For example, you can ask the new hire to write a message introducing themselves.
Here’s the cool part, once the new hire completes that task…
… Tonkean will flag the activity as “complete,” and will automatically update the hiring manager in whatever system they like to use. Here, again, the notification is being sent via Slack.
Now, if the new hire employee needs to take an action or complete a training in some other kind of learning management system, that’s fine. Thanks to the way Tonkean integrates with just about every system or tool your team might use, it can not only facilitate communication between employees and send updates across platforms, but monitor and report back on the status of those happenings in those auxiliary systems via the centralized portal view. All the while, it’ll maintain an audit trail of every step taken along the new hire’s onboarding journey.
Important to note here is that Tonkean is 100% no-code. Meaning, it’s easily configurable even by HR and RevOps professionals who aren’t trained programmers. If at any point before, during, or after a new hire’s onboarding journey you want to augment the experience you’re providing them, or configure new ways to analyze the data related to their onboarding experience, you can do that, because you own the workflow. All you need to know is how to drag-and-drop.
The reasoning behind this is simple. At Tonkean, we believe every automated process—sales onboarding very much included—requires the oversight and participation of humans in order to run smoothly and with the requisite level of customization. And it must be customizable by the people who are on the ground, running the process. To iterate upon and increase the effectiveness of this process over time, those people can’t be waiting on IT teams to do the customizing for them. That’s why Tonkean’s intelligent intake automation and orchestration tool is 100% no-code.
We hope all this was helpful. If you want to watch the demo we referenced in this post in full, click here. And if you want to learn more about what Tonkean can do for your RevOps or HROps team, check out our new employee onboarding blueprint.
