Name: Elizabeth Schillo

Title: Chief Revenue Officer

Organisation: Netchex

Elizabeth Schillo serves as Chief Revenue Officer for Netchex, leading all go to market functions across Sales, Marketing, and Partnerships. With 18 years of experience in the HR Tech Space, she was drawn to the opportunity to bring together talent strategy and employee engagement to accelerate growth and automation initiatives for our clients and their employees. She is passionate about creating programs that work for the entire organization, engaging high potential employees, improving retention, leadership and team development, diversity, and showing value back to the organization with qualitative and quantitative data.

Schillo is also passionate about developing her teams to grow revenue, drive high levels of customer satisfaction, and personally develop team members to move forward in their careers. Prior to this role, Schillo led Sales and Customer Success for CareerBuilder SMB and all Canada operations, led Sales and Customer Success at Torch/ Everwise (Learning Management Software) and Dice/Clearance Jobs (Tech and Cleared Recruiting).

She oversaw account management, new business sales, customer-centric sales communication, sales training, new product sales, and strategic partnerships for business development to generate annual results of over $130 million. She held sales leadership roles with Ann Taylor and McKesson.

Over more than a decade, Schillo has demonstrated her ability to lead multi-channel sales teams and drive results. Her commitment for training, leadership, and serving customers has enabled her teams to develop strong customer relationships. She holds a master of arts degree from Wheaton College and a bachelor of arts degree from Lee University.

Thank you to the 2,000 leaders who’ve generously done the 7 Questions on Leadership!

I hope Elizabeth's answers will encourage you in your leadership journey. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Jonno White

1. What have you found most challenging as a leader?

I believe that the same areas that drew me to leadership are also what creates my challenges. I am passionate about growing people, creating career paths for them, and winning together. As a Sales and Revenue leader, I'm also highly metrics focused and extremely data driven.

My biggest challenge as a leader is setting company or team vision at large and then gaining individual level buy in to take ownership and execute.

Post-covid, as the world has moved to remote work, I think this challenge is even more amplified as colleagues are less connected and so the company vision and execution map has to be clear to understand and execute for all players involved.

2. How did you become a leader? Can you please briefly tell the story?

I've been passionate about people throughout my entire life and was actually a therapist before making the jump into sales....which isn't as big a career pivot as it sounds. Both are focused on understanding someone else's needs and goals and creating a path to the desired state that everyone buys in to do.

As an individual contributor, I had the opportunity to mentor and train other team members and was so inspired by their willingness to learn that I jumped at the first opportunity I had to get into leadership... and from there, I learned that once you become a leader, your team doesn't care how you got there, but they are 100% invested in how you can make them better and help them to create their own greatness.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

I usually wake up around 5:30, work out and then if I'm not traveling, I take my kids to school around 7.

From there, I try to be online working by 7:30, as I am EST and can usually get 2 hours of focused work done in the mornings. I do try to set an intention for the day of key goals, as days can be unpredictable and this lets me confirm that the most important things were accomplished.

The rest of my work day is filled with meetings, coaching sessions, client work, and strategy. I end my day with a team checkin most days, as we are a midsize company where things move fast and it's important to stay connected.

From there, I usually get home around 7 and spend time with my family until my kids go to bed between 8:30-9.

After that, I'm gearing up for the next day and then try to get 7 hours of sleep so that I'm energized and engaged.

4. What's a recent leadership lesson you've learned for the first time or been reminded of?

Delegate. As a recovering perfectionist and high achiever, it is hard to delegate for 2 reasons.

1) I'm in a high velocity, high momentum company where there are not a lot of people with extra time and it is often faster to do it than it is to explain it and

2) many of the people to whom I would delegate are learning how to do what I am asking.

It's been such a good reminder for me that we are all beginners in areas and someone once gave me a shot and that led to the incredible career that I have had so far, so I'm re-committing to delegate and create those growth experiences for others.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

Atomic Habits by James Clear. For anyone who hasn't read it, the premise is that we create success by creating habits rather than setting goals. Each small habit can lead to great transformation.

For me, this is such a good reminder that a journey begins with a single step. None of us are usually good at something new when we try it for the first time, but the commitment to consistency, to showing up when it gets hard, to making it a true habit that becomes as natural as brushing your teeth...this is where real changes starts in each of us.

6. If you could only give one piece of advice to a young leader, what would you say to them?

Focus on creating wins for your people. If they feel like they are winning and you care about them, they will follow you to acheive their own potential.

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader, so far?

In 2020, I started a new role on March 16th - 4 days after the national shutdown due to Covid-19. All the plans that I had for my first 8 weeks were focused on travel, field time with my team, meeting with customers and then overnight, we were in quarantine.

I had a team that was brand new to me, a world full of unknowns, and wanted to make an impact in my new job. The pro of all this was that I had immediate buy in from the sales team because everyone was panicking that they weren't going to be able to be in the field so they weren't going to be able to sell.

We got laser focused on our tech stack, adjusting KPIs to meet to market, focusing on areas of new need (healthcare), collaborating with prospects who were also navigating new unknowns (hospitality, restaurants), and understanding buying patterns and changes since most people were remote.

We also invested into partners that could help create opportunity and drive new deals and ended 2020 with RECORD sales numbers and have doubled in the business in the 3 years since then!