A one-person enablement team at a fast-growing startup needs an onboarding solution with minimal lift and high impact
Trafford Judd grew his enablement career at large, post-IPO organizations like LinkedIn, Slack and Asana. So it was naturally a bit of a change when he joined Intenseye, a small but growing leader in AI-powered workplace safety solutions. When he was hired, the company had recently secured Series-B funding and needed someone to support and optimize their 30-person GTM team as they prepared to scale. Trafford was tasked with building enablement for Intenseye’s revenue roles from the ground up.
As Intenseye prepared to rapidly scale, Trafford was cautious about finding ways to ensure manual work didn’t distract from making impact on strategic priorities. Whenever Intenseye hired someone new, he had to fully support the hire as soon as they started the onboarding process, on top of reviewing sales data and working on new initiatives. Plus, onboarding at Intenseye initially required a lot of manual processes. New hires would set up multiple meetings by themselves during their first week, sometimes across different time zones, with minimal guidance. Both Trafford and the hiring managers had little visibility over a new hire’s progress, and he could see the inconsistency would create more challenges as they grew.
“It doesn't take much for onboarding to become a huge time suck for enablement professionals,” says Trafford. “It almost doesn't really matter the volume which you're hiring. Onboarding one person is probably 60% the same amount of work as onboarding ten of them. I could see a world where if we accelerated our pace of hiring it could potentially overwhelm the work that I was doing. We were thinking there has to be a better way.”
The Solution
Trafford was already familiar with Tangelo before starting at Intenseye, so he was confident that he could quickly implement it and begin driving impact.
“I saw the work that Tangelo had done and was very impressed. In fact, a couple people at Intenseye had already used it at previous companies and had great things to say. It felt like a no-brainer solution to bring it to the company.”
Tangelo’s automatic calendaring was a huge attraction for Trafford, especially operating as an army of one. Meetings could be automatically scheduled without any manual work. Plus, the flexibility of task and content types issued to new hires made the onboarding process less tedious and more interactive.
Most importantly, Tangelo could make onboarding feel like a tailor-made experience for new employees. Tangelo allowed Intenseye to provide their growing team an easy, organized introduction that made them feel supported without increasing Trafford’s workload.
“There are a lot of products that try to do all things for all people. By contrast, Tangelo focuses on a couple of key pain points that don’t get solved with other tools. It feels like a bespoke experience to everyone that joins simply by the way we've structured the program.”
Crucially, Tangelo doesn’t take too much time or extraneous knowhow for Trafford to maintain. He can easily make minor improvements to the program that often lead to major outcomes.
“The fact that I can manage Tangelo myself with no technical skills or anything else is a big deal. I feel that it's almost like gardening. I just do a little tweak every week and the program just gets better and better over time.”
Trafford Judd
Head of Revenue Enablement and Operations
The Results
Since adopting Tangelo, new hires at Intenseye are ramping at a much faster rate compared to those prior to the program’s implementation.
“You can see them getting productive from day one,” says Trafford. “Since having Tangelo in place, our new hires are more productive from day one, significantly accelerating ramp times and supporting Intenseye’s culture of excellence. It's very obvious that as we increase our hiring volume, we'll see the team getting productive much more quickly as a result.”
Tangelo has completely transformed the new hire experience by providing “a world-class experience without adding unnecessary resources.” The feedback Trafford has received from employees about their onboarding experience has been universally positive, particularly impressive for such an early-stage young company.
“I meet with all new hires during their first week,” Trafford notes, “and everyone is very surprised that the company at our stage has such a thoughtful and curated experience for them. I feel like new hires at startups are left to their own devices to sink or swim. But at Intenseye, everyone comes through thinking that the process is really well designed.”
Tangelo has even started to attract talent to Intenseye. “One of the best pieces of feedback I heard was from a candidate we were interviewing who had spoken to a few people on the team. One of the questions he asked was, ‘I've heard such amazing things about how you onboard people, can you tell me what that would be like?’”
Having previously worked at bigger companies, Trafford now believes that Tangelo would have been a tremendous gain for them as well.
“I've run onboarding programs where we had 100-plus people joining in weeks or months; the human hours that it takes to run a program like that and make it a really thoughtful experience is kind of mind blowing. To think all of that could have been done quickly and efficiently hurts a little bit.”
Trafford Judd
Head of Revenue Enablement and Operations
Intenseye initially planned to use Tangelo just for GTM onboarding, but its success has led the company to deploy it company-wide. Now, every new hire interfaces with Tangelo when they start with the company. In fact, Trafford believes that Tangelo will continue to play a pivotal role as the company develops and grows in size.
“The scalability of Tangelo’s platform makes me confident Intenseye can sustain rapid growth while maintaining exceptional standards.The moment someone is hired, they're put into Tangelo and their experience begins. Then on my end, it's just maintaining content and optimizing over time. That gives me confidence that Intenseye can continue to grow at a remarkable rate.”
Relieved
Work overload for new hires and “army of one” enablement leader
Gained
A world-class onboarding experience that leads to faster ramp times and increased confidence
Made Awesome
Tangelo’s success with the GTM team has attracted new talent to Intenseye and encouraged the company to expand its use company-wide
Tangelo powers Intenseye’s journey from startup to scale-up with scalable and efficient onboarding
Customer Stories / Intenseye
When Trafford Judd joined Intenseye to build an enablement function, Tangelo became a crucial tool to relieve workload, decrease ramp time, and provide an exceptional new hire experience.
Use Case
Automation
Industry
Team Size
50-200 employees
AI & Technology
Published on
February 3, 2025
By Tangelo