We all know the power of a Pardot drip campaign to personalize B2B Customer Experiences, but have you thought about using Pardot to customize the new hire onboarding experience for your Internal Customers? Join Kate Lessard (Sales Operations Senior Manager) and Heidi Hodges (Senior Marketing & Communications Manager) from Woodruff Sawyer to explore the use case of an internal drip campaign to:
- Create a personalized and professional New Hire experience
- Centralize training collateral
- Place scheduling power with the users (while they juggle other training & onboarding expectations)
- Gather and act on feedback
How Woodruff Sawyer Uses Pardot for Employee Onboarding
We are going to share a use case with you today from Woodruff Sawyer, and how we were able to leverage Pardot to provide an exceptional new hire onboarding experience. First things first, we’re gonna take a moment to introduce ourselves.
My name is Kate Lessard, and I am the Senior Manager of sales operations at Woodruff Sawyer. My team really heavily supports our sales team at our organization. And so we’re always looking for new ways to drive efficiency, and build a self-sufficient user base through automation. We’re also really passionate about building a great user experience. So we’re constantly looking for ways to provide a top-notch user interface and make life easier for our sales team.
Heidi Hodges is our senior Marketing and Communications Manager at Woodruff Sawyer. She has been with the company for about 15 years, and in that time, she’s launched a variety of marketing initiatives, including events, blogs, marketing, automation, and social media. She leads our firm’s email marketing, social media, digital demand generation activities, and of course, all things Pardot. She is a certified Pardot specialist. And she is our in house B2B marketing expert.
How things began
When I started at Woodruff Sawyer, which was about two and a half years ago, we were still in the process of ramping up our Salesforce usage. And so we had a bit more time than we do today to provide individual training to our new users. We offered a lot of hand holding, and we’re able to bring a dedicated training specialist onto our team, which has been a fantastic addition.
Kelly, our training specialist, would host a series of three training sessions for each new user with one dedicated Salesforce training. Another would be to help them represent themselves and Woodruff Sawyer on LinkedIn. And then she would offer a third training that would cover any of our other sales ops products that we use, which are typically products that integrate with Salesforce. So a lot of it goes hand in hand together.
The problem with the former onboarding process
What we found was that this was a lot of information. It was taking a lot of time for her to onboard new employees. And not only that, but she was also helping out our existing employees to ramp up our Salesforce usage.
So there was a lot of hand holding for the employees that already were at Woodruff Sawyer as we started to make changes to make the user interface better and make Salesforce an easier experience for everyone. Our training specialist Kelly created a huge library of content over the past couple of years. She’s created content not only for those new users, but also for the existing users to make sure everyone has access to training, and is up to date on the most frequent tasks that they accomplish in our CRM.
Despite all the training she was doing, we found that users were not onboarding as quickly as we needed them to. We also were getting feedback from our users that they felt really overwhelmed. They felt that they were getting too much information in a really short amount of time. And they weren’t retaining it because they were trying to cram everything in and remember it and it was just not working for them.
So this resulted in a lot of requests for one-on-one time with our training specialist. And it also – resulted in additional cases being submitted to our Salesforce admin, requesting help and resources and additional Salesforce requests.
We are a really small team, and as we entered a major growth cycle for the company, we found that we were struggling to keep up with this demand. And I will also say that 2020 having our entire workforce go to a remote work environment, and it exacerbated the issue even farther, and we found ourselves stretched really thin. So it was time to get creative.
Transitioning to bite-sized trainings
Kelly and I organized a plan to operationalize our onboarding. And we crafted bite-sized trainings to follow up on an additional onboarding meeting. This is the initial training session. We wanted to keep that dedicated in person this year with virtual training support because it’s essential to our culture and how we collaborate and communicate with each other.
But now the user understands that it isn’t their whole training. It is the foundation in what they’re going to receive, and it’s the first step in their onboarding experience.
So these bite-size trainings that we’ve built out into our email campaign building complexity, and each week, they add on to what was learned in the week prior. So Heidi will walk through the ins and outs of what this looks like in a little bit. But essentially, once a new user gets started, and is created as a Salesforce user, they enter the campaign and then that’s when the Pardot magic begins.
Using Pardot to organize bite-sized onboarding trainings
New employees are onboarded through an email campaign that lives in Pardot. This email campaign also gives us the opportunity to centralize our training materials and bring an easy to access training library right into our users inboxes. And other benefits include, placing the scheduling power in the hands of our users. They can just click a link, select a time that works for them and then they move on an email campaign.
We added quick surveys to the emails, and now they have the quicker and much easier way to gather feedback and implement any changes. And then above all, we’re able to provide a personal and professional onboarding experience, which affirms my team’s passion for providing an exceptional user experience.
We’re now able to take what we do for them on the platform and translate that into how we onboard them. So it’s a seamless experience of what it’s going to look like working with their sales ops team moving forward.
Creating accessible content
I mentioned the benefit of having an easy to access training library right into users’ inboxes. And I wanted to give you a quick glimpse of what that really means before we dive into the email campaign.
We wanted to be really mindful of the fact that people learn in different ways, and they also retain knowledge in different ways. So our emails often contain a variety of different ways to digest the information.
You’ll see on here we have a screenshot from a short video and that is Kelly, our awesome training specialist in the corner. And this is probably the most popular thing that we do. The videos are always under three minutes. They’re short, they’re easy to digest, and, it’s been a really great way to add those into our email campaign.
We also offer step-by-step tutorials in Salesforce where they can literally log in, follow along and by the end of the steps, they’ve accomplished what they set out to do. And then we do offer the opportunity, of course, to actually read about any changes or anything’s going on. But I’d say that’s probably the least popular training option that we offer.
We always offer an opportunity to book one-on-one time with Kelly or join her for office hours if our users really are craving that personal attention. But we’ve been really pleasantly surprised to find that the majority of our users really do want to be self-sufficient. And they want to figure this out on their own and use the materials that we’re providing them.
Results of new onboarding process
So I know by now you are dying to see what this actually looks like. So in a moment, I’ll turn it over to Heidi, to actually dive into the campaign and talk about the different training paths that we offer. But I wanted to take a moment to highlight the time savings that this has brought my team and specifically our training specialist.
Prior to launching this email campaign, Kelly was spending an average of 5.75 hours training a new hire. That might not seem like much, but this equates to about 20% of her workload each month. And so, not only has this provided a great experience for our internal customers, but it is a major driver of efficiency for our sales ops team. It’s freed up a considerable amount of bandwidth.
Check out the video recording to see how it all works.
