Andela Reduces Ramp Time and Accelerates Sales Cycles with Showpad

Like any high-growth company, Andela was scaling rapidly and soon outgrew many of its legacy processes, including its sales onboarding program. 

Andela’s previous onboarding program was a list of 1:1 live meetings housed in a spreadsheet. New hires would go through the list of meetings one at a time, booking calls with their manager, peers and other individuals across the business. 

“It was very time-intensive for the hiring manager,” says Carly Lehner, Senior Director of RevOps & Enablement at Andela, “And when you rely solely on live, 1:1 meetings, you lose a lot of consistency. Employees can be trained on the same topic in completely different ways and key points can be left out.”  

As Andela continued to grow and hire more talent, they knew they needed a scalable, self-directed and engaging onboarding program to get new hires up to speed faster. After exploring several sales enablement platforms, Andela chose Showpad for its all-in-one content and coaching solutions, ease of use, proven history of time to ROI and best-in-class customer success philosophy.

Andela uses Showpad Coach to enable a scalable, high-impact onboarding program that sets new sellers up for success faster than ever.

The new onboarding program combines self-guided learning courses, practice pitches and live group training sessions. These self-guided courses are organized into learning paths by role. Now, when new hires start, they’re simply added to their learning path in Showpad Coach and start ramping up straight away.

To keep new hire cohorts’ live sessions consistent, Andela’s enablement team also created facilitator guides and slide decks they house in their Showpad instance. So every seller gets the same information, tools and resources they need to do their jobs effectively.

“Leveraging Showpad has been very beneficial. Everything’s in one place, the onboarding is consistent and it’s easy to change things if we need to.” 

-Carly Lehner, Senior Director of RevOps & Enablement at Andela

With the new onboarding program in place, Andela has reduced their SDRs’ time to first booked meetings by over 50%. And it’s only getting better as they continue to iterate and improve on their onboarding processes.

“We’ve seen a meaningful reduction in seller and SDR ramp time and Showpad is a big part of that,” says Carly. “As soon as they’re flying the nest after 10-15 days of onboarding, they’re booking their first meetings. This shows us that the onboarding program is effective and doing its job.”

To further support their sellers, Andela’s enablement team built a comprehensive sales playbook in Showpad, divided into the different sales cycle stages. Each stage has a dedicated Page housing information on the activities to be done, preparation required, relevant content to share with buyers and other supporting resources for the seller.

While building the playbook, Andela’s enablement team used Showpad’s engagement analytics to understand which content assets resonated at different points in the sales cycle and which assets contributed to won opportunities. They then leveraged these insights to decide what content to feature at each stage of the sales playbook.

“I look at the insights all the time. I’m always interested in seeing the top content and how it’s connected to revenue.”

– Carly Lehner, Senior Director of RevOps & Enablement at Andela

Thanks to Andela’s new sales playbook, along with Showpad’s seamless Salesforce integration, their sellers now have one central location for everything they need. That includes engaging buyers, automatically logging buyer interactions and learning what next steps will advance the sales cycle. This coordinated approach lets Andela’s new and seasoned sellers improve their sales effectiveness and significantly accelerate sales cycles.

Andela now plans to expand their use of Showpad from the client side of their business to the talent side. “Showpad has such a positive reputation internally of having everything that people need that other teams now want access to it,” says Carly.